Every migrant story is a story of a compulsion or desire to pick yourself up from the familiar and take a chance on a new place. The choice to migrate illegally can be prompted by external or internal factors, varying circumstances for different individuals.
Grouping all illegal immigrants into a bucket of victimhood, or nobility, or any other gross generality is not only absurd and reflects a preconceived prejudicial idea about an entire group of people, but dangerously threatens the lives of children, who in this country, the country they have come to, it has long been accepted and recognized that children's separation from parents is often the result of parental conduct and government intervention.
In the United States, as of 2015, almost 700,000 children spent time in US foster care (childrensrights.org).
In the United States, as of 2016, there are FIVE MILLION children in the US with parents who are incarcerated.
In the United States, as of 2015 Child Maltreatment Report from the Children’s Bureau ( published in January 2017) an increase in child abuse referrals from 3.6 million to 4 million.
Parental circumstances, internal or external contribute to these separations between parent and child in the United States. As a society, we in the US recognize the necessity of sometimes separating parents and children when parents are ensnared in circumstances where government has stepped into their lives for law-breaking. Yet, there is no Democrat outrage to step in, step up, and object to such separations. In fact it is Democrats who are often the first to support such laws to protect US citizen children.
Yet, Democrats are spouting generalizations and advocating old-time dangerous concepts of "family" to the variety of circumstances that are bringing illegal migrants into our country, advocating that we ignore the diverse realities that bring illegal migrants in from impatience with immigration process to economic challenges to the desire to leave their country for a variety of personal reasons.
As part of this prejudice of grouping all illegal migrants in the same pot, disregarding the diversity of individuals and motivations that brought them here, Democrats are also ignoring the reason we have laws in our country that result in parent-child separation often based on the complexity of human conduct where it is deemed that children's best interests are achieved through such separation.
Instead, US Democrats are choosing to give a "pass" to all illegal migrants exposing a bias and prejudgment about the individuals making up this group of illegal migrants that can only jeopardize children.
The current backwardness of prejudicial assumptions and presumptions by Democrats upon which their alleged pro-family illegal migrant arguments follow illustrates the imaginary non-reality based thinking of all prejudice and jeopardizes children for whom they are advocating by keeping those children outside the system in our country designed to (albeit often failing at, but still allegedly motivated to) protect the best interests of the child.
It is remarkable that Democrats are prejudicially over-generalizing about a population of people who often have nothing more in common than the fact that they broke the US immigration law. Such backwards thinking jeopardizes all children and threatens to undo the generations of casualties that resulted in efforts to eradicate the vicious harm from suffered by child labor, child abuse, child neglect and sometimes does so by separating "families."
The overgeneralization that every illegal migrant is here with the pathetic experience of oppression in their own country by its government, fleeing in the night the persecution by its government is an incredible body of assumptions that not only assume every illegal immigrant the same, not only assumes that every parent who brings their child with them as they break the law is a devoted and loving parent, or even that every "parent" is a child's parent, not only assumes that every individual is facing some governmental horror, chaos or violence in their own country, but that every parent is a good actor.
This is the kind of backwards thinking, that families are automatically safe havens that fostered unspeakable harm in our country for generations as law enforcement ignored the conduct of bad family actors from assault, to rape, to neglect, that occurred in "homes" as "family affairs," giving "families" a pass and failing to enforce laws of assault and battery and rape that were already on the books for other circumstances "outside" family that might have prevented continuing harm if they'd been enforced when it came to "families."
The horrendous risk the Democrats are advocating based on prejudice and prejudgment disrespects the sacrifices and progress of this country going back to the case of Mary Ellen Wilson, in 1874, which relied on laws preventing cruelty to animals to remove the child from her abusive foster parent home, and was the beginning of governments recognizing that not all families are safe havens. Marital rape was not recognized as a crime until the mid-1970s. 911 was not a recognized resource for people until 1968.
Blanket admission of illegal immigrants and giving them a legal pass assumes that those coming in don't have divorces where children are kidnapped, assumes that the children they have with them are theirs, assumes that unlike the United States where we're told that one in five have mental illness that this is not the case in these illegal migrants' country of origin, assumes that substance abuse problems, which millions of people suffer from is not a problem in these families. Obviously ridiculous as most prejudice is.
A consideration that illegal migrants are diverse people, individuals entering the US for a variety of reasons, willing to break the law for a variety of reasons and bringing children with them for a variety reasons, is not only the best means of avoiding prejudicial generalizations about an entire population, eg illegal migrants, but is the best way to prevent giving permission to bad actors to continue their bad behavior here by enforcing the laws, beginning with the illegal entry law.
