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We need a reform to protect American children from broken immigration policies

It is difficult to admit that in the United States there are at least 650,000 children born in this country who are missing one or both of their parents because their parents were deported. That’s the conclusion of a study by Luis Zayas recently publish in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, by John Hopkins University.

According to Zayas, “For every two adult undocumented immigrants that are deported from the U.S., one citizen-child is affected. With roughly 1.3 million adults deported in the past decade, the number of citizen-children is staggering.” Those children are what I called “orphans by deportation.”

Those children, Zayas said, lose one or both or the parents, or are forced to relocate to a country they don’t know. Whatever the case, there are unavoidable and negative consequences for the children, including a significant reduction in the quality of their lives.

Let me say it one more time: there are 650,000 American citizens, all of them under 18, who suffer all kinds of difficulties because of the current immigration system. None of those children decided to be born here. Probably none of them are in trouble with law. However, they are negatively impacted by the immigration laws.

According to Sandra Hernandez, executive director of Centro de la Familia, a nonprofit organization in Colorado Springs, CO, the deportation of the parents causes mental health problems for the children, including depression, anxiety, aggressiveness, concentration problems (they can’t focus at school), nightmares, and low self-esteem.

With the record number of 390,000 deportations during the past fiscal year, as recently reported by the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency, there are no doubts the number of American children affected by deportations will increase.

At the same time, according to a new report by the Utah Department of Health, Latinos are in better health (at least in Utah) now than they were five years ago. The improvement can be measured in the areas of chronic and contagious diseases.

In fact, it seems Latinos enjoy better health than non-Latinos regarding some diseases, including several kinds of cancer and of heart diseases.

Also, according to Dr. Tim Wadsworth, a sociologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, immigration may be helping to reduce crime in more than 200 cities in the United States. Wadsworth’s study, presented last May, follows similar studies by Harvard, by the University of Nebraska in Kearny, and by the Arizona Sun.

And there is yet one more element. A report published last week by the Pew Hispanic Center reveals that last year only 300,000 undocumented immigrants came to the U.S., a significant reduction from the 650,000 who arrived each year a decade ago. And 8 percent of immigrants living in the U.S. left the country during the past two years.

Perhaps, above everything else, we need an immediate reform to protect American children from the bad consequences of a broken immigration system. Furthermore, we need to clearly understand that prejudice-based perceptions will seldom coincide with reality.

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