“We Just Want Our Parents Back”

Via Greg Siskind, NBC’s Today Show had a great piece recently on how families are suffering in the face of congressional inaction on immigration reform.

Predictably, a restrictionist pundit tied to John Tanton’s nativist network gets some airtime, though not much.  Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) isn’t impressed by tearful junior high students who want to be able to live with both their parents:

If you grant widespread amnesty, then you make everybody who has played by the rules, who’ve waited their turn, and done what they’re supposed to, you make all those people look like fools and dupes for following the rules.

Actually, there are two sets of rules: one set for people from wealthy countries--predominantly white, predominantly European--and one set for everybody else.

People like Jasmine’s mother now pay the price for not wanting to miss their daughters’ childhood.

For many others, there is no “line” to wait in at all.

Also, as reporter Carl Quintanilla notes but you’ll never hear from CIS, the rules have changed a lot in the last 20 years.  Restrictionists have been very effective in their lobbying efforts to make the laws work against families instead of in their favor, in particular with the catastrophic 1996 law signed by President Clinton: IIRIRA.  With IIRIRA, the ground shifted beneath the feet of countless immigrants and their families.

IIRIRA instituted an inflexible time limit for applying for asylum, screening out thousands with valid claims.  It made harsh immigration consequences for criminal convictions retroactive, leading to surprise deportations for thousands of longtime permanent residents who thought their debt to society had been paid years ago.  It raised the standard for hardship to U.S. citizen or permanent resident family members as a defense against deportation to new and ridiculous heights.  It created a new penalty specifically designed to permanently separate families, the “unlawful presence” bar.

This came from politicians who looked their constituents in the eye and claimed to be pro-family.  As it turns out, some are pro-family, as long as your family was all born in the U.S.

Fixing these policies that destroy families has hardly been discussed as part of any comprehensive immigration reform—rather, the administration and much of Congress has bought into soulless, poll-tested framing of immigration reform as an enforcement plan, a national security issue.  That is a component of immigration law, but border security is already built into the system and tends to drown out all other issues.

Jasmine pleads: “It’s been four years of my family being apart, and I want that to end.”

People like Steven Camarota will tell kids like Leslie and Jasmine, who are U.S. citizens and have lived their entire lives in the U.S., to go live in Mexico if they love their families.  Others will lay the blame at the feet of parents who aspired to give their children a better life than they themselves had.  Some of my commenters routinely make these arguments.  I hope that the majority of the voting public can see the moral bankruptcy of those positions.  I am happy to see more and more news pieces like this one making their way onto the airwaves and internet.

Meanwhile, mixed-status families like Jasmine’s and Leslie’s wait for Congress and the President to acknowledge that their votes, that their lives matter.