Illegal immigration enforcement and effects on children's futures

Returning American Born Children to Illegal Immigrants' Country of Origin

One of the promises of the American dream is that anyone born in the United States is an American citizen, and is entitled to the full protection of the American Constitution. If that person is born of a dual citizenship, which can only last until the individual reaches a legal age of the majority, then, upon reaching the age of majority, he or she may choose to surrender their American citizenship for citizenship in the country where they were born as a U.S. citizen (i.e., children born overseas to American soldiers, or other citizens of the United States). The United States does not allow a dual citizenship beyond the age of legal majority. Yet everyday U.S. born children are being deported with their non-U.S. citizen parents, people who entered the country illegally, and whose American born children are being deprived of their Constitutional rights as U.S. citizens because they are forced to leave the country with their parents.

A paradox that is a direct result of the "citizen born" rule, is that children born in the United States to non-U.S. citizens, most notably illegal aliens, or immigrants, are indeed, nonetheless, U.S. citizens, and entitled to the same rights as any other American citizen, and entitled to the protections afforded them in sustaining and asserting their rights under the U.S. Constitution. However, minor children, especially very young children, become lost in the gap between their minority and majority age. It is a time when the best interests of the child are the responsibility of the parents. If the parent is an illegal entrant into the United States, and is subsequently arrested as an illegal entrant, then they face deportation, which can also carry the penalty of never being allowed back into the country. Any children that were born in the United States while here, however, are United States citizens, but they have no voice in the Immigration Courts -- at least none that would assure they can remain in the U.S., and that their parents or primary caretaker can remain with them to care for them. Rather, they are returned to the country of their illegal immigrant parents' origination, and are thereby deprived of their rights as a U.S. citizen to the pursuit of happiness, since we cannot presume that being returned to a country where they have ostensibly no rights as a citizen can be a pursuit of happiness.

Returning U.S. children to countries with their illegal immigrant parents is the subject of this proposed research paper. It will examine the rules of Immigration law that allow children to be deported with their parents, and what the child, if that child remains outside the country, is suffering in the way of lost rights and benefits such as: education, healthcare, due process of law, and the opportunity to achieve a social and economic standard of living reflective of the quality of life and dignity that is enjoyed by those American citizens who grow up in the United States.

The plight of American born children forced to reside outside of the United States because of their dependent and minority age statuses, begs the question of whether or not these children, if raised in third world countries like Mexico, Nicaragua, or Columbia, can ever achieve the promise of the American dream upon return to the United States, which has, in their absence, become foreign to them, and they foreign amongst their peer group?

The subject of immigration, especially that which moves daily across the Mexican-American border, is an emotional and tense issue, and one into which a new breath of life is breathed during every presidential election. There is no denying the economic impact of illegal immigration on the United States; it is a serious problem. This, however, does not make it acceptable to wreak potential economic havoc on a U.S. born citizen that is, on an individual level, just as economically devastating.

A two-year study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences found that Americans that illegal immigration does not have an "overall" impact on the U.S. economy, and had "little negative impact on the income and job opportunities of most native-born Americans (Simon, 1999, xxv)." Thusly, the impact that is made on the life of a native-born American forced to reside outside of the United States by virtue of the fact that his or her parent was deported, seems an miscarriage of justice, deprivation of individual Constitutional rights, and a perhaps irreversibly damaging social injustice perpetrated against an American citizen.