Deadly Consequences of "Business as Usual" and Immigration Enforcement

by Katherine Kaufka Walts

As COVID-19 rapidly advances across the country, local justice systems are focusing their resources on essential services. Police and prosecutors are focusing on violent crimes, detainees are being released, and criminal courts are prioritizing the most serious criminal offenses. These efforts reflect a commitment to saving both lives and taxpayer dollars through the pandemic. Meanwhile, U.S. immigration systems are operating under the status quo, with devastating consequences.

Life continues as usual for the 38,000 immigrants who are detained in the US, including approximately 7,000 children. It’s important to remember — these individuals are not serving time for a crime. Instead, they are waiting for a hearing to determine whether they can legally remain in the country under civil proceedings.

On the day California issued its initial social-distancing order, it was still business as usual for ICE agents, who, newly armed with protective health gear, including gloves and N95 masks, continued to apprehend immigrants. The same week, the Department of Justice ordered all multilingual CDC posters demonstrating procedures to minimize COVID-19 contamination to be removed from immigration courtrooms. (The order was shortly reversed after a backlash from immigration judges.) Immigration courts continue to operate at full speed, ignoring health-care risks and shelter-in-place orders.

In the 140 immigration facilities detaining adults and families, social distancing is not an option, as a group of Loyola University Chicago law students and I found when we visited immigration detention facilities in Arizona earlier this month. We entered prison-like facilities, each housing over 1,000 detainees, surrounded by endless rows of razor wire and armed guards. Detainees share cells and are not allowed to move through the facilities without a guard escort. They eat in communal spaces, and shower in communal spaces. The same days we heard detainees tell us about sexual assault, murder, and persecution they suffered in their home country, we heard guards laughing at the detainees, joking that they should “turn on the sprinklers” to make them move faster. We reviewed reports documenting sexual abuse of minors and limited access to medical care for immigrants in federal custody. But the threat of COVID-19 was also on our minds — and theirs.

While there are contracted cleaning services at the facilities, detainees who opt in to work, provide cleaning services for a mere $1 a day. A lawsuit filed against DHS last week alleges that gloves, hand sanitizer, masks, and other essential supplies are not available inside detention facilities. Government attorneys have argued that soap and toothpaste are “non-essential” items for immigrant children placed in federal custody.

By failing to close immigration courts and detention centers, the federal government is telling immigrants their lives do not matter. It also increases the risk of transmission of COVID-19, with potentially deadly consequences not only for detained immigrants, but also for immigration court personnel, ICE officers, detention staff, and the general public. Regardless of one’s views on immigration, we all should all have a shared goal of saving lives.

Katherine Kaufka Walts is a Clinical Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Human Rights of Children, Loyola University Chicago, School of Law. This piece is reprinted with permission. You can follow her work here.

On Children as Caregivers in an Epidemic

By Jean Hunleth

Children throughout the world live in families affected by illness and other debilitating conditions, but the care they give to family members is often invisible outside of the family. In her book, Children as Caregivers, anthropologist Jean Hunleth explores how children give and receive care in their families within an infectious disease epidemic.

In Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia, I follow the stories of 38 children as they respond to the effects of TB, an infectious disease, in their homes and communities. I base the book on research I carried out in Lusaka, Zambia that spanned nearly 10 years. Yet the ideas for the book started much earlier than the research. They likely took root when I was the age of the children whose stories I tell in the book and my grandfather moved into my childhood home in St. Louis, Missouri, unable to walk or recall his life in the present day. His memories of himself in his younger years were, however, quite vivid. He inhabited these different time periods as I kept him company and fed him his favorite meal of ham and beans with “more horseradish!” than my mother would have condoned. In short, as a 12 year old, I too helped to care for an ailing family member. 

My interests in children as caregivers grew when I joined the Peace Corps as a water sanitation volunteer in Zambia. As a volunteer who took up residence in a village in Zambia’s Eastern Province, I witnessed first-hand the many things that children accomplished for their families, care included. I also saw how international health and humanitarian projects ignored and diminished children’s contributions. Even when addressing child health problems, such projects never seemed to ask children about their experiences. It was this disjunct that I wished to address in my research.

The topic I approach in my book—how children care for adults with TB—is unique, even within the small body of literature on children’s caregiving. TB is often considered an adults’ disease, especially in areas heavily affected by the HIV epidemic. And, even though caregivers are viewed as integral to TB treatment success, caregivers are assumed to be adults—an assumption that I dispel immediately using as evidence children’s own perspectives and experiences. These include 8-year-old Loveness and her 12-year-old brother Bwalya, who took such good care of their sick mother that neighbors and clinical workers assumed their mother had adult caregivers. And 10-year-old Abby, who cared for her mother for weeks prior to her mother’s TB diagnosis. When Abby’s family separated her from her mother at diagnosis based on clinical advice about TB care, Abby’s concerns for her mother’s health increased dramatically—and so did her concerns about her own life chances. These and many other examples based on children’s own experiences and understandings leave us wondering what else global health and humanitarian programs miss when they fail to consider children as social actors.

In addition to my focus on care, my work presents an extended conversation about methods for research with children on very challenging, often stigmatizing topics. Working across anthropology and public health, I combine approaches to research from both fields, namely ethnography and participatory action research. My methods include observations I made while participating in activities of daily life, interviews, structured surveys, performances, archival materials, and drawings. As a complement to Children as Caregivers, I curated an online Art Gallery where I narrate the book through the drawings children made as part of the project.

Children as Caregivers is based on the experiences of a few Zambian children who were growing up in Lusaka in the midst of a TB epidemic. However, I take many lessons from that work that make me consider what we are overlooking when it comes to children’s caregiving in other places, including in the U.S., where I currently live. In the U.S., we are already seeking children’s involvement in all kinds of health projects, including in projects to prevent deaths from opioid overdose. As I write this, we are also dealing with the coronavirus outbreak, which we know is affecting children and families, though we do not know how yet, and it is important that we do not see children only as victims or carriers of the virus. Instead, in these and other cases, it is necessary that we start taking children’s decisions, understandings, and experiences seriously, given the tremendous care challenges of our times, including the outsourcing of significant care work onto the family.

Our ability to better see and hear children, to recognize and come to understand the ways in which they are agentive, will not happen via survey-based and adult-centered research. Instead, it demands ethnographic and multimodal approaches that combine narratives, the arts, and multiple other ways of listening to underscore children’s actions, relationships, dependencies, and interdependencies in context.

My book received a generous grant from Knowledge Unlatched to ensure that an electronic version of the book is and will remain freely available here. Hard copies are also available for purchase from Rutgers University Press and other booksellers. 

Jean Hunleth is an assistant professor of surgery and anthropology in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

Visualizing the "Doublethink" of Children's Rights

The USA is the only country in the United Nations that hasn’t ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. What exactly does this mean? What does it look like? In a collection of paintings and digitally designed posters currently on exhibit at All My Relations Arts, artist Moira Villiard explores the essence of childhood and children’s rights in modern times. This work calls attention to individual cognitive dissonance—the “doublethink” that occurs when people hold two contradictory beliefs about an issue or situation.

The Waters of Tomorrow

Waters of Tomorrow, by Moira Villiard

Artist’s Statement:

Our water today is the same water our ancestors drank from - it’s the same water they took care of just enough to leave for us. With this in mind, it’s necessary to also consider how we leave the things we were given. 

Our water today is the water of tomorrow and the next day, and the next. It is the water our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren will enjoy for play, for sustenance, for prayer, and more, and so it’s necessary to leave it better than we found it.

The children in this image include children of two different times - the one on the left is me as a child and the one on the right is a child who exists today, and whose story (as it changes) is not one that I seek to romanticize, but simply honor with her loose depiction … in that moment, she’s a child of today splashing in the puddles, swinging from the jungle gym above a world that’s probably just as big as her imagination. We both are that child.

Of course, the world I reference is the same world that places some childhoods in cages, both real and metaphorical. It is also a world of false mothers and fathers. It’s one that haphazardly clings to logical fallacies in an effort to infuse rights into the unborn before they even breathe, and long before acknowledging the rights of the breathing or even the right to breathe.

“There are debates about how to define a child when the reality is we - in the United States - scarcely have a blueprint for what rights that child would be entitled to once granted their own existence. Some children sacrifice themselves to survive and become children in adult bodies. Some children are parents, others are contributing members of society, others slaves...”

To be a child today, or a child of any day, is to know the reality of your own experience out of context, and to be a reflection of tomorrow. And none of the contexts should ever end on a single opinion or conversation. 

Consent and complexity

Siblings [left], Mother and Daughter [right], by Moira Villiard

The artist shared with Youth Circulations that the subjects of the paintings include a mixture of images of Villiard as a child and referenced photos of people she knows (who also are mixed identity) when they were children. Villiard felt she could not adequately get consent from children to paint them for this exhibit so instead relied on the permission of people who are no longer children and who can consent to the use of their childhood photos. Some of the children have specific stories that the work tries to capture. Other pieces explore the fun and curiosity of youth in a more general sense. The combination of depictions allows for a broader illustration of the complexity of childhood and the rights that come with it.

Bloom, by Moira Villiard

About the artist: Moira Villiard is a fiscal year 2019 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The "Just Move" Argument: Reflections on Distributive Justice, Mobility, and Rural America

Today’s discourse on struggling rural communities insists they are “dying” or “forgotten.” In her new article, “Distributive Justice and Rural America,” Ann Eisenberg argues that rural communities have not just “died” but were sacrificed:

“It is, in fact, not difficult to establish that rural residents throughout the United States suffer from inequitable allocations of various critical resources. Some of these resource allocations, such as severe shortages of doctors and lawyers, public decision-makers have overlooked, while others, such as inequitable education and infrastructure spending, they have created.”

This post excerpts a section of “Distributive Justice” with particular salience to Youth Circulations readers, specifically the pervasive public claim that rural individuals should “just move.” Eisenberg asks—and indeed, we all ask: Is it ethically objectionable to mandate mobility?

Photo by Michele Statz

“...This Article is therefore not concerned solely with poverty—an already pressing problem—but also with what appears to be the large-scale, systematic unraveling of many rural local governments and related social and economic systems throughout the country. Rural decline is not necessarily a tragedy per se. Viewed through one lens, it makes sense for people to move to cities with more job opportunities; it also makes sense for obsolete or hazardous industries to be phased out. But approximately sixty million people still live in rural places; one-fifth of these sixty million are more vulnerable, non-white populations. As more young people leave rural America, and the ever-aging rural population’s property values continue to drop, many rural localities will continue to decline. Even if it would be too daunting or irrational to try to reverse these trends, the management of this decline—or the current lack thereof—raises important ethical questions.

One response to these trends is that rural residents should simply relocate to the places that enjoy a higher proportion of resources and greater economic opportunity. Yet, this solution to rural marginalization fails for several reasons.

First, the de facto policy in most areas to address rural decline has been just this approach: residents in dying or long-struggling communities have been left to their own devices with the hope that they will relocate to more livable locales. Many have indeed moved, but many have not. Those who remain may be unable to move because of a lack of resources or other impediments to mobility. They may also decline to move because they do not want to. The high rates of rural suicides, opioid overdose deaths, and other “deaths of despair” should prompt commentators to more deeply examine the impediments to rural mobility.

This line of thinking also raises the question of whether it is ethically objectionable to mandate mobility, or whether the onus is on public entities to provide basic services to existing communities. It is not necessarily clear that life would be better in a large urban center, where housing costs, long commutes, and a loss of community may bring a qualitatively different form of suffering upon relocation. The “just move” argument also presumes that there will always be a perfect match of opportunities available to those who would seek them, only potentially in a different place. This presumption seems faulty, especially as we move into a future that will increasingly displace workers through automation.

Finally, as this analysis illustrates, the “just move” argument also ignores the structural forces that have shaped the modern rural status quo. It is not the case that well-informed individuals en masse decided to locate themselves in an unfortunate locale and can simply undo the decision. Rural communities have often been crafted over the course of decades in order to create a workforce to provide public necessities. The presumption of perfect individual autonomy seems questionable; many people were born where they are, and after multiple generations became reliant on a local mono-economy that was formed on the basis of public subsidies and other policy drivers. In other words, today’s rural marginalization was not created by each individual’s faulty choices, but by society as a whole. As such, the allocation of resources that shapes rural inequity is worthy of everyone’s attention.

Ann M. Eisenberg, Distributive Justice and Rural America, 61 B.C.L. Rev. 189 (2020):211-212.

African migration and the charade of ‘return to safety’

by Iriann Freemantle

The UNHCR and African Union's policy of returning migrants to their countries of origin, suggests that Africans should be grateful to just stay alive, and are only—theoretically—entitled to anything beyond that on their own continent.

In October, the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency), the African Union and the Rwandan government have jointly initiated the “evacuation” of African migrants from torturous Libyan detention camps to Rwanda. All actors involved, as well as the European Union, which likely contributes significant funding, have celebrated this intervention as a “lifeline” providing migrants with “options for a safe future.” The UNHCR quotes a woman saying upon arrival in Kigali that “we had a dream of getting out of Libya and now we are finally able to live in peace.”

These evacuations follow the well-established pattern of casting the return of Africans to Africa not only as an act of protecting lives, but also of restoring migrants’ dignity and enabling their very futures. Other common types of interventions also link protection to return in this way: taking those who have been shipwrecked in the Mediterranean back to North African shores, “assisting” migrants to go home “voluntarily” or informing them about “the risks of irregular migration” and unseized opportunities at home.

Image: Bjørn Heidenstrøm, via Flickr CC.

Yet, making access to even the most basic safety dependent on immobility or return is a double-edged sword: while it saves lives in the most immediate sense, it also suggests that Africans should be grateful to just stay alive, and are only—theoretically—entitled to anything beyond that on their own continent. It seeks to confine Africans in Africa, urging them to accept their fate and, as a young Nigerian returnee wearily acquiesces, “stay in our country and feed on what we have.” Critically, using the language of protection also omits that evacuation has meanings other than the restoration of safety. To evacuate also means to empty out. To expel. After all, before the dream of “getting out of Libya,” there was another dream, now entirely eclipsed: to go to a place of one’s own choosing. This omission reinforces and naturalizes the idea that national communities best stay separate if they want to be safe and prosper.

