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The author’s parents, Pier Luigi and Elda (center), with her Italian grandparents, Teresa and Alfredo, in Italy, 1970. Courtesy photo |
CommentsSuffer the Little Children
An introspective on immigration and childhood
By Monica CaldariPublished: June 22, 2010
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On May 19 President Obama and the first lady hosted Mexican President Felipe Calderon at the White House. During a
camera-laden session with schoolchildren, a young Hispanic girl shared with Mrs. Obama her mother’s anxiety about immigration policies that send away those without “papers.” It was a moment when time seemed to stand still. The child’s confusion and fear were evident. Her family unit was in danger. Similar to children living in a war zone, their traumatic experiences are based on an unstable existence. How do these children perceive their world when faced with the prospect of upheaval, loss, and drastic changes?
Before the 1920s, the United States was a haven for immigrants. There were no clear and specific immigration laws, which meant no one was considered illegal.
There were, however, many popular and respected voices who openly declared their disdain and mistrust of specific populations who were growing in larger proportion to others.
Peter Schrag’s WSJ.com essay, “Untangling Immigration’s Double Helix,” relays Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts regarding the influx of Germans to Pennsylvania as “a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion.” Franklin went on to say, “Even our Government will become precarious.” Sound familiar? Schrag also reminds us that Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts declared that southern Italians were “generally rustic and of the lowest type of the Italians as to character and intelligence.”
History glorifies the arrivals to Ellis Island who came in search of the American Dream, who capitalized on and reinvented American society and culture. They influenced the direction of our free nation as it developed and progressed. Intentionally or not, their diverse cultures, histories, and languages embellished the landscape and created a new kind of American.
Today’s immigrants are not so different. The majority come from a different part of the world but are creating similar controversy and political divisions. They are Latin Americans: Mexicans and Central Americans who arrive in the supposed “land of opportunity” seeking an escape from their own countries’ poverty, misery, and political strife. It has been argued that the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement exacerbated the influx of Mexicans and other Central Americans into the U.S. by undercutting agricultural prices and production in those countries that had relied so heavily on subsistence through their agricultural practices.
Those most directly affected by immigration choices and policies are children of immigrants. According to Marjorie Faulstich Orellana’s piece, “Stigmatizing Children: The True Cost of Arizona’s Immigration Law” in The Huffington Post, “One in five children in the U.S. today is the child of an immigrant. Many are U.S. citizens. Most have grown up here.”
I am one of those children. As a first generation immigrant (Puerto Rican mother and Italian father), I clearly remember my own arrival to the land of opportunity. While we were not escaping poverty and injustice, my parents were ultimately seeking a better existence for themselves and their children. They came in search of economic security and advancement. I was the 7-year-old daughter of two highly educated professionals with accents. As I learned the language (without an accent), I remember being in public places and refusing to acknowledge my mother when she spoke to me in Spanish. I was embarrassed and ashamed. Even her accent made me cringe.
As I look back on this today, I am filled with remorse for the child who felt unaccepted in her own country (Puerto Ricans are legal U.S. citizens). If I felt this way, with no real fear of being taken away by authorities, it begs us all to question how children of immigrants, documented or not, feel when they know their safety and well-being is on shaky ground.
These young children, who were born here or immigrated at an early age, will be the future of our nation. When they see their parents harassed, or hear of friends’ families being taken away, how will this affect the way they perceive our government’s laws and the officials who are sworn to protect them? Many teachers, guidance counselors, and social workers are witnessing children’s anxieties and are unsure how to dispel their fears.
What I do know is this: We are a country made up of immigrants, some who arrived earlier than others, but diverse in our cultural, historical, and experiential backgrounds nonetheless. The policy of immigration reform is one which obviously needs to be acknowledged and worked on, but the pressing concern, the real heart of the matter, is how future generations will collaborate and respect one another based on our present situation. Will fear and mistrust of foreigners dominate our landscape, or will we finally open our eyes to see that the future is staring us in the face waiting to see what our next steps will be?
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