Alexander Sebastianus
Writing Response: “Growing Up in the Shadows: the Developmental Implications of
Unauthorized Status”
Never to considered citizenship statuses, I am quite surprised and astonished by the significant number of Unauthorized immigrants in America and their struggle living abroad with their family, as the article Growing Up in the Shadows: The Developmental Implications of unauthorized Status mentions, that “Unauthorized immigrants account for one-fourth of all immigrants in the United States, yet dominate public perceptions and are at the heart of a policy impulse.”
I can say I am privileged to be able to have a home and place where I am in comfort and feel safe. Many families and individuals are situated in places they feel not belonged or have a harder time to make a living. This is why many people in different parts of the world migrates and hope to make a better living for their families and future generations.
Unfortunately our world revolves around a system where it holds statuses of where a person belongs and lives. This complicates the process and restricts peoples freedoms and rights of where they belong and what services they are eligible for.
The article Growing Up in the Shadows :The Developmental Implications of
Unauthorized Status by the Harvard Educational Review. explains how million of young people in the United States lives in limbo status, without formal documentation. Many of these people are brought here as children and spent most of their formative years in the United States in neighborhoods, attending schools, and internalizing a sense of themselves as young
Americans. Some were brought by their parents as babies across the Southern border. Others were toddlers who came when their parents began their education. Still others flew across the globe on tourist visas in mid-childhood. Some came as teens when their families sought asylum but aged out as the legalization process took over a decade to unfold.
As children, none made the decision to break national policies. All came to suffer the consequences of their parents’ choices, America’s broken immigration system and its policy makers’ stalemate.Based on the article it shows that there is an increasingly points to negative developmental consequences of parental unauthorized status across all stages of childhood, the authors explore possible options for policies and programs that could mitigate these risks, and propose ways to achieve this goal within the framework of proposed comprehensive immigration reform provisions.
First the article founds that the parent’s unauthorized status is associated with lower levels of cognitive development and educational progress for the child, and offers several mechanisms that may explain these negative effects. The most damaging effects seem to come from parental detention or removal, which impacts the economic and psychological well-being of the child. This results to disruption in attachment and interruptions in schooling, which in turn harms learning and emotional
development.The psychological distress experienced by unauthorized parents is also associated with negative developmental effects for their children. Even more, children of unauthorized parents appear less likely to be enrolled in public benefit programs for which they are eligible.