Image: Jonathan Morgan, via Flickr CC.

The focus on rescue also hides that the threats migrants face are the direct result of political decisions and practices that deliberately make life for migrants life-threatening—so much so that return becomes not just their only option but something they are made to feel grateful for. Something they are generously permitted to do, as reinforced by the International Organization for Migration’s expression of gratitude to the EU “for their continuous support allowing thousands of migrants to return home safely.”

Limiting the focus to safeguarding the right of Africans to stay conceals that real freedom and dignity mean to have a choice: to stay or to move. While evacuations and other forms of return may save physical lives, let nobody try to tell you that this furthers Africa’s progress, dignity and emancipation. Reproducing colonial discourses and methods of controlling African movement, it serves the very opposite.

Iriann Freemantle is a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Originally published on Africa Is a Country , this contribution is reprinted with permission from the author.

When aid recipients call for more dignity: The Radi-Aid Research Report

The Radi-Aid research project is a collaboration between the Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (SAIH) and the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia.

Since the 1990s, SAIH has been exploring issues around one-sided and unnuanced aid communications that use stereotypes and oversimplifications. Through its work with Radi-Aid, it has aimed to challenge Western storytelling about Africa, contributing to a public debate about the consequences of using stereotypes in aid communications, and looking at how to change the way we communicate global issues.

SAIH Social Media Guide Cover

Ever since its 2012 satirical spoof video Africa for Norway went viral, the campaign has taken on a role of an international watch dog for the aid sector. The campaign has focused on arranging the Radi-Aid Awards (2013-2017), celebrating the best - and the worst - of development fundraising videos. Along with this, it has produced several satirical, awareness-raising videos, and in 2017 developed the Social Media Guide for Volunteers and Travelers. 

The Radi-Aid research report moves this important work one step further. From the introduction:

With this year’s Radi-Aid project, we have taken a leap with a new approach, while still focusing on promoting nuanced aid communication. When addressing aid communication and charity advertisements in the past, we have often thought about the recipients of aid and the people who are portrayed in the advertising imagery. What do they think of the adverts? How do they feel about the portrayal of African countries? What would they do differently if they were to run similar fundraising campaigns themselves? What would happen if we allowed voices from the South to truly be the narrators of their own stories?

In this project, we have aimed at deepening our understanding of international aid communication and how it is perceived. By listening to the thoughts and opinions of youths and adults from six different African countries on various issues relating to aid communication we get confirmations, contradictions, we find ourselves amused, astonished and curious but, most importantly, eager to learn and listen in order to broaden our minds. The findings of this report don’t lead us to a single conclusion. We are not critiquing or promoting the different extremes of aid communication. Rather we are inviting reflection, to increase awareness, to challenge existing assumptions, and to open ourselves to a multitude of stories.

The Report can be found here.

A Better "Best Interests": New Article by YC Editors

You can put a baby in a bassinet before an immigration judge, and she would have to make her claim just like a 45‐year‐old man would. -Immigration attorney, Chicago

This conceptual article examines the role and limitations of the best interests standard in international and domestic policy, with a particular focus on how the standard is implicated in the treatment of unaccompanied minors in the United States.

Motivated by emergent interdisciplinary scholarship on global youth and informed by a comparative consideration of best interests across other professions, we propose a new model of best interests. This model calls for a multidimensional recognition of youths’ family‐, community‐ and decision‐making contexts; acknowledgment of youths’ rights; and a commitment to speaking with, rather than for, young people. What results is a novel and dynamic understanding of best interests with relevance to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.

Find the full text here.

“A Better ‘Best Interests’: Immigration Policy in a Comparative Context”

Statz, Michele and Lauren Heidbrink

2019 Law & Policy Review 41 (4): 365-386.

https://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12135

Overseas Korean Adoption: When capitalism overrides child-welfare ethics

By Kelly Condit-Shrestha

The 2019 Brothers Home scandal—and adoption agencies’ non-response—is symptomatic of transnational Korean adoption’s historic and current priorities as an industry: the procurement of “adoptable” children over the maintenance of ethical child placement practice and above the welfare of South Korea’s most vulnerable citizens.

On November 9, 2019, The Associated Press exposed how Brothers Home, a South Korean compound that illegally imprisoned, abused, and enslaved thousands of Korean “undesirables”—“the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled”—during the 1970s and 1980s also operated as “a massive profit-seeking enterprise that thrived [as] an orphanage pipeline feeding the demand of private adoption agencies.” As of November 18, 2019, the horrifying details evidenced in an Associated Press (AP) news story resulted in near dismissal within the transnational adoption industry. Rather, reflecting the laissez-faire attitudes, if not outright scorn, that overseas adopted Koreans often face from adoption agencies—within the disciplining critique to be more “grateful”—U.S. agencies Children’s Home Society  of California, Children’s Home Society of Minnesota, Dillon International, and Spence-Chapin, “refused to try” to verify those Brothers adoptions that the AP confirmed during its records review. South Korean agency Eastern Social Welfare Society, who “paid Brothers $10 a month for every child at the facility in 1972… responded with irritation.” In this way, the 2019 Brothers Home scandal, and adoption agencies’ subsequent reactions, reflect the industry’s historic capitalist priorities to secure a sufficient supply of “adoptable” children above the ethics or accountability regarding where exactly those children came from.

“... the 2019 Brothers Home scandal, and adoption agencies’ subsequent reactions, reflect the industry’s historic capitalist priorities to secure a sufficient supply of “adoptable” children above the ethics or accountability...”

Overseas Korean adoption is responsible for the outflow of more than 200,000 South Korean children, the majority of whom were sent to the United States, to be placed into primarily white American families. As I detail in my article, “South Korea and Adoption’s Ends,” beginning in the mid-1960s, the system that is transnational Korean adoption has sustained itself by intentionally exploiting South Korea’s most vulnerable populations in order to procure an adequate supply of “available” children and cater to the overseas market demands of prospective adoptive parents—in other words, the practices of Brothers Home.

By the late 1950s, international Korean adoption was on the decline. A smaller number of children were being voluntarily relinquished and this population had shifted from mixed-race to full Korean children. But rather than support this shift toward better domestic family preservation, adoption agencies instituted competitive recruitment campaigns. Social workers actively sought out women engaged in the many sex work economies that proliferated alongside U.S. military installations, and subsequently produced large populations of mixed-race children. There, agency and orphanage workers bribed, pressured, and coerced the mothers to give up their children. By 1966, Korean international adoption began to increase at an exponential and unprecedented rate.

Global-Korean Adoptions, 1953-1976

Source: Based on Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs. See also Hübinette.

Between 1958 and 1990, the poverty-induced-abandonment of adopted Korean children steadily decreased from 66.1 percent to 10.4 percent, before plummeting to less-than-one-percent by 2004, the height of global international adoptions. At the same time, the adoption industry’s obtainment of adoptable children from South Korea’s vulnerable female citizens became increasingly organized, systematized, and effective. By the 1970s, Korean “factory girls,” the large population of young, poor, single women mobilized as cheap labor in South Korea’s urban centers, had replaced the camptown women of U.S. military bases. Beginning in the 1980s, factory girls were replaced by a new population of unwed mothers—women who were not poverty-stricken but weighted down by the social stigma of single motherhood. Over the next two decades, agency-funded maternity homes emerged, and were refined, as an efficient industry technology to secure the children of this smaller target population. Between 1958 and 1990, unwed mothers’ children progressed from 9 percent to 72.2 percent of Korea’s adoption population; by 2004, they accounted for nearly-one-hundred-percent of those children placed out.

Adoption Circumstances of Internationally Adopted Koreans, 1958-2004

Source: Based on Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs. See also Hübinette; and E. Kim.

Since the 1990s, overseas adopted Koreans—through fortitude, strength, and persistence—have increasingly gained access to their adoption records. As more adoptees gain this access, it has become clear that the Brothers Home adoption scandal is not an anomaly. Rather, the deliberately inaccurate recording and “laundering” of Korean children’s identities to produce “abandoned” or “orphaned” entities available for international child placement is mainstream agency practice. Despite these facts, as well as the historically coercive measures that sit at the heart of overseas Korean adoption’s longevity and industry prosperity, Korean transnational adoption has successfully avoided the accusation of child trafficking. This is in large part due to its ability to perform as an above-board bureaucracy that operates within the bounds of international law.

For example, as a college student, I interviewed my adoptive parents as part of an auto-ethnographic project. Within that interview, my parents were able to neatly explain that the high cost of adopting a Korean child was due mainly to the administrative and procedural expenses, in particular, the “paperwork… There was just so much paperwork.” But it is this paperwork—or rather the inaccuracies, restricted access, or lack thereof—that protects the overseas Korean adoption industry from ethical or legal accountability. As the AP details, U.S. adoption agencies and South Korean government officials repeatedly cited “an inability to check old files,” “privacy issues,” “documents… lost, destroyed or withheld,” as an excuse to deny culpability.

Korean adoptees continue to push the transnational adoption industry toward more ethical practice. But as history and present-day systems evidence, until adoptees are granted complete access to their records, overseas Korean adoption will continue to function without proper oversight, and within flexible ethical standards that prioritize the financial gain of overseas child placement over the humane commitment toward those children and their original families. If records are meant to be sealed and adoptions meant to remain “closed,” what then are the motivations for record keepers to maintain accurate documentation? Until this time of policy revision, agency and government officials’ non-responses to the Brothers Home scandal emphasizes how a continued validation of poor record-keeping also serves as validation for the continued traffic of Korean children, camouflaged under the false banner of bureaucratic legitimacy and industry “respectability.”

Kelly Condit-Shrestha is a transnational U.S. historian of migration, childhood, adoption, and critical race, and an adopted Korean American. The ideas in this blog post are explored further in her article, South Korea and Adoption’s Ends: Reexamining the Numbers and Historicizing Market Economies,” Adoption & Culture (2018), and chapter contribution in the forthcoming edited collection, Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents (Palgrave Macmillan). She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled: Adoption and American Empire: Migration, Race-Making, and the Child, 1845-1988.

Rural peripheries and the promise of asylum immigration?

by Desirée Enlund

Amid an increasingly hostile climate toward asylum seekers in Europe, rural Swedish municipalities have come to view asylum seekers as a possibility for rural revival. This has had varying results but ultimately proves difficult in reversing the long-term problems with which rural areas contend.

Asylum seekers outside the Grand Arctic hotel in Överkalix. Photo: Fredrik Sandberg / TT

In the autumn of 2015, the number of asylum-seekers arriving to Sweden reached an all-time high and began being described as a ‘crisis.’ Sweden has long been a safe haven for people fleeing regions rife with conflict and repressive regimes. While Germany received the highest absolute number of asylum seekers in Europe in the mid-2010s, Sweden received the most asylum seekers per capita among OECD countries. During the peak period in 2015, 162.000 people arrived from Syria and other countries in conflict, including high numbers of unaccompanied youth. The number of people seeking asylum has since decreased, largely because of stricter asylum regulations and border controls pushed through by the Swedish government.

The large number of people arriving in 2015 presented great challenges to local municipalities and civil society, among them providing housing to youth and families and schooling for children. These tasks were largely taken up by civil society, sometimes in collaboration with municipalities. This was seen in urban centres as volunteers in Malmö helped people find housing during their first days in Sweden and healthcare workers attended to asylum seekers' care needs at the train station in Stockholm. Similar efforts were seen in rural areas where volunteers, often women, provided people with necessities such as clothing for the approaching winter (Jarnkvist & Giritli Nygren, 2019).

It is important to highlight that the idea of a ‘crisis’ is not the perception among the many depopulating municipalities across the country. Here, both civil society and local governments often view newcomers as a potential resource. Why? And what are the possibilities for rural revival through this immigration?

The Rural Context

Population density of Sweden, 2016.

Rural Sweden, particularly the north, has long suffered from the effects of de-industrialization and subsequent depopulation (OECD, 2017), with youth moving to urban areas and the south in search of education and employment opportunities. Earlier, one of the focuses of the Swedish welfare state was to counteract this development through regional development policies, the so-called “The whole of Sweden shall live” policies. This intention has later been abandoned and replaced by place marketing whereby municipalities compete in attractiveness for people, investments, and economic prosperity (Westholm, 2013). It is in this context that a growing population could offer a means to halt the economic decline and possibly counter the withdrawal of not only industrial jobs, but recently even the most basic services, such as closing gas stations, delivery wards and emergency hospital care in rural places (Cras, 2017; Larsson, 2018). In my own research I explore the increasing contestation of closures of healthcare facilities in rural areas, where social movements are protesting and organizing themselves in citizen cooperatives in order to self-organize healthcare in rural communities (Enlund, forthcoming).

Asylum seekers in rural places

While local governments were not equipped to handle the sudden increase in asylum seekers in 2015, they have generally viewed the arrival of asylum seekers in rural towns as something potentially positive. The promise of asylum seekers lies in the opportunity they provide to reverse the long-term decline of rural and peripheral areas shared by many rural and shrinking areas across Europe. In Sweden this boils down to some elements of the Swedish welfare state. The first relates to municipal income via taxation, as municipalities with low rates of working-age people and high rates of pensioners generally are poorer. If a municipality can attract young people, such as asylum seekers, and entice them to stay and work, municipalities could increase their tax base. The second factor is that at the national level, the Swedish Migration Board, a government agency, is responsible for arriving asylum seekers. While processing asylum applications, the Migration Board provides housing and a small monthly stipend for the asylum seekers to sustain themselves and their families. However, the agency does not own their own housing. Rather, it signs contracts with the municipalities to provide housing for a specified number of asylum seekers. The municipalities, being sovereign with elected governments, enter into these agreements at will or not; many rural municipalities have been eager to do so. The municipalities stand to gain twice—first through the rent payments by the Migration Board, and second through extra funding from the state tied to integration projects targeting municipalities receiving large numbers of asylum seekers.

