Deported kids face trauma in lands where they were born but not raised

"I don't see why deportation is such a dirty word," said [financial adviser Wendy Shannon]: "I grew up in a farming community, and had dear friends who were immigrant. One of them went back to Mexico and she's a lawyer now. I don't think it's such a bad thing."

Coming from a household where English as a Second Language was taught personally (to my stepchildren) and professionally (my wife taught and then supervised teachers in the largest adult ESL operation in the world), I've come into contact with many young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States by their parents, most but far from all of them Latino. Deportation when it comes to them is a dirty word.

A merciless, myopic, mindless approach for dealing with people'you know, human beings'who typically are, except for a piece of paper, as American as anyone born on U.S. soil. Sending them back to their countries of origin, where very few of them will become lawyers or doctors or manage to fit in at all, should. simply. not. happen.

For now, hundreds of thousands of them are protected from that for the first time thanks to President Obama's actions last week. But they could still wind up separated from their families if their parents are deported. There has been no relaxation on that front. Quite the contrary.

The media have focused on the stories of a number of young undocumented immigrants, valedictorians, war heroes and others, who, despite vigorous enforcement of the immigration laws in the past few years, have managed to stay in the States. But what of those who have been deported? Damien Cave at the New York Times writes about them:

Never before has Mexico seen so many American Jeffreys, Jennifers and Aidens in its classrooms. The wave of deportations in the past few years, along with tougher state laws and persistent unemployment, have all created a mass exodus of Mexican parents who are leaving with their American sons and daughters.

In all, 1.4 million Mexicans'including about 300,000 children born in the United States'moved to Mexico between 2005 and 2010, according to Mexican census figures. That is roughly double the rate of southbound migration from 1995 to 2000, and new government data published this month suggest that the flow is not diminishing. The result is an entire generation of children who blur the line between Mexican and American. [...]

'These kinds of changes are really traumatic for kids,' said Marta Tienda, a sociologist at Princeton who was born in Texas to Mexican migrant laborers. 'It's going to stick with them.'

Traumatic in the classroom, where the language is Spanish, which many of these children speak poorly or not at all. Their grades naturally suffer. Traumatic on the playground where they are often teased and bullied. Traumatic in social life because they are outsiders. For many, the economic situation is traumatic as well. Their parents may have had more or less menial jobs in the United States, but they often did better financially than they can now do in Mexico or, especially, Central America.

One of the children Cave wrote about is fifth-grader Jeffrey Isidoro, who now lives in the central Mexico city of Izúcar de Matamoros. At night, he says, 'I dream, like, I'm sleeping in the United States. But when I wake up, I'm in Mexico.'

That's already been the fate of hundreds of thousands of children who have been raised in the United States. With deportations of undocumented immigrants who have children now running at around 100,000 a year of the 400,000 total, damaged young lives are in abundance. Welcome as is President Obama's stopgap measure announced last week, important as is the DREAM Act that Republicans shot down last year, what's ultimately needed is a comprehensive immigration reform that acknowledges their reality and leans heavily toward giving both them and their parents a reasonable path to citizenship.  

After the November election, that should come sooner than later.