Just like it was fought for in America, enforcement of laws, creation of laws was often the beginning of saving a family from someone whose substance abuse or mental illness first brought government's attention to the "family." It is often these seemingly unrelated or lesser crimes that attract law enforcement attention that sometimes rescues a "family" suffering in the privacy of their home. Removing this protection from illegal migrants is prejudicial and dangerous.
Breaking the law is an opportunity for law enforcement to prevent the loopholes that have historically threatened children from being kidnapped by others or their parents, prevented all kinds of child neglect and abuse that come to light upon scrutiny of an individual in connection with breaking the law.
Automatically presuming good will, good motivations, rational thinking on the part of every law-breaking illegal migrant and removing law enforcement scrutiny for law-breaking is just as dangerous to children as leaving them in the old-time homes where officers saw the wreckage of family crisis and did nothing thereby exposing "families" to the ongoing risks of familial actions that jeopardized their physical and emotional health.
Realistically, there are too many illegal migrants to understand the details of any given family, but equally realistically it is dangerous for children and families to have their new government assume that all is well and take a completely hands-off approach to these families' circumstances.
What we can do is use the standards we use here in their country of choice. Here, lawbreaking puts an onus on the lawbreaker in the form of fines, paperwork, inconveniences of probation, stigma and often family separations, temporary or permanent, in order for the lawbreaker to "prove" him or herself to regain their former status.
This applies to the high-schooler experimenting with drugs and to the non-custodial parent kidnapping a child in a divorce. This is what we do and it isn't always fair, and it doesn't always work, and it places a lifetime barrier to employment, financial aid for higher education among other penalties for the lawbreaker whether he or she took a plea deal because he couldn't afford representation, whether he or she was innocent, or any other instance.
The misplaced "humanity" of placing all illegal immigrants in some idealized pot, ignoring that they broke the law, and giving a pass on not only that initial law-breaking but any subsequent law-breaking in the form of false IDs, lying to authorities about their identities, failure to pay taxes, driving without licenses, is no kindness, it creates a society of "other," at the very least isolating illegal migrants from fully participating in the society they came to and living by its laws.
Illegal entry is a crime, having it on their record might limit the illegal migrant's opportunities in this country as it does for all law-breaking citizens, but integrating illegal migrants into their new country requires that they be fully integrated into our society and that starts with the laws of this country.
Grouping all illegal immigrants into a bucket of victimhood, or nobility, or any other gross generality is not only absurd and reflects a preconceived prejudicial idea about an entire group of people, but dangerously threatens the lives of children, who in this country, the country they have come to, it has long been accepted and recognized that children's separation from parents is often the result of parental conduct and government intervention.
In the United States, as of 2015, almost 700,000 children spent time in US foster care (childrensrights.org).
In the United States, as of 2016, there are FIVE MILLION children in the US with parents who are incarcerated.
In the United States, as of 2015 Child Maltreatment Report from the Children’s Bureau ( published in January 2017) an increase in child abuse referrals from 3.6 million to 4 million.
Parental circumstances, internal or external contribute to these separations between parent and child in the United States. As a society, we in the US recognize the necessity of sometimes separating parents and children when parents are ensnared in circumstances where government has stepped into their lives for law-breaking. Yet, there is no Democrat outrage to step in, step up, and object to such separations. In fact it is Democrats who are often the first to support such laws to protect US citizen children.
Yet, Democrats are spouting generalizations and advocating old-time dangerous concepts of "family" to the variety of circumstances that are bringing illegal migrants into our country, advocating that we ignore the diverse realities that bring illegal migrants in from impatience with immigration process to economic challenges to the desire to leave their country for a variety of personal reasons.
As part of this prejudice of grouping all illegal migrants in the same pot, disregarding the diversity of individuals and motivations that brought them here, Democrats are also ignoring the reason we have laws in our country that result in parent-child separation often based on the complexity of human conduct where it is deemed that children's best interests are achieved through such separation.
Instead, US Democrats are choosing to give a "pass" to all illegal migrants exposing a bias and prejudgment about the individuals making up this group of illegal migrants that can only jeopardize children.
The current backwardness of prejudicial assumptions and presumptions by Democrats upon which their alleged pro-family illegal migrant arguments follow illustrates the imaginary non-reality based thinking of all prejudice and jeopardizes children for whom they are advocating by keeping those children outside the system in our country designed to (albeit often failing at, but still allegedly motivated to) protect the best interests of the child.