Yet perhaps unsurprisingly, many asylum seekers prefer to live in larger cities in order to have better access to services, labour markets and social capital through migrant networks (Eriksson, Wimelius & Ghazinour, 2018). Herein lies a tension between the individual and the state: While individual asylum seekers can decline the housing offered by the Migration Board, doing so means they need to find their own housing. Due to the housing shortage in urban areas (Christophers, 2013), this is difficult. The paradox is thus that asylum seekers get ‘placed’ in areas where there is available housing but where there is a lack of educational possibilities, job opportunities and accessible welfare services. Just as this results in large rural outmigration by local youth (Svensson, 2006,  2017), so also are asylum seekers affected by the same structures, which leads to many of them similarly moving to where the opportunities exist once granted residence permits. That asylum seekers would offer a solution to these structural inequality between affluent urban and poorer rural areas with an increasingly elderly population might be hoping for too much. When it comes to the persistent patterns of uneven regional development, these require more structural approaches by the state to maintain public services, local economies and demographic pressure rather than places and regions being commodities in a competitive global market.

References:

Enlund, D. (forthcoming). Contentious countrysides - Social movements reworking and resisting public healthcare restructuring in rural Sweden. (Human Geography Doctoral dissertation). Umeå University, Umeå.

Jarnkvist, K., & Giritli Nygren, K. (2019). The gendered and gendering of rural refugee reception – Voluntary (older) women’s labour and Church initiatives. Paper presented at the G19 - Swedish Conference for Gender Studies: ‘Rethinking Knowledge Regimes - Solidarities and Contestations’, Gothenburg, Sweden.  

Desirée Enlund is a doctoral candidate in Human Geography at the Department of Geography and affiliated to the Graduate School of Gender Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. Her work examines the impact of healthcare restructuring on rural areas of Sweden through the lens of social movements contesting the withdrawal of welfare services and citizen cooperatives self-organizing healthcare in rural communities.

The Distance Between Us: Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights of Rural Women and Girls

By Meghan Campbell

This post assesses how the leading international human rights instrument on women’s equality accounts for the critical role of rurality in the enjoyment of women and girls’ sexual and reproductive health rights .

Note: Rurality and sexual and reproductive health are rich fields of study and stretch across disciplinary silos. This post adopts an international human rights legal perspective. As a result, it employs the terminology used by UN treaty bodies and organisations while acknowledging and respecting different disciplines may have principled arguments for using different terminology.

* * *

In human rights law, minimal attention is given to how the rural-urban divide impacts the realisation of the sexual and reproductive health rights of women and girls. This neglect of rurality is unwarranted: It is a meaningful, often lynchpin, explanatory factor for rural girls and women’s lack of access to high quality sexual and reproductive health rights.

In this piece, I explore how the leading international human rights instrument on women and girls’ rights addresses rurality in the realisation of sexual and reproductive health rights. I begin with a global survey to demonstrate the role of rurality in realising girls and women’s sexual and reproductive health rights.  I then proceed to evaluate how international human rights law is accounting for rurality.

Geography impacts the realisation of sexual and reproductive health rights. The lack of public investment in rural areas means women and girls routinely must travel long distances to access sexual and reproductive health services, both in the global North and South. Some rural women are in economically dependent relationships with their family which can  make overcoming distances particularly difficult, and tragically the cost of traveling can have life-and-death consequences. The low population densities in rural areas coupled with the high density of social acquaintanceship and gendered discourses makes accessing sexual and reproductive health services humiliating and creates risks of social ostracism. Living in a rural community also may increase vulnerability to serious bodily harm and may operate to isolate and silence the voices of women and girls.

An exception to this global trend is the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW is unique among UN treaties in that Article 14 protects the equal rights of rural women in various fields of life, including “access to adequate health care facilities, including information, counselling and services in family planning.” Lisa Pruitt observes that CEDAW “moves beyond the implicit focus on urban populations that characterizes a great deal of contemporary law making.” There are also provisions in CEDAW that apply to both rural and urban women, that both in theory and practice take account of rurality in sexual and reproductive health rights, including Article 5 (negative cultural stereotypes and attitudes), Article 10 (equality in education), Article 12 (equality in access to health care) and Article 16 (equality in family life).

There is rich promise within CEDAW to grasp how rurality shapes the realisation of sexual and reproductive health rights. On the positive side, many of the CEDAW Committee’s recommendations get to the heart of the geographic and social isolation in rural areas. The CEDAW Committee advocates for temporary special measures, sustained investment in rural spaces and rural women’s economic empowerment and participation. It highlights the prevalence of female genital mutilation and early forced marriage in rural areas. To end these violations of sexual and reproductive health rights, the CEDAW Committee encourages states to target awareness raising on these harmful practices to traditional leaders, men and boys; to enforce the laws prohibiting FGM and early forced marriage; to reduce evidentiary burdens when pursuing legal accountability; and to provide the necessary financial support for prevention and awareness-raising.  

The lack of investment in rural sexual and reproductive health rights, the CEDAW Committee observes, results in “rural women [being] more likely to resort to unsafe abortion than urban counterparts.” Where abortion is decriminalised, the legal regimes that regulate access to abortion can significantly impact on rural women and girls. For example, the CEDAW Committee identifies waiting periods to access abortion can “impede access for rural women” who cannot afford to travel multiple trips to health care clinics or overnight accommodation. The synergy between distance from health services and financial costs also negatively impacts post-abortion care, as many rural women cannot afford to return to health clinics. The CEDAW Committee repeatedly encourages states to guarantee post-abortion care for rural women.

There is also space for more sustained engagement with rurality and women and girl’s sexual and reproductive health rights. There is less awareness on the role of rurality in sex education. The CEDAW Committee does advocate for comprehensive, scientifically accurate, gender responsive sex education which applies to both urban and rural girls. However, it does not touch upon social isolation and conservatism that can be severe and prevalent in rural communities that may limit sex education. The CEDAW Committee consistently advocates that rural women and girls must be able to access, affordable modern contraception. Unfortunately, the CEDAW Committee does not acknowledge the role of stigma in accessing contraception in rural communities, particularly close-knit rural communities. Its recommendations could be strengthened by harmoniously encouraging states to protect girls and women’s privacy and to tackle negative attitudes on sex education and the use of contraception so that rural women and girls can gain knowledge and use contraception without public shaming.

 Rural girls and women are far too often invisible and their sexual and reproductive health rights are routinely violated. CEDAW shines the international spotlight on the intersection between rural, gender and sexual and reproductive health rights. The recommendations are targeted towards many of the structural inequalities in rural communities—investment in rural health services and transportation links, increasing women’s economic independence and participation in rural decision making. While the CEDAW Committee is attentive to rural women and girls’ lived experiences, there are still gaps in its approach to rurality. The lack of privacy and the social isolation combined with gendered norms characteristic of many rural areas can make exercising sexual reproductive health rights challenging. The CEDAW Committee’s recommendations should reflect this reality. It should encourage states to develop health services that protect women and girls’ privacy over intimate areas of their lives and also transform rural cultural attitudes that perpetuate shame and stigma. Overall, CEDAW’s sensitivity to rurality is to be commended and other domestic and international human rights bodies should similarly take account of the role of geography in shaping the realisation of human rights.    

Meghan Campbell is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, Deputy-Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub and Managing Editor of the University of Oxford Human Rights Hub Journal. Her monograph, Women, Poverty, Equality: The Role of CEDAW explores how the concept of equality in the UN Convention on the Discrimination on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women can be interpreted to address gender-based poverty. The ideas in this blog post are explored further in the forthcoming edited collection Intersectionality and Human Rights (Hart 2020) edited by Shreya Atrey and Peter Dunne.

Rethinking the “At-Risk” Narrative and Reimagining a New Future Alongside Black and Brown Youth

By Ranita Ray

Drugs, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood dominate the stories we hear about economically marginalized Black and Brown youth. It is accepted that avoiding these “risk behaviors” is key to breaking the cycle of poverty. I argue it is futile, and harmful, to focus on risk behavior prevention, and offer new ways to think about the reproduction of racialized poverty.

In the U.S., when we think about the lives and futures of economically marginalized Black and Brown youth, many think about the urgent need to target issues of drugs, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood that supposedly plague marginalized communities of color. This is evident through the public and academic discourse of “at-risk” youth who need to avoid impending pregnancy, and eventual and inevitable participation in gangs, drugs, and violence. Federal, state and local interventions, as well as non-profit efforts are often squarely focused on targeting “risk” behaviors among youth. Academics are no exceptions. The most popular books on Black and Brown youth tend to focus on sensational topics of drugs, gangs, violence and teen parenthood attempting to explain how abject poverty and societal rejection force youth to adopt alternate paths to respect and dignity. Most existing works also construct these “risk behaviors” as inherently immoral and obstinate social problems. As a feminist ethnographer, I challenge these commonly held views.

“Targeting risk behaviors not only fails to interrupt the cycle of racialized poverty, but instead perpetuates it.”

As an ethnographer, I have spent years in particular communities to learn about how large societal forces shape everyday lives, and vice versa. I spent three years among sixteen economically marginalized Black and Brown youth who were transitioning from high school to college in a northeastern U.S. city I’ve named Port City, and wrote a book on my findings entitled The Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City. I am also a radical ethnographer, so I center the lives and voices of the Black and Brown youth and argue that targeting risk behaviors not only fails to interrupt the cycle of racialized poverty, but instead perpetuates it. Building on the works of Black and third world feminists, I argue the “at risk” narrative draws on racialized and classed discourses that construct all Black and Brown bodies as social problems. Specifically, I challenge two rationales inherent in the “at risk” discourse in poverty studies: avoiding “risk behaviors” offers marginalized youth opportunities for socio-economic mobility and “risk behaviors” are inherently immoral and problematic.

The sixteen youths whose voices and resistance are central to The Making of a Teenage Service Class worked hard to play by the “rule of mobility”—they postponed pregnancy, avoided drugs, gangs and violence, worked multiple jobs, and remained focused on obtaining a college degree. Meanwhile, teachers, non-profit workers and the community at large conveyed the message to youth that they were “at risk” of becoming violent gang members, young parents, and ultimately burdens on the state. In turn, they provided the youth with teen pregnancy and violence prevention workshops or finance management workshops. They also held trainings that were designed to teach “morals” and “character building.” Meantime, youth struggled with hunger, untreated illnesses, and spent long hours traveling between school, work, and home. The workshops and trainings were misdirected and unhelpful.

One young person I met during my research, who I will refer to as Angie, was going to be the first in her family to go to college. Unable to score high enough on her SATs, Angie decided to enroll in community college. Halfway through her semester her car broke down. She was traveling on a bus that took nearly 2 hours to travel 10 miles from her home to the local community college. This meant Angie was forced to spent long hours commuting between home, school, and work. She was constantly hungry and exhausted. What Angie needed at that time, put bluntly, were better public transportation options and money. Instead, what was available to her were non-violence training programs and teen pregnancy prevention workshops. One day when Angie called me to ask for a ride she said:

“Ah, I feel so needy. And you know I don’t like to do this but can you please, please give me a ride? I feel like shit; went to work early today ’cause my boss gave me extra hours and then been here [the community college] all day and I didn’t even eat nothing. Think my gastric thing is acting up again. And now I gotta go meet him [her boyfriend]. Like, I wanna go home and pass out, but I promised I’d cook for him, and I don’t wanna not do it ’cause you know, he real nice to me too.”

This type of a take on racialized poverty not only harms marginalized youth by diverting resources, but it does more harm by stigmatizing them and creating cleavages in communities. Evelyn, another young woman I met gained admission to a four- year university. Imagine my surprise when she told me that she was going to postpone college to join the army. An army recruiter had told her that there was plenty of time for college, but she needed to learn discipline first to avoid the treacherous path some of her community members take—one of drugs, gangs and violence. She told me that she had heard from her teachers, community members, and the news about how plagued communities “like hers” were and she didn't want to end up in jail. Evelyn told me, “That military will give me discipline, that’s what you need to progress in life. That’s what I wanna do, I don’t wanna end up like my mother on the streets, that’s for sure.”

Another young woman AJ, told me she wanted the type of birth control that went deep into her skin because “people like her,” meaning Latinas, become pregnant all the time and she didn't want that fate for herself. AJ stated, “…honestly, ’cause I think that’s what’s wrong with our community, like [the] Latino community, all these girls gettin’ pregnant and we stuck in the ghetto.” AJ had heard these narratives from her teachers, non-profit workers, and other community members. Utilizing/Internalizing these scripts, young people at times stigmatized and humiliated their friends, sisters, and cousins who did become young mothers.

Teen Pregnancy Panic

Research shows that for marginalized young women, avoiding parenthood does not heighten chances of socio-economic mobility. All communities use drugs evenly. But rich White youth are not perceived to be dangerous drug users like the young people in Port City who were encouraged to attend non-violence workshops and told how they would end up in jail if not careful. In fact, the racist criminal justice system, not poor choices, is more likely to land Black and Latinx youth in jail.

If we change how we think about Black and Brown youth and stop constructing them as social problems needing to be solved, then perhaps we might reimagine where to invest our efforts. School teachers, non-profit workers, volunteers, college professors, and community members who are committed to social justice need to wrestle with racist and classist systems that keep youth down. Instead of workshops and trainings, we might do so by fighting for free college, a higher minimum wage, abolition of prisons and borders, and so much more. The thing is, Black and Brown youth are already resisting. We just need to join them.

Ranita Ray is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her book, The Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City (University of California Press, 2018) received the 2018 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems as well as an Honorable Mention for 2019 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award Presented by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Race, Gender, and Class. Ray’s work has been published in Social Problems (winner of 2019 American Sociological Association Race, Gender, and Class Section Best Article Award); Journal of Contemporary Ethnography; The American Journal of Bioethics; Sociology Compass, as well as in the form of book chapters. Ray received a 2019 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship for her current longitudinal ethnography, which explores the complexities of schooling, gender and racial dominance, based in Las Vegas.

Centering Humanity within Dehumanizing Spaces: Challenges in Trauma-Informed Immigration Work

By Laurie Cook Heffron and Ana Hernández

Against a backdrop of increasing dehumanization and criminalization of migrating families, social work students aim to address trauma within a setting that often serves to reproduce trauma, the Karnes immigrant family detention center.

The role of the United States government in the dehumanization and criminalization of migrating families is by no means new, yet recent changes in policy and practice [1] facilitate its expansion. On any given day, more than 50,000 migrating individuals are detained and incarcerated in one of a variety of facilities funded by and operating within an entanglement of governmental and private entities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and private prison corporations, among others.

