478. Sheer Cruelty

 

In 2018, 18.3 million people lived in mixed-status families in the United States. A mixed-status family has at least one member who is an undocumented immigrant. Hundreds of thousands of young DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients live in these mixed-status households with one or both parents undocumented as well as younger siblings who are citizens. Everyone in these households is subject to tremendous stress at the best of times, living in poverty, having to keep their precarious status a secret, and living with the knowledge that one of their loved ones could be deported at any time. Even when the citizen children are old enough to sponsor family members there are roadblocks put in their way; and family members who are citizens are frequently denied benefits for which they are eligible.

Soon after Donald Trump took office as President he announced his intention to do away with the DACA program, established by President Obama in 2012 as a stopgap since Congress had been unable to pass the DREAM Act, which would have offered a path to citizenship to millions of hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding undocumented Americans. At one point he floated a deal to DACA recipients that he would offer them a path to citizenship in exchange for getting the funding he wanted to build the massive border wall between the U.S. and Mexico . To their credit, DACA recipients refused to throw their even more vulnerable fellow-immigrants under the bus in return for their own security. Now DACA is before the U.S. Supreme Court and hundreds of thousands of young people are waiting anxiously for the decision that is due any day now.

Now add the COVID-19 pandemic into this nightmarish situation. Here are two diabolical moves that the administration has made:

First: According to the Migration Policy Institute, there are 15.4  million people in mixed-status families who have been denied their federal stimulus checks. Joint filers cannot receive a stimulus check under the CARES Act if one spouse does not have a Social Security Number (SSN). Stimulus checks are even being denied to immigrants who have Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) instead of SSNs. According to the Center for Migration Studies, “ITIN filers pay over $9 billion in withheld payroll taxes annually.” Several lawsuits have been filed challenging this CATCH-22, on the grounds that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to exclude someone from financial assistance because of who they married. Meanwhile millions of hardworking people are being denied emergency help.

Lorena Espinoza de Piña, ready for work as a registered nurse

Second: US Foreign-Born Workers by Status and State, and the Global Pandemic, a May, 2020 report from the Center for Migration Studies, shows how many immigrants are putting their lives on the line as essential workers at this time. The report shows that there is a larger percentage of immigrants than US-born Americans working in essential jobs. It lists by state and occupation the numbers of immigrants doing essential work, and breaks it down by immigration status. You can see for yourself how many undocumented Americans are risking their lives taking care of our elderly and sick, cleaning our buildings, and growing and processing our food, among many other essential occupations.

President Trump and his senior adviser Stephen Miller are itching to crack down even further on immigration, taking advantage of COVID-19 fears to make sweeping changes to the U.S. immigration system. In this climate, will the U.S. Supreme Court vote to strike down DACA? According to the Center for American Progress, more than 200,000 DACA recipients alone are working on the front lines of the coronavirus response. Public health experts have made the case to the Court that their deportation would be catastrophic for the nation at this time, vital as they are to the fight against the coronavirus. Of course, it would be catastrophic for them as well and for their families: sheer cruelty.

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427. T is for Temporary Status

My theme for this year’s Blogging from A-to-Z Challenge is Migrants, Refugees, and Exiles. Today, the letter T is for temporary status.

When you have status, you have standing, some kind of place in society. There is so much talk about the 11 million “illegal” immigrants in the United States, who have no status and must keep their heads down at all times, lest the authorities catch up with them. There are those with legal status, 37 million strong, who have papers to show when they are stopped at checkpoints. The administration wishes they hadn’t been let in, but now that they’re here it’s best to keep them on edge, rattled, remind them that they’re here on sufferance, show them what will happen to them if they step out of line. And then there are those people who are neither authorized not unauthorized, but who have some kind of temporary status that may or may not be renewed, depending.

There are 1.42 million temporary foreign workers in the U.S. who do not have immigrant status, under 10 different visa classifications. (In another nasty move recently, the Trump Administration has moved to stop granting work permits for the nearly 100,000 spouses of the more-than-400,000 people who are working in the U.S. on hi-tech H1-B visas, and have applied for Green Card status.) There are some 700,000 young people with DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status, which means that they do not have legal status or a path to citizenship, but can obtain work authorization, defer deportation proceedings for two years, and then renew their status—at least they could, until September 5, 2017, when President Trump announced the phase-out of the program. Now it’s tied up in the courts—on again, off again.

And then there are the approximately 417,000 people with TPS (Temporary Protected Status), from ten different nations where there have been life-threatening political upheavals or natural disasters. Since September 2017, President Trump has been trying to terminate six of them. (Listen to this podcast by immigrant and union leader Jaime Contreras.) Further, there are between 840 and 3600 Liberians with DED (Deferred Enforced Deportation), a dispensation President Trump announced would expire at the end of March, 2019 but which has now been extended to March 31, 2020, when it is set to terminate once and for all.

That’s more than two and a half million people, many of whom have been living in the United States for decades, who are living in extended limbo, their hearts in their mouths, not knowing whether they are going to be able to stay or whether they will have to go. How does one make plans, living like this? Get a college education, marry, put a downpayment on a house? Everything is on hold, all the time. Status: Unprotected.

This is exactly how this administration wants it for all immigrants and would-be immigrants. None of us must have a chance to settle or start feeling secure. We must think of ourselves as sojourners, living here on borrowed time.

Jaime Contreras (Photo: Darrow Montgomery)

The targets of these policies and their allies and advocates are resisting these high-handed dictats, getting them blocked in the courts, holding them at bay, winning small victories that postpone or push back the expiration dates of their residency status. However, because the current government has made no secret of the fact that its ultimate goal involves a drastic and permanent reduction in the number of immigrants to this country—legal, illegal, or otherwise, these efforts can only be holding operations. Even immigrants with U.S. citizenship cannot rest easy. According to the American Friends Service Committee “a new denaturalization task force has begun working to strip citizenship from naturalized U.S citizens”(Ibe). Until Trump and his cronies are no longer in power, we all have temporary status, never knowing when the knock on the door will come to send us on our final, one-way, journey.

That was a gloomy conclusion! Here’s an alternate one:

At the end of the delightful title story in Gish Jen’s collection, Who’s Irish?, an Irish American grandmother befriends and opens her home to a Chinese American grandmother after a falling out with her daughter and son-in-law. After a long, hard working life in the U.S. running a restaurant, the now-widowed Chinese grandmother, also the narrator of the story, still doesn’t feel at home in her adopted country. But for the first time, living with Bess, she starts feeling a sense of belonging. Bess’ deadbeat sons keep asking when she is going home, “but Bess tell them, Get lost.

She’s a permanent resident, say Bess. She isn’t going anywhere.
. . .I don’t know how Bess Shea learn to use her words, but sometimes I hear what she say a long time later.
Permanent resident. Not going anywhere. Over and over I hear it, the voice of Bess.”

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