(im)migration

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The Real Death Valley: The Untold Story of Mass Graves and Migrant Deaths in South Texas

 

Video: Graphic Warning

A Weather Channel Original Documentary

Producer’s Note, by Solly Granatstein

In “The Real Death Valley,” we tell the story of Fernando Palomo, a 22-year-old Salvadoran who happened to be a talented artist, and who was beaten within a centimeter of his life when he refused to design a gang’s tattoos. He and his older brother, like tens of thousands of others, fled their homeland and journeyed north to what they saw as the relative safety of the United States. They made it across the Rio Grande into Texas, but that hardly put an end to their troubles.

 

– Click through to read more –

 

Source: soboco.org

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Beyond the border: the US’s deadly immigration crisis

 

Texas has become the deadliest state in the US for undocumented immigrants. This four-part series from the Guardian and The Texas Observer looks at the lives affected by the humanitarian crisis.

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In Brooks County alone, the bodies of at least 294 people who died trying to hike around the Border Patrol checkpoint were recovered from February 2011 to March 2014.

 

Source: www.theguardian.com

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To Fix the Child Refugee Crisis, End the War on Drugs

America’s anti-drug policies didn’t stop the production of narcotics, they just shifted it overseas.

Source: www.businessweek.com

 

The war on drugs is really a war on people. There can not be a war on inanimate objects. 

 

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How Failure to Fix Immigration Affects a Young Girl — Again

Outside the chambers and hallways of the Capitol, the immigration reform debate isn’t political. It’s personal. When Washington, D.C. resident Cindy Monge saw the images of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern border it hit home. Eight years ago she was one of them.

Source: abcnews.go.com

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Torn Apart: Immigration and the American Family

 

We are a compassionate nation. We look back with sadness and horror at parents and children separated in centuries past, and then turn our heads when it happens in our day. The separation of parents and children is not confined to history.

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American history is replete with stories of parents and children forever separated. Slaves were sold as individuals and families were wrenched apart to suit their owner’s needs. The tide of 19th century European immigration brought children to America on their own or parents without their kids hoping that family members would one day follow.

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Immigration is surely a political issue, but it is also a parenting and family issue. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, approximately 17 million people live in families with an undocumented family member. About 4.5 million children who were born in the US have at least one undocumented parent.

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Academics from Harvard and NYU wrote in the New York Times, “The extraordinary acceleration in the dismantling of these families, part of the government’s efforts to meet an annual quota of about 400,000 deportations, has had devastating results. Having a parent ripped away permanently, without warning, is one of the most devastating and traumatic experiences in human development.”

 

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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Powerful Cartoon Asks Americans To Consider The Potential Of The Children At The Border

Invoking well-known undocumented immigrant and Pulitzer Prize winner Jose Antonio Vargas who came to the U.S. as a child, the cartoon wonders about what could be.

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

 

I will start asking people, “What kind of refugee was your family?”

 

  • War refugee
  • Economic refugee
  • Political refugee
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Rush to Deport Could Trample Asylum Claims – The Boston Globe

HARLINGEN, Texas — The first time her aunt in Mexico took her out at night, the young teenager was told they were headed to a party. It was no party. “It was trafficking people, drug dealers,” she recalled. “I just saw a lot of guys. They had guns. I was in shock. I was shaking. The more I was saying no, the more they treated me badly.”

Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart: America’s Immigration Crisis: Kid Edition

 

Republicans always claim America is the best nation on Earth; to their chagrin, child refugees fleeing violence and poverty in Latin America are listening.

Source: www.hulu.com

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57,000 Possible Cases of Asylum

 

Mr. Obama called the surge in children from Central America an “actual humanitarian crisis on the border,” and said it “only underscores the need to drop the politics and fix our immigration system once and for all.”

 

Source: www.nytimes.com

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The U.S. Roots of the Central American Immigrant Influx

Before dying of pneumonia at a Guatemala hospital in late May, the recently deported 21-year-old Gustavo Antonio Vásquez Chaj told his family that the U.S. Border Patrol had kept him, at some point, wet, stripped of a layer of clothing, and in a cold cell during several days in detention.
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The tragic journey of Vásquez Chaj and Tucux Chiché is one story among many of how harmful U.S. political and economic policies in Latin America violently intersect with a hardening and brutal system of U.S. immigration control. In their case, the young men’s voyage was first and foremost one of necessity rather than of choice. Vásquez Chaj and Tucux Chiché were economic migrants fleeing a country of wreck and ruin that decades of harmful U.S. foreign and economic policies have helped to bring about.

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It is indisputable that the United States shares significant responsibility for the genocide of tens of thousands of Guatemalans—mainly indigenous Mayans, including members of Gustavo and Maximiliano’s community, who comprised a majority of the (at least) 150,000 killed in the 1980s alone.
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Source: nacla.org