A GEO Group flag flies alongside the United States, Texas, and Department of Homeland Security flags at the immigrant detention center in Karnes, City, TX. Photo credit: Laurie Cook Heffron

Immigrant detention may last a few days or be indefinite, and the consequences of either are often long-lasting. The harmful impact of incarceration is well documented and includes increased risk of self-harm, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts, depression, traumatic stress, and anxiety. Detention also causes disruptions to the family unit, can create role reversal between parents and children, and undermines attachment relationships critical to child development and family wellbeing. When considering this impact within the context of longstanding and recent acts of interpersonal violence and systemic oppression, the result is even more harmful.

As Texans and social work students and professionals, we live in a region heavily impacted by this context. Set against the expanse of Texas-Mexico borderlands and the high number of detention facilities in the state, we work closely with clients, friends, and families enduring the direct results of detention. We are also working within a profession whose code of ethics and professional directives require us to be informed about, engaged in, and actively resisting inequity and oppression. In the same breath, we recognize that our profession has been complicit in and facilitated the creation and maintenance of oppressive structures and are mindful to not repeat such errors.

Over the last several years, a central site of this struggle has involved working with parents incarcerated with their children at the immigrant detention facility in Karnes City, Texas [2]. The first team of social work student volunteers began work in the winter of 2016, with the goal of supporting the efforts of RAICES (involved in this work since 2014) in providing parents with information and resources, helping parents understand the system they were navigating, and identifying and protecting any options and choices available to them. In particular, volunteers provide information about the purpose and logistics of the Credible Fear Interview process and assist in identifying and acting on any indication of abuses taking place. Over time the two separate but parallel projects (graduate and undergraduate student engagement and faculty supervision from both social work and law) merged into a joint effort with shared coordination. The goal is to build capacity, cross-train, and utilize legal expertise coupled with honed attention to the backdrop of trauma.

Inter-disciplinary team of social work students and law students stopping for breakfast tacos in Seguin, Texas, on the way to Karnes immigrant detention facility. Photo credit: Ana Hernández

Overall, the project aims to embody a trauma-informed approach. Approaches and settings that make recovery from trauma possible (including those endorsed by federal agencies) clearly involve the elimination of practices of seclusion and isolation. These elements are decidedly not existent, nor possible, in the contexts of detention in which we work. By centering the knowledge that human connection and relationships can be healing in and of themselves, we work to provide a sense of support and wellbeing in a space that so often cannot feel safe for those detained. Building off recent research and the experiences of social work student volunteers, we explore four main aspects in which volunteers operate in a trauma-informed manner despite a setting that is isolating and often serves to reproduce trauma.

First, physical and psychological safety, as defined by those who've experienced trauma, may not be possible in the detention center as a result of the constant threat of deportation. Frequent intercom calls for individuals by their inmate number, nighttime bed checks, and regular cases of sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and deaths in detention enhance the climate of instability and danger.

One example of promoting wellbeing in this hostile environment is the simple strategy of grounding exercises, techniques designed to respond to trauma survivors who may feel distress, re-experience trauma, and have difficulty regulating their responses. Grounding activities aim to help someone find calm, to center oneself in the current time and space, and to prepare for re-entering a fear-inducing system. Volunteers also engage in safety planning and resource identification with those who will be returned to their home countries and face considerable danger upon arrival. Finally, this work also offers an opportunity to identify abuses within the system (alongside a larger network of advocacy organizations and immigrant detention visitation programs).

Sunflower along Texas-Mexico border. Photo credit: Ana Hernández

Second, a trauma-informed approach also necessitates actively pursuing the goal of building and maintaining trust and transparency. Frequently shifting policies and procedures within, and external to, the detention context create a setting in which those detained often do not know who they can trust. Those detained also receive little to no reliable information from immigration officials about immigration procedures, applications, hearings, and timelines.

Our volunteers always explain their role, limits to their role, and the purpose of the interaction with women at Karnes for maximum transparency in the process. Additionally, our work at Karnes exists within a larger patchwork of efforts by outside NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] whose goal is to provide information about rights and immigration procedures, individual case consultation, preparation for release from detention, preparation for deportation, and referral to low-cost immigration legal services.

Third, tending to trauma also involves promoting and protecting empowerment, voice, and choice. Traumatic experiences may have left people feeling as if they have little choice or control over what happens to them, coupled with incarceration in an atmosphere that removes most choice from daily living (when to wake up, which side of the hallway to walk on). Particularly around parenting, this setting inhibits mothers’ authority and decision-making related to sleeping, feeding, clothing, and disciplining, and restricts their responses to the social, educational, and medical needs of their children.

We work with women to navigate the new contexts within which they are situated. Our work within the detention setting aims to recognize and give choice and control – where to sit in a visitation room, when and what part of their stories to tell, whether or not to have a child present. Information-giving is connected to this effort to give choice and remove barriers to self-advocacy.

Finally, a trauma-informed approach must utilize a cultural, historical, and gender lens by actively resisting bias, providing gender-responsive services, supporting traditional healing practices, and recognizing historical trauma. In detention, cultural stereotypes are often enforced through insults by guards, and the considerable gender-based violence previously experienced by many asylum-seekers remains unaddressed. Likewise, the short- or long-term historical context that contributes to families’ trauma exposure and the dehumanization and criminalization of migrating families is largely unrecognized by the system.

In supporting women to prepare for their credible fear interviews, volunteers are mindful of the opportunities and limitations within asylum law and ever-changing federal policies regarding asylum claims. By incorporating an understanding of historical trauma, cultural differences, and gender-based violence, volunteers are able to validate the lived experiences of oppression while providing guidance for how women can understand their unique history within the limited context of immigration law. To validate one’s fear as “credible” regardless of policies is a hugely important reinforcement of their humanity and rights.

Ultimately, the individuals we have spoken with around the country who aim to support those in detention often feel that they are not able to see enough people, do enough, or circumnavigate physical and legal barriers in effective ways. We also cannot dismiss the toll on volunteers of entering such oppressive spaces or witnessing the undermining of human rights that occurs in detention centers on a daily basis. While immigrant detention is a particularly challenging space within which to implement trauma-informed practices, it is important not to minimize the powerful impact of every positive human interaction – no matter how small it may seem. This is the underpinning of trauma-informed work and it is the basis upon which our volunteers can understand the impact of their efforts at a fundamental level. Out of the dozens of volunteers who have gone with us to detention centers, we now have a group of social workers armed with the knowledge of the detrimental impact of immigrant detention and determined to make systems change. We know they will do this through individual clinical work; community organizing; and policy advocacy in order to create a system that does not rely on immigrant detention and instead creates trauma-informed integrative systems of support for those seeking refuge in this country.

[1] While the population of those incarcerated at Karnes has recently shifted, it has been primarily used as a family detention facility during our work there. 

[2] These include, but are not limited to, challenges to the Flores settlement, a host of family separation practices, changes in eligibility for asylum, expansion of expedited removal, and the Migrant Protection Protocols/Remain in Mexico program

Laurie Cook Heffron, PhD, LMSW is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at St. Edward’s University. Her research and social work practice focus on the intersections of interpersonal violence and immigration and the impacts of immigrant detention on survivors of violence.

 Ana Hernández, MSSW, MA is the Program Coordinator of Girasol at the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing at the University of Texas at Austin. Her advocacy, social work practice, and research are centered around work with immigrants in detention and the immigrant community in Austin, Texas.

Birth Migration and the Politics of Seeking Safety Abroad

by Sarah Smith

Women embrace obstetric technology—often migrating transnationally to seek what they perceive as safer birthing options—only to face the social stratification inherently embedded in biomedicine, putting their bodies at risk. I explore Chuukese women’s desires to migrate to Guam for higher-tech births, despite suffering disproportionately poor birth outcomes upon arrival. I ask: what is it about obstetric technology that gives people so much faith, even in the face of stratified reproduction? 

Where is the best place to give birth? Feminist anthropologists have examined this question, in all its iterations, for decades. We have explored the birth experiences of women across the world, questioned the biomedical control of women’s bodies, and critiqued development initiatives that deny credibility to traditional midwives. While we spend time critiquing the reach of biomedicine, many increasingly mobile women throughout the world leave their own perceived “unsafe” spaces for “safe” biomedical births. However, upon traveling to “modern” facilities in wealthier city-centers or nations, women face the institutional racism, classism, sexism and poverty ingrained in biomedical environments, putting their birthing bodies at risk. I spent two years conducting an ethnographic study of Chuukese women’s reproductive health in Guam, including women birthing in Guam despite facing these risks, and wrote about this phenomenon in Medical Anthropology.

Guam is an unincorporated territory of the US, and Chuuk is one state of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a country in a unique relationship with the US, formed after decades of these islands being designated post-WWII “trust territories.” This relationship allows FSM citizens the ability to freely travel, live and work in the US without a visa. Since this relationship was codified in 1986, FSM citizens began moving into the US for better education, jobs and access to health care; particularly for those from Chuuk’s 23 inhabited islands, migration often starts with nearby Guam. As this began, anti-immigrant resentment and discrimination toward Chuukese migrants grew in Guam, and rhetoric about the Chuukese arriving only to give birth for citizenship, food stamps and welfare is widespread. Yet, women continue to seek what they see as safer births in Guam.

Source

Childbirth in Chuuk

This was not the first shift in Chuukese women’s birthing choices over the last century. Older anthropological accounts portrayed birth as a reason for women to go home to their familial land, where they would be cared for by an expert midwife and older female kin who were the primary support system. This first changed when a hospital was built in the main island in the mid-20th century; women were encouraged by newer colonizers to birth in this shiny new biomedical space. At this point, many women who could afford the boat ride left their home islands and midwives and headed to the hospital. Ingrained in this new mentality was that biomedical professionals were necessary, “just in case” something bad happened; more technology meant better outcomes. Anthropologist Melissa Cheyney calls this phenomenon the “obstetric imaginary,” an unyielding belief and trust in the biomedical establishment to improve lives and to reduce suffering in all circumstances. Biomedicine often contributes to saving lives and reducing suffering, but we also know that a) sometimes it does the opposite, for a variety of reasons; and b) care is highly stratified, often reflecting community inequalities.

Chuuk State Hospital Maternity Ward

In Chuuk, development funding is not sufficient to support the high expenses of biomedicine, and the hospital declined dramatically over the years. Chuuk’s hospital grew to be a place known for a shortage of staff and supplies in a deteriorating building with holes and leaks throughout. Locals call it “the place to die.” As a result of this decline and loss of trust in Chuuk’s biomedicine, women didn’t return home to trusted midwives; they went transnational. They started to leave Chuuk for safer birthing spaces with more technology, beginning with Guam.

This ethnographic study included life history interviews with 15 Chuukese women, semi-structured interviews with 24 health care workers providing reproductive health care, and the shadowing of over 100 women seeking care in Guam’s reproductive health clinics. Of the women I shadowed in Guam, the majority were there for prenatal care. While these women were often residents, many were also visiting Guam for birth. These women wanted to live in Chuuk, but did not feel safe birthing there. When I asked women why they chose to leave, they said things like “a lot of babies die in Chuuk, and a lot of mothers.” Others described a bad experience with a previous birth, and some complained of giving birth with no attendants, a symptom of a very underfunded and understaffed system. So, those pregnant women with families who could afford the airfare traveled to Guam to give birth.

Arriving at Guam’s Airport

Is Guam better? Safer?

Women regularly told me Guam was a much safer option. Nelly told me, for example: “It’s a really big difference. Health care here [Guam], it’s really, very good. It’s not, there’s nothing I can compare to the one in Chuuk.” Yet, I wanted to conduct this research because Chuukese women suffer the worst reproductive health outcomes on the whole island of Guam. They have more C-sections and higher rates of complications, including maternal and infant mortality. Of course, Guam Memorial Hospital (GMH) is suffering from its own neo-colonial existence as well—with scarce funding, limited skilled personnel and a large indigent population—the hospital has a reputation for inadequate care. Its financial woes are inevitably blamed on the migrants seeking care without insurance, and these feelings are transferred to Chuukese patients birthing in Guam, further stratifying their reproduction.  

Stratified reproduction is an anthropological concept which delineates how stratification in society is shaped and maintained by reproduction. Chuukese women’s reproduction was stratified through local policies meant to slow the flow of federally sanctioned migrants, and through treatment by hospital personnel. First, to qualify for Guam’s Medically Indigent Health Insurance Program for non-U.S. citizens, applicants had to be Guam residents for six months. This meant women who arrived just a few months before birth did not have time to get insurance. Without insurance, women could only register at GMH if they had a large (about $200) down payment. Because of this, many lower-income women waited until they were in labor to arrive at the emergency room, often with no records, thus bypassing the required fee.  

Guam Memorial Hospital

Women also experienced resentment and discrimination from health care workers. Women told me again of giving birth without attendants; some were given C-sections without understanding what was happening; others were sent home despite high blood sugar or blood pressure—complications that led to poor and sometimes lethal outcomes for them and their babies. Women felt hospital providers treated them worse because they were Chuukese. They told stories of providers lecturing women—while in labor—that they should stop having so many babies. 

Health care providers had their complaints as well. They complained about Chuukese women’s silence in labor, because they could not assess how far along these women were in the birth process. They also complained that Chuukese women reached the hospital too late. Conversely, several Chuukese women I spoke with proudly told me that by the third or fourth child, they could time it just right: arriving as they were pushing the baby out. This demonstrated their strength in the birthing process, allowing them to avoid a discriminatory atmosphere until they absolutely had to be there. Because—while Guam was perceived as much better than Chuuk—it was not ideal for a Chuukese woman. Women who could afford to get further to Hawai’I or to the west coast—left Guam for what they saw as more technology and thus “better” biomedicine. Yet, for those who could only afford to get to Guam, they believed it was much better than their home island or Chuuk State Hospital. Care was stratified by the cost of a boat ride or plane ticket.

