Deportations Destroying Community, Hurting Children

Along tidy, tree-lined streets of working-class neighborhoods in Lake Worth, there is no shortage of reminders of hardworking Guatemalan-Maya families quietly disappearing because of our nation’s broken immigration system.

Immigration enforcement raids on poor, Latin American immigrants are on the rise. Apartment buildings known for housing refugees are emptying. Businesses needing manual laborers are finding fewer workers.

But even more troubling is the toll on women, elders and especially children who are left behind when families are severed by the rising tide of deportations.

One recent situation, in particular, has rippled through our community.

Facing deportation to Guatemala, a desperate father had to make a gut- wrenching choice about his teenage son: take him back to Guatemala where there isn't much opportunity or hand him over to an uncle in Palm Beach County where there is more of a chance for his son to succeed.

He decided to leave his son in the care of a protective and trustworthy blood-relative.

But months later, after the father was repatriated, his son suffered at the hands of his uncle who demanded money for housing, feeding and watching the youth.

The boy eventually fled, and today he is homeless, shuffling from friend to friend or anyone else he can find to provide him a place to sleep. He clings to a dream of reuniting with his father while bracing for the worst yet to come.

It’s an agonizing fate many youths are now enduring across South Florida. Tragically, other children have lived through even worse: forced labor, emotional abuse and sexual assault.

America’s renewed emphasis on federal immigration laws is breaking apart families who came to this country for the same reasons people have come for generations -- in search of a better future for themselves and their children.

The approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants -- many from Guatemala and Mexico -- are very much part of the social and economic fabric of our country.

According to Americans for Immigration Reform, a pro-immigration group in Houston, three-fifths of them have been in the U.S. for more than a decade, comprising more than one-quarter of the foreign-born population.

They are people who account for only five percent of the workforce, concentrated in mostly low-skilled, hard-to-fill jobs such as farming, food production, construction, and domestic workers. They produce $651 trillion in annual economic output and $1.7 trillion in annual spending. And they pay more than $7 billion a year in federal taxes, even though they can’t qualify for Social Security benefits.

In short, the oft-quoted assertion that undocumented immigrants are costing us hundreds of billions of dollars is simply untrue. Even the assertion that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs away from millions of Americans and lowering wages is not accurate.

The forces that left the Guatemalan youth in Lake Worth homeless are part of the sweeping anti-immigrant rhetoric that has cultivated false stereotypes and prejudices. It unfairly scapegoats undocumented immigrants, who pay taxes and have no criminal record, and blames them for the current economic problems.

The hysteria is likely only to get worse.

Across the U.S., authorities are deporting record numbers of undocumented immigrants and auditing hundreds of businesses that hire undocumented workers. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had planned to deport about 400,000 people in 2010, 25 percent more than were deported in 2007, according to The Washington Post. The effort is part of President Obama’s plan “to make our national laws actually work.”

At the same time, politicians, including those in Florida, have looked at creating variations of Arizona’s anti-immigration law.

Billed as a way to protect communities from perceived problems associated with undocumented immigration, the Arizona law requires police officers, at the time of a lawful stop, to check the immigration status of anyone who might be in the country unlawfully.

In reality, such a law can only be enforced by the un-American practice of racial and ethnic profiling. It threatens to saddle taxpayers with flawed policies that will take years to undo.

In Lake Worth, fear of deportation has many Guatemalan-Maya families taking pre-emptive steps by applying for passports so their American-born children can more easily return to the U.S. if they are forced to leave. Some families are neglecting shopping trips, language classes and even medical care because they don’t want to be questioned.

These immigrants are a vital part of any community.

As some towns have found, other forms of anti-immigrant laws, such as penalizing anyone who employs or rents to an undocumented immigrant, are backfiring.

For instance, in Riverside, N.J., such legislation drove away many Latin American immigrants, closing businesses that catered to them and devastating the local economy, according to a New York Times article. The town eventually rescinded the law.

Locally, as deportations have increased, many charitable groups and businesses have donated blankets, coats and other necessities in the winter months for struggling Guatemalan-Maya families still here. During the Christmas season, hundreds of games, bicycles and other gifts were presented to immigrant children.

Reforming our immigration system is no easy task. Stopping immigrants through racially-profiled police stops isn’t the answer. The ultimate solution must include securing our borders and bringing the millions of unauthorized immigrants out of the shadows and giving them a chance to become legal citizens.

Then, and only then, can our community avoid traumatizing children left behind when their fathers, mothers or both are rounded up in immigration
raids and taken away for good.

Writer: Leon Fooksman is a journalist. You can reach him at leon@astorytellingcompany.com

Dispelling Immigration Myths

Fact #1: Undocumented workers pay taxes, thus supporting public social services such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Aid to Dependent Children and public schools.

Between 50% and 75% of undocumented immigrants pay federal, state and
local taxes.

The Social Security Administration receives over $7 billion a year in taxes from undocumented workers, who cannot claim those benefits due to their non-citizen status.

Fact #2: Enforcement policies only drive unauthorized workers into the underground economy, thus depriving local, state and federal governments of their tax revenues.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that lost tax revenue due to undocumented workers turning to the underground economy runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Fact #3: Undocumented immigrants are not the majority burden on our health care system.

American citizens make up 78% of the total uninsured population in America, while a combination of legal and undocumented immigrants make up 22%.

The most important determinant in health care coverage is not immigration status or citizenship but whether an employer offers health insurance benefits. Less than 40% of non-citizens have employer coverage, compared to nearly two-thirds of native citizens.

Immigrants are less likely to visit the hospital emergency room compared to U.S.-born residents, and recent immigrants are less likely to use health care of any type, such as physician services.

Fact #4: Only 4% of school-aged children are undocumented immigrants.

Undocumented immigrants pay taxes to support the education of their children in the form of sales and property taxes.

Source: Americans for Immigration Reform