It is remarkable that Democrats are prejudicially over-generalizing about a population of people who often have nothing more in common than the fact that they broke the US immigration law. Such backwards thinking jeopardizes all children and threatens to undo the generations of casualties that resulted in efforts to eradicate the vicious harm from suffered by child labor, child abuse, child neglect and sometimes does so by separating "families."
The overgeneralization that every illegal migrant is here with the pathetic experience of oppression in their own country by its government, fleeing in the night the persecution by its government is an incredible body of assumptions that not only assume every illegal immigrant the same, not only assumes that every parent who brings their child with them as they break the law is a devoted and loving parent, or even that every "parent" is a child's parent, not only assumes that every individual is facing some governmental horror, chaos or violence in their own country, but that every parent is a good actor.
This is the kind of backwards thinking, that families are automatically safe havens that fostered unspeakable harm in our country for generations as law enforcement ignored the conduct of bad family actors from assault, to rape, to neglect, that occurred in "homes" as "family affairs," giving "families" a pass and failing to enforce laws of assault and battery and rape that were already on the books for other circumstances "outside" family that might have prevented continuing harm if they'd been enforced when it came to "families."
The horrendous risk the Democrats are advocating based on prejudice and prejudgment disrespects the sacrifices and progress of this country going back to the case of Mary Ellen Wilson, in 1874, which relied on laws preventing cruelty to animals to remove the child from her abusive foster parent home, and was the beginning of governments recognizing that not all families are safe havens. Marital rape was not recognized as a crime until the mid-1970s. 911 was not a recognized resource for people until 1968.
Blanket admission of illegal immigrants and giving them a legal pass assumes that those coming in don't have divorces where children are kidnapped, assumes that the children they have with them are theirs, assumes that unlike the United States where we're told that one in five have mental illness that this is not the case in these illegal migrants' country of origin, assumes that substance abuse problems, which millions of people suffer from is not a problem in these families. Obviously ridiculous as most prejudice is.
A consideration that illegal migrants are diverse people, individuals entering the US for a variety of reasons, willing to break the law for a variety of reasons and bringing children with them for a variety reasons, is not only the best means of avoiding prejudicial generalizations about an entire population, eg illegal migrants, but is the best way to prevent giving permission to bad actors to continue their bad behavior here by enforcing the laws, beginning with the illegal entry law.
Just like it was fought for in America, enforcement of laws, creation of laws was often the beginning of saving a family from someone whose substance abuse or mental illness first brought government's attention to the "family." It is often these seemingly unrelated or lesser crimes that attract law enforcement attention that sometimes rescues a "family" suffering in the privacy of their home. Removing this protection from illegal migrants is prejudicial and dangerous.
Breaking the law is an opportunity for law enforcement to prevent the loopholes that have historically threatened children from being kidnapped by others or their parents, prevented all kinds of child neglect and abuse that come to light upon scrutiny of an individual in connection with breaking the law.
Automatically presuming good will, good motivations, rational thinking on the part of every law-breaking illegal migrant and removing law enforcement scrutiny for law-breaking is just as dangerous to children as leaving them in the old-time homes where officers saw the wreckage of family crisis and did nothing thereby exposing "families" to the ongoing risks of familial actions that jeopardized their physical and emotional health.
Realistically, there are too many illegal migrants to understand the details of any given family, but equally realistically it is dangerous for children and families to have their new government assume that all is well and take a completely hands-off approach to these families' circumstances.
What we can do is use the standards we use here in their country of choice. Here, lawbreaking puts an onus on the lawbreaker in the form of fines, paperwork, inconveniences of probation, stigma and often family separations, temporary or permanent, in order for the lawbreaker to "prove" him or herself to regain their former status.
This applies to the high-schooler experimenting with drugs and to the non-custodial parent kidnapping a child in a divorce. This is what we do and it isn't always fair, and it doesn't always work, and it places a lifetime barrier to employment, financial aid for higher education among other penalties for the lawbreaker whether he or she took a plea deal because he couldn't afford representation, whether he or she was innocent, or any other instance.
The misplaced "humanity" of placing all illegal immigrants in some idealized pot, ignoring that they broke the law, and giving a pass on not only that initial law-breaking but any subsequent law-breaking in the form of false IDs, lying to authorities about their identities, failure to pay taxes, driving without licenses, is no kindness, it creates a society of "other," at the very least isolating illegal migrants from fully participating in the society they came to and living by its laws.
Illegal entry is a crime, having it on their record might limit the illegal migrant's opportunities in this country as it does for all law-breaking citizens, but integrating illegal migrants into their new country requires that they be fully integrated into our society and that starts with the laws of this country.
I liked your piece.
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