As with the rest of the world, the cultural power of almighty biomedicine has made its way to Chuuk and Guam. Communities still appreciate and respect local medicine, and often integrate methods from both medical traditions for pregnant women, but for childbirth,  people have embraced the obstetric imaginary. Chuukese women and their families trust that obstetric medicine is the safest option and yet, it continues to fail them. In spite of their best efforts to circumvent the low-technology options in Chuuk and their deleterious effects through pursuing the “best” care transnationally, Chuukese women migrate only to confront the worst birth outcomes in Guam. What is unique is not the pervasive power of global biomedicine, or the obstetric imaginary. This trust in obstetric technology is pervasive throughout the world. The unique element here is that obstetric medicine continues to invoke a sense of trust in saving lives in the context of stratified reproduction. This imaginary is so powerful that it persists even as biomedicine’s unequal distribution of care endangers women’s lives.

Sarah A. Smith is Assistant Professor of Public Health and Co-Director of the Health Disparities Institute at SUNY Old Westbury. Her research examines sexual and reproductive health at the intersection of US colonial policy, gender, and migration in Micronesian communities. Her research has been published in Social Science and Medicine and Medical Anthropology.

On the Deliberate Traumatization of Migrants’ Children

by Sarah S. Willen

In Israel, as in the United States, children have become pawns in government efforts to expel migrants -- despite clear evidence that arresting, detaining, and deporting children violates their human rights and has long-term traumatic effects. Policies like these demand our swift, strong, and emphatic condemnation.

“We’ve lost our minds,” 80-year-old Holocaust survivor Shalom Janakh said through tears in a short video condemning Israel’s move to deport children born to unauthorized migrant parents. Janakh’s beloved young neighbors, 9-year-old Michael and 5-year-old Shira, were recently arrested and detained by the Israeli immigration authorities along with their mother, Ishora, who came to Israel from Nepal to work as a caregiver. “This is a shame and a disgrace,” Janakh choked in his heart-rending appeal to Israeli Minister of Interior Aryeh Dery and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “In my opinion, there should be a 6- or 7- meter wall with the Minister of Interior inside, not these children.”

Large Hebrew banner reads, “Don’t deport children.” Smaller sign reads, “Why do you want to deport me?” Source: United Children of Israel.

A 12-year-old student had similar things to say about the detention of her friend Mika, also 12, who was born in Israel to Filipino parents. Like other families targeted for deportation, Mika was arrested at home along with her 9-year-old sister, Maureen, and their parents, Sheila and Randy. “What kind of people are we that we’re deporting children?” Mika’s friend asked in a television interview, clearly aware of the weight of her words. “What kind of people have we become? We ourselves were strangers in other countries, and now we’re deporting foreigners from our country?”

Left: Twelve- year-old Mika and her family at their court hearing. Right: A letter from Mika, in Hebrew, in which she describes her family’s arrest and subsequent detention as “the most frightening thing that’s happened to me in my entire life.” Sources: Oren Ziv for ActiveStills (left) [1] and United Children of Israel (right).

Sheila and Randy came to Israel 25 years ago, like 60,000 of their conationals, with visas permitting them to work as caregivers for elderly Israelis. All of their children were born in Israel and, till now, educated in Israeli public schools. In August, families like theirs became targets of a deportation campaign launched just before the new school year that began on September 1 -- and in the political vacuum preceding the upcoming elections on September 17. As it has in the past, Israel’s right-wing leadership is trying to deport vulnerable migrants in an effort to re-assert sovereignty and curry favor with their political base. And once again -- as in early 2018, when Netanyahu tried to deport asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan, and failed -- a growing group of Israelis are fighting back.

In recent weeks, thousands of Israelis -- schoolchildren and educators, famous artists and former government officials, mental health professionals and Holocaust survivors like Shalom Janakh -- have made a clear demand of their government: Stop arresting migrant parents and their Israeli children. These Hebrew-speaking children, they insist -- who attend Israeli schools, celebrate Israeli holidays, and often want to perform the same military service required of their peers -- are Israeli “in every way.” Parent associations at a dozen different public schools have led efforts to prevent their deportation. Private attorneys have represented families in court. And new groups have emerged to strategize and lend support.

One of several petitions from prominent Israelis. Maureen is pictured on the right, together with a friend from Balfour Elementary School in Tel Aviv. The title: “Don’t deport the children!” Source: United Children of Israel.

Mika, Maureen, and their parents were detained for eleven days and nights. The girls’ friends, their families, and their broader community rallied in their support -- at demonstrations and in TV interviews, on social media and outside Givon Prison where they were detained until they were released on bond, pending appeal.

Supporters fear that the fate of Mika and Maureen -- or Shalom Janakh’s young neighbors, Michael and Shira -- could parallel that of families like 13-year-old Rohan and his mother, Rosemary, who were deported to Manila in August. An Israeli journalist who visited Rohan and Rosemary a few days after their expulsion painted a devastating portrait of the deportation and its traumatic impact on both mother and son. Rohan, struggling to understand why he had been cut off from the world he knew, put it this way: “My dreams are shattered.”  

In my work as an anthropologist, I’ve spent a good deal of time with women like Sheila and Rosemary -- women who came to Israel in search of work opportunity, and eventually became pregnant. I first started meeting new migrant moms and moms-to-be in 2000, while laying the groundwork for the book, Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives on Israel’s Margins.

For a few of the women I got to know, pregnancy was planned and eagerly anticipated. But for many -- especially for women from the Philippines -- it was not. Unlike most of the migrant workers who came to Israel in the late 1990s and early 2000s, nearly all Filipinos arrived with legal authorization. The Israeli authorities defined pregnancy as “incompatible” with the arduous and underpaid work of 24/6 caregiving, so authorized migrant workers who became pregnant in that period automatically lost their legal status -- and often their jobs. (Since then, the law has changed: now migrant women who give birth must leave Israel within three months of their baby’s birth -- or send the child to the Philippines to be raised by relatives.) For these migrant women, an unplanned pregnancy can destroy their plans and dreams for the future.

Israel has no birthright citizenship provision. Neither can adult migrants become naturalized, even if they have lived and worked in Israel for decades. For the most part, only people with a bureaucratically legible tie to the Jewish people, or to an individual Israeli citizen (i.e., through marriage), can become citizens themselves.

The current deportation campaign is not the first time Israel has moved to round up and expel unauthorized migrants. In 2002, as I describe in Fighting for Dignity, the Israeli government launched a mass deportation campaign of unprecedented size and scale that wrought havoc on Tel Aviv’s newly established communities of global migrants and, within three short years, led to their collapse. What is new, however, is the state’s eagerness to deport children and families. Twice since 2005, Israel threatened to deport kids -- but in each case, plans ground to a halt, largely in response to intensive activist effort. On both of those occasions, small groups of children were granted permanent residency and their families temporary status. If these children serve in the Israeli army, which is mandatory for Jewish citizens, they can even obtain citizenship and their immediate families can receive permanent residency.

This time, however, things are different. Children like Maureen and Mika are being arrested, detained, and in some cases deported from the only country they know. Like Rohan, they are in danger of being expelled to a place they have never visited, far from their friends and teachers, where they may not speak the language -- and where no one will speak the lingua franca of their everyday lives, the colorful, slang-filled Hebrew of Israeli schoolchildren.

Holocaust survivor Shalom Janakh, whose young neighbors Michael (9) and Shira (5) were arrested along with their mother and are currently detained. Janakh described Israel’s new policy of deporting families as “a shame and a disgrace.” Source: United Children of Israel.

We don’t need sophisticated science to understand that arrest, detention, and deportation can traumatize children, with far-reaching effects. But for those who want data, the science is clear and strong. Last week, a group of Israeli mental health professionals consolidated the evidence in a position paper that details how “Arrest, detention, and deportation of children is a clear and serious danger to their mental health and future development.” These experienced clinicians acknowledge that children of migrants already belong to a vulnerable community, and that the stress of arrest, detention, and deportation has clear traumatic potential. They warn of severe consequences, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and behavioral disorders. They note that organizations of health and mental health professionals, in Israel and around the world, staunchly oppose the deportation of children -- and that children facing deportation would be unlikely to get the care they need, especially given their particular linguistic and cultural needs.

Meanwhile, more evidence of how deportation campaigns harm health is mounting on the other side of the Atlantic. Just last week, two social scientists published a New York Times op-ed opposing the detention of children in the U.S. under very different circumstances, but for similar reasons. Their conclusion is equally clear:  “No detention center is safe and healthy for children.”

There’s plenty of room for disagreement about what fair and just immigration policies would look like. But deliberately traumatizing children is wrong. Policies that violate children’s rights and impugn their dignity -- whether in Israel, the U.S., or anywhere else -- demand our swift, strong, and emphatic condemnation. We live in deeply troubling times, and we cannot afford to lose our minds, or our moral compass.

[1] For one-time use, not for archive use.

Sarah S. Willen, PhD, MPH is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Research Program on Global Health and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, USA. She is editor of Transnational Migration to Israel in Global Comparative Context (Lexington Books, 2007) and author of the newly published Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

On the Immigration History Research Center Archives, or: What fuels you?

By Michele Statz

As a scholar of migration and global youth, I came to the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) woefully late. Only last September did I first visit it, let alone hear of it, for the “Migration across Global Regimes of Childhood Symposium.” In December I returned, this time to learn about the Immigration History Research Center Archives and the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives, and all they offer you, our readers.

Part of the University’s Migration and Social Services Collections, the Immigration History Research Center Archives and the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives work closely with the IHRC, the oldest and largest interdisciplinary center devoted to documenting and understanding im/migrant and refugee life in North America. The Center and all of the University’s Archives and Special Collections are located in the Anderson Library.

Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota. PHOTO BY:

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I’m proud of the work we showcase on this site, and as a co-editor it challenges and fuels me in all the right ways. Accordingly, when I met with the archivists in the Migration and Social Services Collections in December, it was with very pragmatic questions: What are you doing here? What is it like to work here? How can our readers use this resource? How can this inform my own work? I had described some ongoing research projects ahead of time, and when I arrived the archivists set me down with a cart of boxes they had selected from the general archive and the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives. They were informative, patient, and, above all, experts.

Still: I didn’t know where to start, or how to start. Frankly, I knew very little. And perhaps most important: I did not know that this would be restorative.

I began working my way through so many file folders in the quiet reading room and was quickly absorbed. Hours passed as I filtered through meeting minutes and newspaper pages, family photos and immigration documents, letters, church bulletins, colorful pins. Truthfully, I had no idea what I was looking for.

File from the Jews in Northern Minnesota papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries. Photo by Michele Statz.

One file titled “Friedman, Newton. Naturalization papers, ports of entry, Duluth Jews, address book. 1913-1948” held a pages-long list of Jewish arrivals to Duluth, Minnesota, where I now live.

The list included:

#16843 Siegbert Wollstein, bookbinder, not married. Roll 28 v. 36

 #16846 Alex Feuer res. 420 N. 3rd Av.E. Student. 18 yrs. Born Aug.1 1929. Stu-Mare, Rumania. Last foreign address Munich Germany. Came thru Breman to NY on SS Marine Flasher Oct 2 1947. Decl.Intent.Mar1 1947. Roll 28…

 #16847 Israel Alfred Zyroff res.312 E.8th laborer. Born Jan 24 1920 Zablotow, Russia. 28 yrs. Stateless.

 #16830 Peter Semanovic RES.705 W.Sup.laborer. born June 16 1871 Tazuni, Wilno, Poland. “Shrapnel scars on top of head” Widower. Son born 1903 in Tszuni. “Not known if alive.”

 Max Kleinman… tailor. B. June 29, 1922 Czestochowa Poland. Tatoo on left arm concentration camp. #1553. Stateless.

Along with the papers and some narrow yellow forms there was a small, chestnut-colored notebook. I picked it up and quickly paged through it, then stopped.

 It was clearly a day planner, not much different than the one I still use. Someone had filled in the spaces with to-do lists and names and addresses in careful, if now somewhat illegible, penmanship. The pages were soft and worn. And in the very center of it, sometime on or long after December 12th, 1915, a small person had scribbled in the days’ spaces with what I suspect was a great deal of focus and intention.

Notebook from the Jews in Northern Minnesota papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries. Photo by Michele Statz.

I suspect this because my day planner, and indeed, most of my research notebooks, feature something quite similar:

Photo by Michele Statz

I sat very still for a moment, realizing that this was the thing I needed to find.

 I don’t know anything about the owner of this planner other than that she or he was an immigrant and more specifically, gauging from the rest of the material in this file, a Jewish refugee. Perhaps this person was one of the individuals listed. He could have been the tailor, or the bookbinder. He might have had the shrapnel scars on his head or a number tattooed on his body.

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 When I read the descriptions on that list it was with sadness, and with a kind of tired anger. It’s fairly safe to think that anyone who lives or studies mobility, displacement, and the frenetic, violent, brazen disenfranchisement of im/migrants and refugees right now is generally pretty angry. Stunned. Tired. Mobilized. Overwhelmed. Committed. Still angry. And of course, anyone paying attention was probably feeling this way long before Trump.

 But when I opened up that day planner, I felt something else. It has taken me months to sit down and write this post, largely because that feeling was in some ways more vulnerable than my (or our) oft-default sadness and anger. I held that day planner and ran my finger along the thoughtfully-scribbled page, and for a moment experienced a marked and almost sacred absence of spatiotemporality, a deep sense of knowing that made me ask: Why is this not under glass? I couldn’t believe I could actually touch something so precious, something that transcended its 100+ age and felt so profoundly familiar. Because after all: Who among us with a small child in her or his life hasn’t done the same? Who hasn’t scrounged in a pocket or bag for some paper, a pen, a phone, a stick of gum—anything to keep little bodies and minds busy—while waiting in line or trying to speak with another adult? Or trying to conduct research?

 Without expecting it, it was at the Immigrant History Research Center that I found a different kind of fuel. Rather than urgency or responsibility, those scribbles surfaced an abiding and sweet, absurd sense of desperation that I totally understood. It was not so much a call to action as it was a quiet affinity, a tiny break that I wish for everyone here.

 So: Maybe start at the archives.

Michele Statz is an anthropologist of law and Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Biobehavioral Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth. Her work explores global youth and public interest immigration advocacy; rural access to justice; and reproductive health rights. She is the co-editor and co-curator of Youth Circulations.

