GOP targets children in its renewed attack on immigrants

By Jose Miguel Leyva

Tribune News Service

The GOP is continuing its campaign against immigrants.

Republican House members recently attached an amendment to a Homeland Security funding bill threatening President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program.

Though the president has vowed to veto any legislation that endangers his immigration reforms, Republicans have pushed forward with this new attack using what seems to be their new favorite weapon: defunding. Even if this tactic has had minimal results in the past, the GOP still finds it easier to threaten and cajole than to actually discuss and legislate effective policy.

Insulating children

Certainly, Obama’s executive order to extend deferred action for undocumented children last November has been unpopular with conservatives. However, finding a way to insulate the children of undocumented immigrants from the decisions of their parents — and the penalties of immigration laws they had no ability to consciously violate — has long been a bipartisan effort.

The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act upon which Obama’s actions were modeled was sponsored by senators on both sides of the aisle. But it stagnated in Congress for years, held back by hard-line conservatives. The Obama administration’s original executive order in 2012 was a less than ideal way to accomplish immigration reform and bypass the obstacle this minority posed. Now those on the far right are taking control, and legislators willing to protect students and children seem to have become the minority.

The real tragedy here is that undocumented immigrant children and families, who only recently began to breathe sighs of relief thanks to Obama’s reforms, are once again being placed in the line of fire for the sake of political grandstanding.

Underpaid labor

Once again, immigrants are painted as the cause of much economic strife, even as the U.S. economy has depended on their underpaid labor. Young individuals and children who have almost never known life outside the United States are being targeted for deportation to countries that are pretty much as foreign to them as to anyone born here.

Our immigration system has been broken for too long. The last thing we need is to allow it to backslide into failure.

Jose Miguel Leyva is a freelance writer and journalist living in El Paso, Texas. He wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine.