The Human Impacts of the Over-Inclusiveness of Immigration Enforcement

The human impacts of the immigration raids on U.S. citizens and legal immigrants of particular national origins should not be ignored.  As the Washington Post reminds us in a report today, it long has been the case that certain minority groups — especially Latina/os and Asian Americans — are presumptive foreigners subject to the immigration laws and border (and interior) enforcement.  During the 1930s in th edepths of the Great Depression, for example, state and local governments “repatriated” an estimated one million persons of Mexican ancestry — two thirds of who were U.S. citizens.  See Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930sAbraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929-1939 (1974).  The recent immigration raids have resulted in the questioning — some might say harassment — of the immigration status of national origin minorities as well as a plethora of lawsuits.  And the U.S. government at times have even wrongfully deported U.S. citizens, such as Pedro Guzman, a developmentally disabled U.S. citizen who just happened to be Latina/o, in 2007.  The raids also has created orphans out of U.S. citizen children and subjected them to de facto deportation if their parents are removed (a problem facing many citizen childrenb of deportees)

Perhaps the overinclusiveness of immigration enforcement is one reason why many Latina/os and Asian Americans support fairer, less arbitrary, and even-handed immigration enforcement –immigration enforcement that does not place them at risk of questioning (or worse) simply because of their physical appearance.  Rather than deride people of color who do not support strognger border enforcement and raids as “ethnocentrists” or worse, we should consider how the current overinclusiveness of immigration enforcement hurts minority — including U.S. citizens and legal immigrants –communities.

KJ