The uncontained violence against unaccompanied Central American minor migrants in the U.S.

Asylum-seeking procedures compound existing traumas unaccompanied children face in the U.S.—and have unintended consequences for service providers.

By Stephanie L. Canizales and Samuel De León

As attention remains on unaccompanied, asylum-seeking children on the border and in federal custody, thousands of children are resettling in counties throughout the U.S. Asylum-seeking children arrive in highest numbers to traditional immigrant gateways like Harris County in Texas and Los Angeles County in California, respectively. It is important to consider how life in the U.S. may reinforce trauma from prior exposure to violence by enacting new forms of violence that compound the suffering of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in the U.S. Recent interviews with legal, health, and education service providers in Harris County, Texas starting in January 2019 elucidate the effects of uncontained violence against unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in the U.S. and suggest priorities in addressing its containment.

Honduran boy playing in Catholic Charities Respite Center crossed with his father in McAllen, Texas and separated under zero-tolerance. Source

Seeking Asylum in Harris County, Texas

In Harris County, service providers recognize the challenge of achieving formal legal, educational, or economic protections when a child’s conditions of migration are silenced through trauma and fear. Matters are made worse when youth are exposed to violence in sponsoring in the U.S., which compounds prior experiences. A Houston-based organization working toward the legal protection of migrant women and girls estimates that 70-75% of their clients experience violence in the U.S. Certainly, this violence can include domestic and sexual violence at the hands of household or community members (see Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez’s Family Secrets for more on this) or gang violence. Equally alarming are the ways in which violence is enacted by formal institutions charged with protecting immigrant families and children and its widespread effects.

As youth move through detention, resettlement shelters, sponsoring households and schools, they also navigate the U.S. immigration system and its bureaucracy. Youth face the outcomes ranging from legal protection to deportation and the various temporary and fragmented statuses in-between. The possibilities of protection for children are narrowing. Indeed, numerous restrictive measures that enact legal violence on youth have been introduced in response to the rise of unaccompanied minor migrants arriving in the U.S., including proposals to mark youth from non-contiguous border countries as immediately removable upon apprehension, redefine the bounds of ‘unaccompanied’ status to exclude children with parents living in the U.S., and allow for the indefinite detention of children, among others. The separation of family units and the deportation of parents without children unwittingly grows the population of unaccompanied minors which federal departments are unprepared to account for, resettle, and reunify with their families. Several months past their July 2018 deadline—the federal government continues to work toward the identification and reunification of families separated through zero-tolerance. Evidently, attempts to make the immigration system more efficient can intensify youths’ exposure to violence.

For example, since 2014, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services scheduled asylum interviews in the order they were received, a policy known as First In, First Out. An Obama-era tactic known as rocket dockets aimed at fast-tracking backlogged applications through the prioritization of unaccompanied children or families with children in response to the ‘surge,’ which presented a challenge for attorneys assembling evidence necessary for asylum. In 2018, the federal government introduced a new tactic—Last In, First Out—as a counter to Last In, Last Out. Referred to as a “legal black hole,” this new strategy of placing the most recent arrivals at the top of the immigration courts’ priority list significantly reduces the amount of time that attorneys have to prepare cases and makes asylum less attainable. According to attorneys and other service providers in Houston, Last In, First Out places earlier-arrived children in limbo, or liminal legality, for longer periods of time.

12-year-old Mayeli Hernandez from Honduras cries as she testifies before Congress in 2014. Source

One of the primary effects of fast tracking is the challenge it creates for attorneys and other stakeholders to serve unaccompanied minors as they are unable to build rapport with children. Some suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and are forced to relive these experiences as attorneys work to “craft the ‘perfect victim,’” as one family counselor described. In addition, they are asked to constantly repeat their story to multiple adult figures as they construct their “paper lives” that appeal to immigration court judges. This is “hard work” for kids, according to a social service advocate, because they are “retraumatized” throughout the process. Another interview participant described court hearings as “a theatre for survivors [because] attorneys and judges want to see kids cry.” The ever-changing policies that govern the fate of children in the U.S. immigration system can induce further violence on immigrant children.

Although we have not yet interviewed children at this stage in our fieldwork, the re-traumatization migrant children experience is evident in conversations with stakeholders who speak of second-hand or vicarious trauma. “Revictimization occurs in all spheres and service providers are not exempt,” an interview participant said. “This work… it’s emotionally draining, especially listening to stories and providing services. It affects you as a person because you wonder, ‘am I doing enough? What am I missing?’” Stakeholders are pressed to learn as much as they can about a child and the conditions of their migration in a short amount of time. Large caseloads desensitize stakeholders to the severity of their cases. Many worry that the structure of asylum application procedures, hearing scheduling policies, and the normalization of violence against children is affecting the health and livelihoods of advocates:

“They work so much even when they are supposed to have days off. They don’t take breaks; they work on weekends. And then you see they talk about cases like they are winning some kind of competition. They talk about rape, human trafficking like they are happy they have a really severe case because they are going to win.”

Case managers and others who deal with the social integration of unaccompanied minors’ in the U.S. agree that children are most injured by legal policies and procedures.

Unaccompanied boy defends himself in court without attorney or caretaker. Source

In Harris County, geography has much to do with this. One paralegal reported, “The kids don’t have rights, especially in Texas”—referring to Texas’ position in the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit, which exacerbates the vulnerability of migrant children legal protection. Importantly, two Texas Immigration Courts—Houston and Arlington—host the largest number of backlogged immigration cases (9048 and 7203 cases, respectively) nationwide, which exacerbates time pressures that contribute to trauma-reinforcement. That many agree that Houston is among the most welcoming cities in the state points to a grim future for many unaccompanied minor migrants seeking asylum in the state.

Containing violence against unaccompanied minor asylum-seekers

Violence against children prompts their migration and moves beyond their individual lives to affect others within their communities and networks and has long-term implications on the development, health, and integration of unaccompanied youth.  Research finds that post migration experiences exacerbate previous trauma and induce toxic stress into the lives of individuals and communities. When experienced by children, and at young ages, violence and trauma can cause or contribute to mental health challenges in adulthood. Thus, we suggest that containing violence against unaccompanied minor migrants should be observed as a public health concern.

Houston residents protest expansion of Southwest Keys facilities in city. Source

There are multiple ways policymakers can address this concern:

1. Prioritize migrant child and adult health, especially in cases of long-term custody;

2. Enforce oversight of federal agencies;

3. Secure legal counsel and timely asylum hearings as access to legal counsel increases chances of protection from 15-73%;

4. Provide wraparound post-release services to children and sponsoring families, with a focus on health, education, and economic stability of households; and

5. Establish trauma-informed procedures for those working in the legal, health, education areas of child resettlement.

As the unaccompanied minor migrant population grows inside and outside of federal facilities, violence is rearing its head.  Failing to contain it promises lasting health, social, economic, and political challenges for generations to come.

Stephanie L. Canizales is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Her book manuscript, Sin Padres Ni Papeles, examines how undocumented and unaccompanied Central American and Mexican youth experience incorporation as they come of age. Her research has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Twitter: @stephcanizales

Samuel De León is an undergraduate student majoring in Political Science and Sociology at Texas A&M University. His research interests are Latinx migration, immigrant integration, race/ethnicity, and Latinxs and the law.

 Twitter: @samdeleon_

Open Letter from Mayab’ Scholars in Diaspora to The United States, Mexican, and Guatemalan governments

[Kaxlan tzij/ Español abajo]

Sign your name here.

We write this letter as Maya Peoples, activists, and scholars who have been historically displaced from our ancestral homelands and countries to publicly denounce the United States, Mexican and Guatemalan governments for their inhumane treatment and oppressive policies toward our people. In particular, we express our outrage against the outright disregard of our Maya children and youth seeking asylum and refuge in the United States. Since December 2018, five Maya children have died under the custody of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security at the U.S.-Mexico border, and one under the custody of the Mexican immigration officials in Mexico City.

Jakelin Caal Maquin (Maya Q’eqchi’ Nation, 7 years old), died of a bacterial infection on December 8. Felipe Gomez Alonzo (Maya Chuj Nation, 8 years old), died from flu complications on Christmas Eve. Juan Leon Gutierrez (Maya Ch’orti’ Nation, 16 years old), died from a brain infection caused by an untreated sinus infection, on April 30,. Wilmer Josue Ramirez ( 2 ½ years-old) from the town of Chiquimula, which is Ch’orti’ Maya territory, died from pneumonia on May 14. The next day, a ten-year-old girl from Guatemala — whose name is not yet known — died at an immigration detention center in Mexico City. Carlos Hernández (Maya Achi Nation, 16 years old), died from influenza on May 20., Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez (Maya Mam Nation, 20 years old), was shot and murdered by a border patrol agent in Texas after crossing the border on May 23, 2018.

The United States, Mexican, and Guatemalan governments’ violent and inhumane treatment of our people resulted in these high profile deaths, but countless number of children suffer violent acts and continue to die as they journey to the United States. As Maya people, we ask ourselves: How many more children must die before the U.S., Mexican, and Guatemalan governments realize that this is a crisis specifically affecting Indigenous children and youth? When will these governments take responsibility for their domestic and international human rights violations that have resulted in these tragic deaths? When will the United States offer humane solutions for Indigenous asylum seekers, given that the conditions they escape are a direct result of historic and ongoing U.S. intervention in our ancestral homelands?

Maya Peoples are the majority in Guatemala. Since the formal end of the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), in which the state engaged in genocide and adopted terrorist tactics to eliminate Indigenous Peoples, we have faced extraordinary challenges due to the fact that by nearly every social, cultural, economic, spiritual, and physical measures our communities and families have been uniquely and negatively impacted. The Guatemalan government, through its implementation of neoliberal economic reforms, has created a humanitarian crisis that in particular, has affected Maya Peoples. The high levels of corruption and impunity by high-ranking officials has contributed to state-sponsored violence and repression, and the lack of funding for social services, hospitals, and education has also contributed to these injustices. In addition, while transnational gangs have become a growing concern, the government’s response to this issue has only worsened conditions by militarizing our lands and territories, targeting our traditional government structures, civil society, criminalizing young people, and leaving crimes against girls and women unpunished. Maya women and children, explicitly Indigenous children, are the most victimized and impacted by these oppressive and violent tactics. 
 
Moreover, it is in our ancestral lands and territories where transnational corporations and extractive industries operate. These extractivist industries have created environmental damage and degradation that has resulted in water contamination that has led thousands to flee. Indigenous leaders fighting for the defense of our ancestral lands and territories, and those who contest and challenge these policies, are criminalized, incarcerated, persecuted, and murdered. In addition, many people have to deal with drug trafficking, gang violence, and extortion, which leaves people with no option other than to sell their land and migrate — seeking refuge in the United States. The impacts of climate change exacerbate the injustices we and our people face in our traditional lands and territories. Many farmers have lost their crops due to a decrease in precipitation and rainfalls, and increased droughts.

As indigenous peoples and nations, we face racism, discrimination, violence and death in our homelands, forcing many of us to flee. However, instead of understanding these conditions, Maya people are met with inhumane treatment, virulent racism, human rights violations, and death at the Guatemala/Mexico and U.S./Mexico borders, all of which constitute a violation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The U.S. Custom and Border Protection Agency has reported that since October of 2018, over 44,000 unaccompanied minors, and over 248,000 family units (parent/caretaker and child) have been apprehended and detained. Considering that Indigenous Peoples are the majority in Guatemala, and that there are 68 distinct indigenous Nations in Mexico, and that Indigenous Peoples are present in other Central American countries, we strongly believe that many of the children and family units coming from these countries, are Indigenous and need distinct migration laws. Tragically, they are being denied the basic human right to ask for and obtain asylum. 
 
The Guatemalan, Mexican and the United States governments must be held accountable for the deaths of our children. Impunity for their deaths is not an option and we demand justice for their families, as well as a humane solution to a crisis that is the direct result of neoliberal economic policies of these countries.

Contrary to society’s erroneous assumptions, as Maya Peoples, activists, and scholars in diaspora, we make important contributions to our respective countries of origin by not only sending remittances that are the bedrock of Central American and Mexican economies, but also paying taxes in the countries we have now made our homes. Therefore, we demand:

• An immediate stop to family separations, and an immediate reunification of children with their parents or caretakers

• The immediate end of the detention of children

• An exhaustive, fair and transparent investigation clarifying the deaths of Maya migrant children

• An investigation and prosecution of officials who have violated Maya children’s human rights

• The resignation of immigration officials in charge of the detention centers where these children died

• The end of contracting privatized detention centers

• The end of inhumane and torture tactics while in detention such as solitary confinement and placing people in “iceboxes” (hieleras)

• Complete medical attention to migrants and asylum seekers

• The complete and full respect of the rights of asylum seekers

• Provision of and access to indigenous and Maya language interpreters to asylum seekers in accordance with Executive — — Order 13166 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in particular Art. 13 

• An immediate stop on detained children being fostered or adopted by U.S. families

• A dialogue with leaders of the Maya diaspora for the development of humane immigration policies

Mayab’ Scholars and Activists in Diaspora:

• Gio B’atz’ (Giovanni Batz). Maya K’iche’ from Los Angeles, CA. PhD in Social Anthropology.

• Floridalma Boj Lopez, Maya K’iche’, Assistant Professor in Sociology, California State University, Los Angeles

• Juanita Cabrera Lopez, Maya Mam Nation, Quetzaltenango & Washington, D.C. 

• Gloria E. Chacón ( Maya Ch’orti’ origin), Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego

• Daniel Hernandez, Wīnak: K‘iche‘, Tz‘utujil, Mam, Kaqchikel, Doctoral Candidate, Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. 

• Jessica Hernandez, Binnizá-Zapotec & Ch’orti Maya, Doctoral Candidate, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington 

• Emil Keme (aka Emilio del Valle Escalante), Maya K’iche, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

• Vicenta Lopez Mateo, Maya Q’anjob’al, MSW Candidate, USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work

• Carla Osorio Veliz, Maya Tzotzil from Los Angeles, CA and Eugene, Oregon. PhD student in Geography at University of Oregon

• Ana Ramirez, Maya Akateka, Doctoral Student, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

• Jesse Ramirez, Maya Akateko, Undergraduate Student, Princeton University

• Emilio Vicente, Maya K’iche’, Immigrant Rights Activist

• Yesenia Pedro Vicente, Maya Q’anjob’al, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Felipe Gomez Alonzo, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez and Jakelin Caal Maquin.

