I have to admit that I've been trying to avoid much of the news coverage on the immigrant children from Central America that seem to be pouring into this country without their parents and in fact often in search of them. It is a tragedy no matter which way one looks at it and given our political system one with little chance of resolution. We will not have immigration reform this year and next year starts the presidential campaign and so it will be another two years before we might get to the issue. And so the tragedy will continue, and it is a tragedy in more ways than just having young children crossing a very dangerous border which for Central Americans begins when they leave their homes. Each step is fraught with danger from unscrupulous policemen, cartel henchmen, coyotes, rapists, overloaded trains, hot deserts, etc.
The first tragedy is when the child is left behind by parents who want a better life. Too often, however, that better life becomes restricted to the person here and possibly their "new" families. One of the things that we don't talk about when we talk about immigrants is that they are often running away from more than just poverty. They are escaping everything associated with their former lives of poverty and sometimes that means spouse and children. They might not think it about consciously but once they are here their lives become consumed with being here, and that can often mean meeting other people here and creating a community that excludes those left behind.
In a study done years ago, a scholar found that women from the third world who are hired as nannies will often become more attached to the children they care for than to their children back home. These beautiful, usually white, blond, blue-eye children become their passion and the dark, black-eyed often malnourished children without future become less attractive as sons and daughters. To alleviate their guilt they send money home and on the occasional visits will take numerous gifts, but they always come back after telling their own children that "soon, mommy will come for you" until one day they stop coming and their children stop believing.
Living among undocumented immigrants I know of scores of men and women who now have families here and while they feel for those left behind they have chosen to make a new life for themselves because the old one is unbearable, thus, a child loses not only a father or mother physically but they also lose their "familial place" to other siblings that they will likely never know. Most are also left with families that cannot provide them much and where they are very low on the pecking order of love and comfort. They are rarely happy and so they leave, chasing a dream of reconnecting to parents that they don't know anymore and which they love only as an "ideal". By the time they come searching, they do so not to find the parent but to try to find the "thing" that made their parents forget them. By then, it has become about working to have things because in their minds that is the reason their parents left.
Like the child soldiers of Africa, some of these child immigrants are so disconnected from community and so alienated from love that though they yearn for it, rarely do they know how to receive it or express it. This, of course, is a situation with varying degrees--some will reunited with loved ones--but surely one that awaits a child immigrant if he/she does not quickly reunite with a parent and finds a loving home.
The tragedy for American society is that in the past children have been the ones that open our hearts to change, but it seems not to do so today. A colleague of mine writes that the civil rights movement found much success when its leaders turned the fight against segregation and violence into one about saving the children. They convinced the American public to see children instead of black skin. Of course in the process they missed teaching whites what it took to really educate black children, but that's for another post.
The story of the child immigrant is one of much less empathy even among some of those black children now grown and heading major agencies, including the one that oversees the detention centers. The first action that the president is making is to send more ICE agents to the border while these children are "housed" in buildings without beds and where they are crowded too many to a room and have little time to see open space or even to play. Worse, they have aroused fierce anger by whites who are "tired" of immigrants coming over the border regardless of the reason. These child immigrants--in the minds of many Americans--are not really children they are simply "wetbacks" or "illegals" that will one day grow up to take jobs. It is shameful to say it but immigrant children today do not elicit the same concern that white or black children do. They are too foreign to the American heart.
They are an evolving tragedy because most of them will be deported only to have them try again and the next time they might not be lucky in the desert or in escaping those who would exploit them. Or they will give up emotionally, join gangs or drug cartels and cause havoc in their communities. What other options do impoverished and neglected children have in dysfunctional countries many of which have been victims of American military and economic intervention or foreign policy decisions. These children are just another part of the "chickens coming home to roost", or as journalist Juan Gonzalez likes to say, "they are the harvest of empire".
There are many people who do care but most of them are powerless to help in more than just the minimal way, hampered by a lack of political will among those sympathetic and blocked by the fierce opposition of those who see a coloring of America as a horrible thing. Thus, I try rather unsuccessfully to avoid getting emotionally involved. I've seen this too often in the past and it rarely gets better.
