Children at the Heart of Illegal Immigration Debate - SOB Story
by Susan Graybeal
Yahoo! Contributor Network
59 mins ago
COMMENTARY | It's easy for me to take a hardline stance on illegal immigration when I only think about the numbers. According to a video produced by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, illegal immigration costs the United States an estimated $113 billion per year. There is a more than $19 billion difference in the amount households headed by illegal immigrants pay into the U.S. system versus what they take out of it. It's easy, when considering the only costs of the issue to American taxpayers to say,
"Detain them all. Deport them all."
However, the issue gets a lot less clear if you put faces to it. Names to it. How about the name Amelia Reyes Jimenez? According to ABC Nightline, Reyes Jimenez has spent three and a half years trying to get her son and three daughters back. An illegal immigrant, she was detained in 2008, when her youngest child was only three months old.
According to Nightline, a recent study by the group Applied Research Center shows that at least 5,100 children of detained immigrant were in the U.S. foster care system as of last summer. Reyes Jimenez's children, in foster care in Phoenix, are among them. Reyes Jimenez, herself, spent six months in a detention center and the next two years fighting deportation. When she was deported, it was via a bus that dropped her off just on the other side of the border. Now she works in Guadalajara and waits for a call from her lawyer. She has twice lost in the attempt to gain a visa on the grounds that the separation from her children was harming them. The case is going to be appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court... Eventually.
As she was unable to meet any conditions for regaining custody of her children, three of whom are U.S. citizens, or to attend hearings in family court, Reyes Jimenez had her parental rights terminated. And it's easy to toss around words like "anchor babies" and to look with scorn upon the notion of amnesty, or even of the Obama Administration's announced Immigrations Enforcement Policy which asks that family relationships be considered prior to deportation.
This is a country where, except in extreme cases, family courts provide steps that a mother can take if she wishes to regain custody of her children. This is a country where, if possible, the reunification of children with their biological families is the desire of the system. Or is it?
This is the country that Amelia Reyes Jimenez entered illegally. This is the birthplace of her daughters; the country they are citizens of. This is the country that took her children and then sent her away.
When trying to sort out this immigration issue, if this country has a heart at all, then its children should be as close to that heart as possible. All of its children. Even Amelia Reyes Jimenez's.
Children at the Heart of Illegal Immigration Debate - Yahoo! News