[Kaxlan tzij/ Español]

Carta abierta de académicos y activistas Mayas en la diáspora para los gobiernos de Estado Unidos, México y Guatemala

 Nosotros, los Pueblos Mayas, activistas y académicos que hemos sido históricamente desplazados de nuestras territorios ancestrales y países de origen, denunciamos públicamente a los gobiernos de los Estados Unidos, México y Guatemala por su trato inhumano y políticas opresivas hacia nuestros pueblos. En particular, expresamos nuestra indignación contra el maltrato absoluto de nuestras niñas y nuestros niños, y jóvenes mayas que buscan asilo y refugio político en Estados Unidos. Desde diciembre del 2018, cinco niñas y niños mayas han muerto bajo la custodia del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional de los EE. UU., en la frontera de los EE. UU./México, y uno más, bajo la custodia de los funcionarios de inmigración mexicanos en la Ciudad de México.
 
Jakelin Caal Maquin (nación maya q’eq’chi ’, 7 años de edad), murió de una infección bacterial el 8 de diciembre. Felipe Gómez Alonzo (Nación Maya Chuj, 8 años), murió de complicaciones de gripe en la víspera de Navidad. Juan Leon Gutiérrez (nación maya ch’orti ’, de 16 años de edad), falleció a causa de una infección cerebral causada por la falta de tratamiento a una infección nasal, el 30 de abril. Wilmer Josué Ramírez (2 años y medio) de la ciudad de Chiquimula, que es territorio maya Ch’orti ‘, murió de neumonía el 14 de mayo. Al día siguiente, una niña guatemalteca de diez años, cuyo nombre aún no es conocido, murió en un centro de detención migratoria en la Ciudad de México. Carlos Hernández (nacion maya achi, 16 años), murió de influenza el 20 de mayo. Antes de diciembre, Claudia Patricia Gomez González (nacion maya mam, 20 años) fue asesinada por un agente de la patrulla fronteriza en Texas después de cruzar la frontera el 23 de mayo de 2018.
 
El tratamiento violento e inhumano de los gobiernos de los Estados Unidos, México y Guatemala a nuestra gente ha causado estas muertes de gran repercusión mediática. No son las únicas. Innumerables niños sufren violencias y continúan falleciendo mientras viajan a los Estados Unidos. Como personas mayas, nos preguntamos: ¿cuántas niñas y niños más deben morir antes de que los gobiernos de los Estados Unidos, México y Guatemala se den cuenta de que esta es una crisis que afecta específicamente a los niños y jóvenes Indígenas? ¿Cuándo asumirán estos gobiernos la responsabilidad de sus violaciones nacionales e internacionales a los derechos humanos que han resultado en estas trágicas muertes? ¿Cuándo ofrecerá los Estados Unidos soluciones humanitarias para Indígenas que solicitan asilo político ya que las condiciones sociales de las que mucha gente escapa son el resultado directo de la histórica y continua intervención de los Estados Unidos en nuestros territorios ancestrales?
 
Los pueblos mayas son mayoría en Guatemala. Desde el fin oficial de la Guerra Civil Guatemalteca (1960–1996), en la cual el estado-nación implementó políticas genocidas y adoptó tácticas terroristas para eliminar a los Pueblos Indígenas, hemos enfrentado desafíos extraordinarios debido a que en casi todos los ámbitos sociales, culturales, económicas, espirituales y físicos, nuestras comunidades y familias han sido impactadas de manera particular y negativa. El gobierno de Guatemala, a través de la implementación de reformas económicas neoliberales, ha creado una crisis humanitaria que, específicamente, ha afectado a los pueblos mayas. Los altos niveles de corrupción e impunidad de los funcionarios de alto rango, así como también la falta de fondos para servicios sociales, hospitales y educación han contribuido a la violencia y la represión ejercida por el estado hacia nuestros pueblos. Además, si bien las pandillas transnacionales se han convertido en una creciente preocupación, la respuesta del gobierno a este problema solo ha empeorado las condiciones puesto que al militarizar nuestros territorios ancestrales, se ha buscado desarticular nuestras estructuras gubernamentales tradicionales y a la sociedad civil, criminalizando a los jóvenes y dejando impunes actos de violencia ejercida contra niñas y mujeres en general. Las mujeres y los niños mayas, y en particular las niñas y niños Indígenas, son los más victimizados e impactados por estas tácticas represivas y violentas.
 
Además, es en nuestras tierras y territorios ancestrales donde operan las empresas transnacionales y las industrias extractivistas. Tales industrias han creado daños y degradaciones ambientales que también han resultado en la contaminación del agua, lo cual ha empujado a miles de personas a salir de sus comunidades. Los líderes Indígenas que luchan por la defensa de nuestras tierras y territorios ancestrales, y aquellas y aquellos que disputan y desafían estas políticas extractivistas, son criminalizados, encarcelados, perseguidos y asesinados. Además, muchas personas tienen que lidiar con el tráfico de drogas, la violencia de pandillas y la extorsión, lo que deja a muchas personas sin otra opción que vender sus tierras y emigrar en busca de asilo político en los Estados Unidos. Los impactos del cambio climático profundizan las injusticias que nuestra gente enfrenta en nuestros territorios ancestrales. Muchos agricultores han perdido sus cosechas debido a las inconsistentes precipitaciones, y el aumento las sequías.
 
Como pueblos y naciones Indígenas, enfrentamos el racismo, la discriminación, la violencia y la muerte en nuestras tierras, lo cual obliga a muchos de nosotros a huir. Sin embargo, en lugar de comprender estas condiciones sociales, los mayas reciben un trato inhumano, enfrentan un racismo virulento, violaciones a sus derechos humanos y hasta la muerte en las fronteras de Guatemala / México, y México/ Estados Unidos, todo lo cual constituye una violación de la Declaración de los Derechos de las Naciones Unidas y la de los Pueblos Indígenas (UNDRIP). La Agencia de Protección de Fronteras y Aduanas de los Estados Unidos ha informado que desde octubre del 2018, más de 44,000 menores no acompañados y más de 248,000 familiares (padre/madre y niña/niño, o guardian y niña/niño) han sido detenidos y apresados.[1]Teniendo en cuenta que los Pueblos Indígenas son la mayoría en Guatemala y que existen 68 naciones Indígenas en México, y que los Pueblos Indígenas están presentes en otros países de América Central, creemos firmemente que la mayoría de los niños y las unidades familiares que provienen de estos países son Indígenas y necesitan leyes migratorias particulares. Trágicamente, se les está negando el pleno derecho humano a solicitar y obtener asilo político en Estados Unidos.[2]
 
Los gobiernos de Guatemala, México y los Estados Unidos deben tomar responsabilidad por la muerte de nuestras niñas y niños. La impunidad por su muerte no es una opción, y exigimos justicia para sus familias, así como una solución humana a una crisis que es el resultado directo de las políticas económicas neoliberales de estos países.
 
Contrariamente a erróneas suposiciones de la sociedad dominante, como Pueblos Mayas, activistas y académicos en la diáspora, hacemos importantes contribuciones a nuestros respectivos países de origen no solo enviando remesas que son la base de las economías de América Central y México, sino también pagamos impuestos en los países que en los que nos hemos asentado y hecho nuestros hogares hoy en día. Por lo tanto, exigimos:

• La anulación inmediata de las políticas de separación de familias, y una reunificación inmediata de las niñas y niños con sus padres o guardianes.

• El fin inmediato de la detención de niñas y niños.

• Una investigación exhaustiva, justa y transparente que aclare las muertes de niños migrantes mayas.

• Una investigación y enjuiciamiento de funcionarios que han violado los derechos humanos de las niñas y niños mayas.

• La renuncia inmediata de los funcionarios de inmigración a cargo de los centros de detención donde han fallecido estos niños.

• El fin de contratos a centros de detención privatizados.

• Anular las tácticas inhumanas y de tortura a las personas en detención, como aislamiento solitario, y ubicando a personas en hileras.

• Atención médica completa a migrantes, y personas buscando asilo político.

• El respeto pleno y completo de los derechos de las personas que solicitan asilo político.

• Provisión y acceso a intérpretes en idiomas mayas e Indígenas para personas que solicitan asilo político en conformidad con la Orden Ejecutiva 13166 y la Declaración de las Naciones Unidas sobre los derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas, en particular el artículo 13.

• La suspensión inmediata de leyes temporales que ofrecen poner en adopción a niñas y niños detenidos, con familias estadounidenses.

• Un diálogo con los líderes de la diáspora maya para el desarrollo de políticas de inmigración humanitaria.

Académicos y activistas del Mayab’ en la diáspora:

•  Gio B’atz’ (Giovanni Batz). Maya K’iche’ de Los Angeles, CA. Doctor en Antropologia social.

• Floridalma Boj Lopez, Maya K’iche’, Profesora titular de sociologia, Universidad del estado de California, Los Angeles

• Juanita Cabrera Lopez, Nacion Maya Mam, Quetzaltenango & Washington, D.C. 

• Gloria E. Chacón ( Maya Ch’orti’ origin), Profesora asociada, Universidad de California en San Diego

• Daniel Hernandez, Winaq: K‘iche‘, Tz‘utujil, Mam, Kaqchikel, candidato de doctorado, Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Nueva Zelanda). 

• Jessica Hernandez, Zapotec & Ch’orti Maya, doctoranda en ciencias ambientales y forestales, Escuela de ciencias ambientales y forestales, Universidad de Washington. 

• Emil Keme (aka Emilio del Valle Escalante), Maya K’iche, Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Chapel Hill, EE.UU. 

• Vicenta Lopez Mateo, Maya Q’anjob’al, MSW Candidate, USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work

• Carla Osorio Veliz, Maya Tzotzil de Los Ángeles, CA y Eugene, Oregon. Doctoranda en Geografía en la Universidad de Oregon. 

• Ana Ramirez, Maya Akateka, estudiante de doctorado, Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Chapel Hill, EE.UU. 

• Jesse Ramirez, Maya Akateko, estudiante de grado, Princeton University

• Emilio Vicente, Maya K’iche’, Activista por los derechos de los inmigrantes .

• Yesenia Pedro Vicente, Maya Q’anjob’al, Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Chapel Hill

[1] Ver: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration
[2] Ver:https://www.milenio.com/cultura/cuantos-indigenas-viven-actualmente-en-mexico

Vengeance Drives Trump Immigration Policy

by Angela Stuesse

This year has seen an uptick in retributive ICE arrests.

Movement leaders have been targeted by the US Department of Homeland Security, according to recent reports. Source.

Recently, it came to light that the Trump administration has been pressuring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release immigrant detainees to “sanctuary cities” in order to target the president’s political opposition.

On at least two occasions, the White House pushed ICE to transport detained immigrants across the country and release them in small-to-medium sized municipalities that have refused to cooperate with ICE’s deportation regime. They reportedly proposed to target Democratic strongholds, including and especially House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco.

“It was retaliation, to show them, ‘Your lack of cooperation has impacts,’ ” a Department of Homeland Security official told the Washington Post.

On March 1, 2017, just a month into Trump’s presidency and exactly two weeks after her father and brother had been taken in a raid at her family home in Jackson, Mississippi, Dany Vargas was arrested by ICE following an impassioned speech she gave at a press conference organized by the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. The afternoon before, Vargas rehearsed her speech with me on the phone, hopeful that her family’s story might make a difference.

Retribution as motivator of policy only results in chaos – and calls for more destructive emergency action.

What we couldn’t foresee at that time was that she was to become one of the first in a growing chain of immigrant rights defenders targeted with retaliatory detention and deportation. As the Washington Post reported, high-profile organizers and movement leaders have been detained and deported in New York, Colorado and Washington. Lawsuits alleging the targeting of immigrant leaders have been filed in Washington and Vermont.

Most recently, on April 2, Argentine activist Claudio Rojas, who speaks out in the documentary film “The Infiltrators,” was deported just as the film was beginning its run on the festival circuit.

Documents leaked to a news outlet in San Diego reveal that journalists and social media influencers are also being targeted, in a secret database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. It is used to subject these individuals to additional levels of screening and harassment when they travel abroad or seek reentry to the United States.

The will to enact revenge is also on display in the uptick of community raids on neighborhoods and workplaces. Just days after Vargas’ arrest, a federal judge in Texas confirmed that an ICE raid in Austin, Texas, had been carried out in response to the local sheriff’s adoption of a “sanctuary” policy. Since then, news stories have continued to surface linking community raids to municipalities that adopt “sanctuary” policies to promote community safety and create a more welcoming environment for newcomers.

In March, immigration raids across central North Carolina, the place I call home, targeted the counties of four newly-elected Democratic sheriffs who are refusing to cooperate with ICE, detaining more than 200 community members. The American Civil Liberties Union called it a “retaliatory detention rampage.”

Following the operations, ICE spokesperson Sean Gallagher confirmed, “This is the new normal. … It is the direct conclusion of dangerous policies of not cooperating with ICE,” he told the press. “This forces my officers to go out on the street to conduct more enforcement operations.”

We have long known that President Trump is vengeful in many spheres of his life – his business dealings, his personal life, and even his interactions with members of his own cabinet. We now see his desire for retribution is driving this major policy arena of his administration as well, with disastrous consequences.

Looking forward to the 2020 electoral campaigns, let us push all candidates to present agendas that are well-reasoned, humane, and in the best interest of all. Retribution as motivator of policy only results in chaos – and calls for more destructive emergency action.

A policy driven by vengeance endangers immigrant and non-immigrant communities alike, chills free speech, and, ultimately, erodes our democracy.

This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by the Tribune News Service.

Angela Stuesse is a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author of Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South.

Global Supply Chains of Risk and Desire: Migrant Youths and the Fast Fashion Exchange in Guangzhou, China

By Nellie Chu

In the mega-metropolis of Guangzhou in southern China, millions of migrant youths arrive in the city’s wholesale market for “fast fashion”—to try their luck at becoming bosses of their own labor. Ultimately, however, their participation in the fast-paced market heightens their sense of emotional and financial insecurity, even as they strive to achieve wealth and social mobility.

