A Mixed-Status Family is an American Family
In the contemporary immigration debate, the idea of the “American Family” is commonly weaponized, evoked in arguments by Republican politicians in favor of stricter and harsher policies. The American Family, as the narrative goes, must be protected and defended by nativist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant policies that restrict the rights and protections held by the undocumented community. As immigration policy has been a key issue within the Democratic primary––and will surely be a contentious issue in the general election––it is critical for Democrats to debunk the baseless and underinclusive vignette of the American Family that Republicans fabricate when discussing immigration policy. In order for the immigration debate to become fairer and more honest, we must first reject that American Family mythos. Undocumented immigrants aren’t only the neighbors, family friends, or acquaintances of members of the American Family—they are active members of the American Family.
Implicit in the structure of the so-called American Family are two distinct populations within American society: U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants. Each population is presented as a perfectly-cut square box, wholly separate from the other population. Mixed-status families serve as a powerful reminder of just how blurred the lines separating those two populations are.
According to the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare at the Immigration Law Center of Minnesota, a mixed-status family is defined as “a family with members of varying legal status.” These families may consist of members with any combination of legal status: the quintessential mixed-status family consists of undocumented parents and U.S.-born children, but that is certainly not the only variety of mixed-status family.
Republicans have established in their political arguments that to fight on behalf of undocumented immigrants is to actively fight against the interests and well-being of United States citizens. An example of the constructed dichotomy between these two populations is an exchange during a debate between the two candidates in the 2018 U.S. Senate election in Texas. When asked about his stance on immigration reform during a 2018 debate—specifically in regard to support for people who qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status—Senator Ted Cruz stated, “[My opponent] over and over seems to be fighting for illegal immigrants by supporting [immigration reform]; [he] is forgetting about millions of Americans. You know, Americans are dreamers also.”
Aside from existing as something that must be protected from undocumented immigrants, the American Family that Republicans create is a unit that is fundamentally supplanted and robbed by progressive policies such as sanctuary cities, legal aid for immigrants undergoing immigration hearings, and access to medical services for undocumented residents. There is a sophisticated ideology behind this school of thought, which is exemplified in an article published by The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kay Cole James, entitled “It’s Time for the Senate to Put Americans and Their Dreams First.” Regarding the 2018 government shutdown over border wall funding, she writes, “Schumer and his liberal colleagues seem to prefer asking Americans to defer their dreams for those of illegals. Right now, there’s a teenage girl in Appalachia who dreams of a great education but sits in a school that isn’t delivering. A factory worker who dreams of regaining work that went overseas earlier this decade. An urban mom who dreams of health care for her son but has to wait in an overcrowded emergency room. These are dreamers all. And they’re Americans.” She uses similar language to Senator Ted Cruz, invoking the word “dreamers,” a term used to describe individuals who qualified and participated in the DACA program.
Donald Trump’s “America First” anti-immigration policies is defined, in part, by an argument based on that same constructed dichotomy. His rhetoric surrounding the immigration debate is indelibly shaped by the assumptions underlying this dichotomy of citizens and non-citizens. When speaking about the goals he aims to achieve through his hard-line immigration policies in his first State of the Union speech, Trump said, “Immigrant communities will also be helped by immigration policies that focus on the best interests of American workers and American families.” After identifying American Families as his priority, he subsequently calls for stricter enforcement policies and an elevated presence of border security agents. In the same breath, Trump goes on to justify this hard-line approach towards immigration when he says, “As president of the United States, my highest loyalty, my greatest compassion, my constant concern is for America’s children… I want our youth to grow up to achieve great things.”
This rhetoric creates a dynamic in which the American Families and American Children that he references are threatened by and distant from the undocumented population in the United States. This line of thought, aside from being profoundly xenophobic, racist, and factless, ignores the reality of populations that are located somewhere in between these two polar opposites of the spectrum.
When a politician references American Families and American Children, whom are they referencing? Which families and children are sketched into their portrait of the Americans whom they are protecting and valuing in the immigration debate?
In total, there are four million U.S.-born children who have undocumented parents, directly challenging the premise of a large separation between American citizens and undocumented immigrants. This also refutes the portrait many politicians create of whom American Families and American Children are. Around six million U.S. born children live with an undocumented family member, which could be a parent or a sibling. For a Republican party that touts a veneration for “family values” and the sanctity of American citizenship, these four million U.S. citizen children represent a paradoxical reality that undermines their binary citizenship world.
