The Unborn Children of Immigrants Face Persecution Because of Race, Not Immigration Status

by Lauren Boyer

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It recently hit me how different my experience is from my Spanish-speaking neighbors. In high school, I had a friend whose parents had braved the journey from Latin America, and I loved seeing how she cared for her family; her sweet but firm demeanor, her generosity as she shared ethnic food that felt like a delicious discovery to me, but had really been there all along, hiding behind the words of another language on a menu I’d overlooked. Her culture’s beauty dazzled me, and I wondered how so many people of her ethnicity had been around, yet away from me all my life. 

This past summer I was conscious of my friend’s rigidness about ICE, and being wary of Trump myself, I felt for her. But it wasn’t as real to me as it should have been. I didn’t realize, because it’s so rarely framed this way, that immigration is a topic drenched in racism. 

This realization hit me when my neighbor mentioned making her son get identification because she was worried his appearance — his race, that is — would get him snatched and sent away to a land that wasn’t his own. Her words echoed the accounts I’d read from black people who feared that government officials might lock them up for no reason other than their race, that they “looked” like another man, a criminal. It was the way that man dressed that made strangers cautious they said…but really it was the color of his skin.

The racism that fuels the mistreatment of immigrants extends to their unborn children. It is horrendously dangerous to be an unborn child carried across the border. But the danger should end there. There is no reason for that life to continue to be threatened while in “the land of the free.” 

The problem expands beyond slurs and assumptions. Like American prisons, ICE detainment centers have a history of miscarriages caused by neglect. A pregnant Tennessee woman was deported after pleading for medical attention and then living with her stillborn child inside of her for three days while in ICE custody. How horrible. How utterly dehumanizing. It’s not a question of How does this happen in America? Rather, it’s a question of How often? Far too frequently, it would appear. The 2018 decision by the Trump administration which allows pregnant women to be detained by ICE only gives these thorns more room to plant their roots. 

Homeland security responded to the Tennessee woman’s claims. While they denied her allegations of mistreatment, their description of her as an “Illegal Alien with History of Child Abuse and Wanted for Homicide” was both an irrelevant and demeaning distraction from her claims. 

The way to protect our country is not by attacking and criminalizing those who appreciate it. It is by ensuring that our citizens and officials continue to uphold and apply the values and safety that attract so many individuals to our country. No beacon wills itself into the shadows. No lighthouse hides from certain boats. To recognize the value of humane treatment is to recognize it for all of humanity, indiscriminate and undisturbed. 

Reports of ICE forcing sterilization make the threat even clearer. People are not unwanted because they are “illegal.” It is a matter of rejecting a group of people as “other” and therefore allowing ourselves to treat them as less than human. It’s not about being foreign. How can it be, in a land of immigrants? The Statue of Liberty, our own beacon, should remind us that along with liberty comes the pursuit of happiness which was shared by immigrants so many years ago as they crossed the sea to Ellis Island. They remembered the Mayflower, and that ship’s Pilgrims recalled Columbus. Immigration is this country’s complicated legacy. It is attached to the prospect of freedom itself in the modern world as well as the historic past. It is complex because it has been abused, but not by who we fear. Columbus began the dehumanization of indigenous Americans that continues today, yet we act like the Mexicans crossing the border have the same history of oppressing other groups that white people do. 

It’s also important to recognize that immigrants do not steal our jobs. Globalization, which includes immigration, is central to the economy that America profits from. If anything, it is our postcolonial duty to allow third world countries to share in the profits of their oppression. Giving immigrants jobs in America not only strengthens the American economy but helps restore the people whose ancestors we impoverished. 

It is racism to mistreat, dehumanize, and discriminate against “dreamers” and the unborn children of immigrants. By exposing them to the same abuses that their parents face (under the blanket excuse of being “illegal aliens”), the children must pay for their parents’ mistakes, not because they committed those offences, but because they are guilty of the color of their skin, the likeness between their features and the ones of the people whose genes they carry. Despite having an American birth, they are denied the American rights that should follow. They are not deported because they made the choice to break immigration law. They are deported because they look like an immigrant. They bear resemblance to the people the government wants to push out. They are of that group, but they are also American and human. They should have the rights of humankind and of Americans.

Conservatives and opponents of immigration often frame the issue as a threat to the American people. This is not because immigrants are likely to be serial killers fleeing the justice system, but because some Americans are scared their jobs will be taken by another country’s impoverished people. The fewer people, the more money it seems. Often, they propose birth tourism as a threat. Essentially, birth tourism occurs when foreign parents secure American citizenship (and its benefits) for their children by planning to give birth in the United States. But most immigration is not a product of birth tourism, and the birth tourism that occurs is unlikely to come from the racial groups targeted by immigration law. Instead of fearing other races, ethnicities, and cultures, we should feel blessed to partake in them. My ancestors on one side came to America before the Revolutionary War. Those from the other side came through Ellis Island. As proud as I am of both sides, I sometimes wish I was closer to the place they came from. How beautiful it is to be in America and remain connected to the history of your family and to know all the food that they ate and all the clothes that they wore. America is a global force because it is a country of immigrants, whose various family histories and cultural values have become intertwined and now extend their reach to touch as far as ships will sail and airplanes will fly. Why on earth would we ever want to weaken this strong, vibrant tapestry?