 In the heart of Guangzhou, China, a multi-storied wholesale market for low-cost fast fashion towers above a line of low-lying buildings. Inside, thousands of stalls cram along narrow hallways. Fast fashion is the “just in time” delivery of trendy and low cost fashion garment and accessories. Transnational supply chains for fast fashion rely on informal labor practices and mass manufacture capabilities in regions across the Global South. Young migrant entrepreneurs operate these stalls, serving clients from Seoul, Moscow, Abu-Dhabi, Mexico City, and Singapore.

Amid this whirlwind of fast-paced buyers, roving carts, and changing styles, millions of hopeful young migrant women in their late teens and early twenties leave their families and homes in the rural regions of China’s interior provinces, such as Sichuan, Human, Guangxi, and Henan. They arrive in this fashion wholesale market in Guangzhou to start their businesses in the hopes of gaining access to the transnational economy of fashion. These women of the post-1980s generation have come of age after Deng Xiaoping’s introduction of market reforms in 1978. Since then, advertising campaigns and mass consumption of multinational brands and fashion luxury items in Chinese cities have spurred these female youths to aspire for femininity, cosmopolitanism, and urbanity as ideals of beauty and womanhood. In contrast to the images of the Iron Girls, symbolic of heavy industry and national strength during the Mao era, young women today disparage peasant livelihoods and factory work, which once served as sources of personal pride and class-based collectivity. Instead, migrant women of this generation strive to become entrepreneurs in the hopes of achieving financial autonomy and secure livelihoods.

With modest amounts of starting capital in hand, these migrants converge upon these market spaces to buy and sell mass volumes of low-cost fast fashions. Fueled by the circulation of foreign and domestic fashion magazines such as Marie-Claire, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, as well as TV shows including Korean dramas and Gossip Girl, migrants borrow images from magazines or websites, and modify them according to what they imagine their consumers desire. Their self-professed claims to consumerist expertise lead them to aspire to become bosses of their own labor, despite limited prior knowledge about design, garment construction, and merchandising. They scour the Internet and exchange ideas through blogs, creating virtual platforms via Wechat, Taobao, and other social media upon which they can expand their clientele. Inspired by the aura of glamour and style, they ascribe beauty and style as conduits of experimentation, and use fashion as an outlet to achieve their dreams of financial independence.

Sample image of a social media platform featuring fast fashion garments and accessories in China.

Sample image of a social media platform featuring fast fashion garments and accessories in China.

Their stories are part of a larger anthropological project that I have conducted since 2010. My ethnographic project follows the lives of Chinese, South Korean, and West African migrants in Guangzhou, who labor to become worldy citizens through their experiences of entrepreneurship. I trace the rhythms of anticipation among these intermediary agents as they move in and out of factories spaces, showrooms, boutiques, and warehouses. Through techniques of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I show how the global supply chains for fast fashion are forged by the continuous de-linking and re-linking of class and labor mobility across trans-regional and temporal scales.

A narrow hallway lined by fashion showrooms in Guangzhou’s wholesale market for trendy, low-cost garments and accessories. Photo credits: Nellie Chu

Despite their aspirations for economic self-reliance, individualistic expression, and social mobility, many of these Chinese women desire a future that remains intimately tied to familial relationships as well as to gendered norms with respect to romantic love, marriage, and motherhood. Indeed, the majority of small-scale businesses in garment wholesale and manufacture within Guangzhou’s fast fashion niche involve partnerships with married couples in the form of shared labor or a mutual pooling of investment capital. Young, unmarried women co-invest with their parents, siblings, close friends, or other unmarried partners. Many youths claim a combination of personal independence, self-fulfillment, and family honor as the primary motivations for engaging in their risky business ventures.  Such claims are well-documented by other anthropologists and observers of China, including Lisa Rofel and Sylvia J. Yanagisako; Xia Zhang; Minhua Ling; and  Jeroen de Kloet and Anthony Fung. In fact, the topic of migrant entrepreneurship has been endorsed and celebrated in popular culture through soap operas, including Legend of Entrepreneurship (Wenzhou Yi Jia Ren) on Chinese state-sponsored television. Through their everyday work lives in the fast fashion sector, migrant youths learn to negotiate their personal aspirations for economic self-reliance with the business of marriage, family, and motherhood.

A migrant saleswoman and a model stand among a crowd of eager onlookers as they anxiously juggle several transactions at a time. Photo credits: Nellie Chu

For example, Anna, a 23-year-old migrant woman from Dongbei, operated a highly successful teeshirt wholesale business in the market in 2011. As our friendship deepened, she recounted how she gained a foothold in Guangzhou’s fashion wholesale industry as a young teenager a decade earlier. Anna began laboring as a wage-worker in a shoe factory in Dongbei, which was operated by a Sichuanese businessman. After she had proven to the boss her willingness to work, she encouraged him to enroll her in a shoe design program in Sichuan. She stated, “When I requested this from my boss, I promised him that I would improve his business. And I did. Initially, he had no idea that I had so much drive and ambition. He merely saw me as a young girl – innocent and unmotivated. He didn’t know that I had a tireless ambition.”

Anna spent several months in the design program before leaving Dongbei for Guangzhou. At that time, transnational migrants from Korea, Japan, and Nigeria swarmed upon the fashion scene in Guangzhou in order to establish trading and manufacturing networks. As a newly arrived migrant, Anna fell in love an older Korean businessman who operated a shoe wholesale outlet near the railway station in the eastern part of the city. Their romance lasted for about eight years, during which Anna learned and perfected the skills necessary for running her own fashion wholesale business. Their relationship, however, was eventually mired by distrust and even jealousy between them. She elaborated,

Over the years, I had saved up vast amounts of money from our business without his knowledge. I did this because I had to support my parents and me. I knew that he never believed in me…that I could possibly out-succeed him. The years that I had saved up money on my own, he would spend it all away. After our relationship ended, I used my money to start my own business. Years later, after he realized that I had become more successful than he, he begged for me to return to him. At that point, it was too late.

Anna’s rise to entrepreneurial success as a young migrant woman involved a romantic and business partnership with her former lover. Her narrative impressed me not only because of the incredible drive and persistence she displayed as she strove to accomplish her entrepreneurial dreams, but also because of the subtle power dynamics that underlie her encounters with businessmen in positions of authority. Fully aware of her relatively vulnerable position as a young woman, she followed in these men’s footsteps in order to gain the skills and knowledge necessary for running a fashion enterprise. She knew, however, that to out compete them, she had to emotionally distance herself from them.  

Anna’s story reveals the entanglements of entrepreneurial risk and intimate desires, particularly among couples who share the responsibilities of running their own businesses. In China, the risks of losing one’s business are almost as certain as the risks of failed marriages and relationships. The highly competitive business environment in Guangzhou, where profits among small-scale businesses quickly come and go, heightens the sense of emotional and financial insecurity that market participants face in their efforts to achieve wealth and financial independence. In Anna’s case, struggling migrant entrepreneurs like herself sometimes cannot differentiate between business competitors and collaborators. Furthermore, these tensions reveal underlying gender inequalities. Bonds of trust with powerful men are thus difficult to bridge and sustain among migrant women like Anna, who has spent most of her life struggling to achieve financial independence.

A young customer takes a break from the hustle that often characterizes this fashion market. Photo credits: Nellie Chu

Nellie Chu is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China. She has published in Chinoiresie, Modern Asian Studies, Culture, Theory, and Critique, and the Journal of Modern Craft.  

“Lo Que Nos Une”: Refugee Youth and Integration in Costa Rica

by Caitlin E. Fouratt

Through digital storytelling, refugee youth in Costa Rica challenge xenophobia and assert that, for migrant and refugee youth, “what unites us” are common experiences of isolation and discrimination.

Over the last 30 years, Costa Rica has been the primary destination for economic migrants within Central America. However, in the past five years, the country has seen a dramatic increase in asylum seekers. Asylum applications grew from just under 1,000 per year in 2012 to 500 per month in 2017. On paper, Costa Rican law welcomes refugees. Asylum seekers are not detained, have a right to a work permit, and can attend public school while their cases are decided. In practice, however, long delays create a social and economic limbo, while xenophobia isolates and ostracizes asylum seekers.

Here, I share the digital narratives of asylum-seeking youth in Costa Rica, where I have conducted research since 2016 alongside a refugee youth association. These narratives reveal how young people encounter delays, isolation, and financial pressures from their families. So too, they problematize divisions of “deserving” refugees and “undeserving” economic migrants. In doing so, they highlight what unites both migrant and refugee youth in the face of difficult transitions to life in Costa Rica.

Digital Storytelling Methodology & Ethnography

As a method, digital storytelling builds on traditions of participatory research, adapting testimonio and oral history practices to new digital media. The process includes sharing stories, developing scripts, storyboarding, production and editing. In collaboration with two undergraduate students from CSU-Long Beach, a colleague from CSU-Northridge, I worked with five young people to develop digital narratives about their experiences. We concluded the week with a screening and discussion of the videos with the rest of the youth association.

Disruptions

According to participants, the decision to migrate was largely out of their control. Peter, who left El Salvador when he was 16 years old, explained: “Well, the decision was made. I didn’t want to come here but it was one night when we sat down to talk, and both of them my mom and dad got serious and said that even though I didn’t want to, I had to come here. And the decision was made.”

Three days later, he and his mother snuck out of the house at one in morning to catch a bus to Costa Rica. He emphasized how conflicted he felt about leaving – not wanting to leave behind family and friends while also recognizing the danger he was in because of the gangs.

Like Peter, many asylum-seeking youths see migration to Costa Rica as one of a series of disruptions to their daily lives that begin long before migration. Almost all of the Salvadorans I interviewed had been explicitly threatened by maras. Prior to migration, they risked their safety by crossing into rival gang territories to work, go to school, or visit relatives. One young man finished his last two years of high school from home because it became unsafe for him to attend his school in a rival gang territory. In this context, crossing international borders to migrate to Costa Rica seemed uneventful. When asked about the journey, Peter responded, “Eh, it was normal.” Still, the contrast between the confinement by internal borders within El Salvador and life in Costa Rica is striking. Alex’s video Historias Invisibles evokes both this contrast and the grief youth feel when leaving behind loved ones.

Family Tensions

Families choose Costa Rica as a destination for a number of reasons. For Salvadorans, the journey to Costa Rica is much cheaper and faster (36 hours) than attempting to make it to the US. Because Costa Rica received tens of thousands of Salvadoran refugees in the 1980s, many already have relatives established there. However, delays in the asylum process contribute to new tensions within family networks, as delayed applications mean delayed work permits. Asylum seekers become almost completely dependent on relatives who are often struggling financially themselves.  

21-year-old Juan Carlos talked about conflicts with his aunt, who had urged his parents to come to Costa Rica. In close living quarters with 8 family members, and only his aunt and uncle with regular employment, frustrations mounted. Juan Carlos felt enormous pressure to work rather than pursue a university degree, even though that had been a major goal of migrating. Staying late at the workshop to avoid spending time with his cousins, he explained, “Lately there’ve been a lot of problems. I mean, sometimes I fight with my cousins about nothing, or sometimes my aunt causes problems because of money.”

These dynamics and family conflict may be exacerbated because Salvadoran asylum seekers often arrive as a family, meaning more economic pressure given the number of relatives to house and feed. Whereas, according to NGO and government officials, Colombians and Venezuelans often arrive in a chain, with one or two members arriving, establishing themselves, and then sending for other family members.  

Isolation

For young people, family responsibilities isolate them from their Costa Rican peers. For example, one of the NGO staff attributed the absence of young women in the workshop to gendered expectations for them to help at home and care for younger siblings. With little financial support, many asylum seekers begin their lives in Costa Rica in marginal urban neighborhoods already populated by immigrants. Peter, for example, notes in his video that his barrio is called Managuita, or little Managua, for its large immigrant population. Such places often lack access to quality services and institutions and are seen as insecure and unsafe.

Delays in schooling also isolate asylum-seeking youth from their Costa Rican peers. Asylum applicants have temporary legal status, but until they complete the process, they are unable to access public services or otherwise integrate. For example, at 14 years old, Diego’s parents tried to enroll him in high school but were told he missed the matriculation date and had to submit official transcripts. Refugees are legally exempt from such requirements, but local school officials often refuse to waive them for asylum seekers. Even when enrolled, Salvadoran students face other challenges, including adapting to a new educational system given difficulties with the language, vocabulary, and accents in Costa Rica.

Connections

Despite such barriers, young people continue to foster connections in Costa Rica. The youth association and their sponsoring NGO developed and led a public campaign called “Lo Que Nos Une” (“What Unites Us”) to bring awareness to xenophobia and the connections between refugees and Costa Ricans. However, the main impact of the campaign for the young people themselves was to reinforce connections among youth within the organization. Indeed, many of the young people involved turned to the association because of their exclusion from the Costa Rican educational system and job market. None of the young people interviewed professed to have close friendships with Costa Ricans, other than two Costa Ricans who form part of the youth association.

Most avoided referring to themselves as refugees or asylum seekers. Instead, they referred to themselves as migrants. The explicit use of the term migrant, instead of refugee, serves to highlight these young people’s connections to Nicaraguan economic migrants, who also face discrimination, difficulties in finding employment, and exclusion from the education system.  Peter argued that is logical for migrant and refugee youth to form deeper bonds because they have had similar experiences that most Costa Ricans cannot relate to, including homesickness and feeling like outsiders.

These digital stories illustrate the exclusion and xenophobia that young asylum seekers must navigate. Several group members commented that, despite having lived in Costa Rica for five years or more, they felt out of place and permanently homesick. In the context of their social isolation, exclusion from formal education, and the job market, these young people felt they were still suspended in a moment of transition, connected to each other and to their new home by experiences of exclusion and uncertainty.

About the author

Caitlin E. Fouratt is assistant professor of International Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Her work has examined transnational families and shifting immigration policies within Central America. Her current research focuses on the experiences of asylum seekers in Costa Rica and state responses to increasing asylum applications. Her work has appeared in PoLAR, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and others.