According to recent research by the University of Southern California’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration and the Center of American Progress, there are nearly 2.7 million Texans who have at least one undocumented family member living with them. Among those 2.7 million people in Texas, 1.4 million are U.S. citizens––including 1 million children. In California, there are 4.66 million U.S. citizens with at least one undocumented family member. This number includes 1.96 million children as well. Taking these mixed status families into account, along with undocumented families all over the country, we must begin to reimagine the portrait of the American Family.
Although Texas is among the states with the highest immigrant population in the country, mixed-status families also make up a significant part of the entire country’s population. Between seven and eight percent of all children in the United States have at least one undocumented parent. Nine percent of families in the United States with children are mixed-status. These statistics suggest that nearly one in every ten American child has an undocumented parent and that nearly one in every ten American family with children is a mixed-status one.
Thirty-nine percent of parents in mixed-status families are both undocumented while forty-one percent of parents in these families are composed of one U.S. citizen and one undocumented immigrant. The varying citizenship and legal statuses within individual families are largely attributed to the fluctuation of immigration policies, as changing patterns of hardline and lenient policies affect immigrants’ propensities to stay in the United States or to return to their home country.
For example, provisions within the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 allowed immigrants to obtain legal status once they arrived in the United States. In more recent years, the increased militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border has compelled many immigrants who come as seasonal workers for agricultural, construction, and other forms of menial labor to stay in the United States despite lacking the proper documentation.
By redefining the American Family, Democrats will be able to not only reframe the conservation surround immigrant populations, but also elucidate issues faced by the undocumented and mixed-status family population.
In an interview about the prevalence of mixed-status families in California and the issues surrounding their community, Jesus Martinez, Chair of the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative, sums up this point succinctly by saying, “The fluctuations in immigration policies mean that family members can easily have different legal statuses depending on when they arrived in the U.S. Undocumented immigrants who once traveled between the U.S. and Mexico may not be raising families full-time in the United States and giving birth to children who are citizens. U.S-born children are going to be able to be eligible for every type of program imaginable, so within the family there’s going to be this unequal access to services, to education, and medical care. We see those families all the time.”
Besides unequal access to important services, there has been a lot of research done on the harmful impact of immigration policy on the children within mixed-status families. Several immigration, globalization, and education scholars argue that some policymakers have not considered the effects and potential harm posed to children in mixed-status families when crafting immigration policy targeted towards undocumented immigrants. New York University professor Hirozaku Yoshikawa writes in her book Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and their Children that “4 million [citizen] children share the same citizenship with the children of the native-born. Policy debates raging about undocumented immigrants in the United States fail to consider the effect on children of all policies targeting the undocumented.”
There are two critical problems faced by mixed-status families that are created directly by American immigration policy. The fear of deportation impacts all members of mixed-status families––including the U.S. citizen members. Additionally, children in mixed-status families who are U.S. citizens do not realize the full benefits of their citizenship due to fearing interaction with government officials. These problems also encapsulate the structural barriers created by particularly harsh immigration policies.
Current immigration policies that contribute to these problems within the mixed-status community are prevalent in the recently revamped immigration policies of President Trump’s presidency. In the beginning of his administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received new directives regarding deportation procedures that dismissed an Obama-era directive that placed priority on deporting gang members and felons over unauthorized immigrants without a criminal record. The Trump administration then expressed intent to use “expedited removal” of undocumented immigrants at a larger capacity than previous administrations, which allows the government to deport immigrants who have been in the United States under a certain period of time without allowing them to have their day in court.
Other hard-line immigration policies under the current administration include the training of local and state law enforcement officers to work as de facto immigration officers with the capacity to turn individuals over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the denial of federal aid to “sanctuary cities” that protect undocumented and mixed-status families by limiting their cooperation with immigration enforcement agencies.
These issues serve as daunting reminders of realities that are seldom acknowledged in the current debate surrounding immigration. How are Democrats going to talk about the consequences of deportation in undocumented and mixed-status families if the debate is still framed around a mythical American Family put in danger by undocumented immigrants?
With notable differences but also important similarities to the undocumented population, the mixed-status population is a powerful example of the complex reality of the American Family. American children in schools have parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles who are undocumented. A good number of them are undocumented themselves. It is incredibly important to support mixed status and undocumented families and remember their realities as we craft an immigration debate moving forward. The American Family is of no particular legal status.