Children ask US govt to stop deporting undocumented immigrants

As Christmas draws near, thousands of children in the United States wrote to the US government last week to stop separating families by deporting and detaining undocumented immigrants.   According to the Asian Journal, the pro-immigrant-family organization "We Belong Together" collected more than 4,800 letters from children who participated in their month-long holiday letter-writing campaign, some of them members of families torn apart by deportation.   “The voices of children and youth are rarely heard in debates about immigration enforcement. They, more than anyone, bear the brunt of these harsh policies,” Miriam Yeung of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum told the Asian Journal.   Some of these children-participants trooped to Washington, D.C. last December 8 to deliver their message to the US Congress and President Barack Obama personally, the report said.    One of them was Gabriel Santos, an 11-year-old Filipino-American from Portland, Oregon. In his letter to Obama, Santos wrote:   Dear Mr. Obama,   I think deportations [are] horrible and every parent should have the right to be with their kids without fear of being deported. I think it would be horrible to wake up seeing that my parents weren’t there and I would have to go to a foster home. My own family is partly made up of immigrants and we’re lucky enough to have citizenship papers so we’re trying to help others who don’t.   PS. The holidays is a great time to fix [this] problem and make it right.   ‘Uniformly negative’ effects on children   In a study done by the US-based Applied Research Center (APC), at least 5,1000 children in foster care are barred “from uniting with their detained or deported parents.”   The study, titled “Shattered Families,” noted that “if nothing changes, 15,000 more children may face a similar fate in the next five years.”    Meanwhile, four researchers from two prestigious universities in New York disclosed last September that these immigration issues affect the children’s social development in a “uniformly negative” way.   According to a New York Times report, the study said more than five million children in the US are “at risk of lower educational performance, economic stagnation, blocked mobility, and ambiguous belonging” when they are raised in immigrant families with illegal status.    “Unauthorized status casts a big shadow that really extends to citizen as well as to undocumented children,” New York University professor Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a co-author of the study, told the New York Times.   Joining Suarez-Orozco were New York University’s Robert Teranishi and Carola Suarez-Orozco and Harvard University’s Hirokazu Yoshikawa.   The study, which was published in the Harvard Educational Review, showed that parents of these children are “significantly less likely to engage with teachers or be active in school” because of “fear and vigilance,” the report said.    It added that these fears also stop parents from availing of government services for their children, such as child care subsidies, public preschool, and food stamps.   Roberto Gonzales, a sociologist who was cited in the Harvard study, said that when they reach late adolescence, these children “realize their legal limitations and their worlds turn completely upside down.” - VVP, GMA News