Immigrant Families

Immigrant Families Although visiting a new place can be frightening, imagine having to move to a completely different country in hopes of starting a better life. This is what many immigrants do with their families without realizing how greatly it will impact them. They are also unaware of how much they will struggle in a new culture that they, for the most part, know nothing about; making it difficult for them to find resources that are willing to help them, especially right now with the current political climate. Countless innocent people are being impacted by the current immigration laws: fortunately, organizations such as Northwest Seasonal Workers and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are attempting to make a difference
There can be major repercussions that come along with deporting a member of an immigrant family; one of them being their children being taken away from them. If an immigrant parent is deported and has children that are U.S. citizens, the child is not allowed to leave with the parent; they are to stay in the States and are put into foster care. An estimate of about two hundred thousand parents were deported between 2010 and 2012, leaving five thousand children in the foster care system (Nazario). In other words, undocumented parents are forced to leave their children in the States alone to be kept in the system or to possibly be adopted, thus effectively giving up their parental rights. This is an issue because even though they have already been caught, many try and are able to return. In trying to return, they are once again risking their lives by coming into the country in dangerous ways, such as through the desert or through the Rio Grande. Of course there are many families that get deported, but there are also families that have been here for most of their lives and have not been caught. So , those children with immigrant parents tend to be more motivated. Generally speaking, “first generation children function at... higher levels” than an average american-born child
Although Northwest is not an association specifically for immigrant families; they have provided many things to this community such as “medical care, food, legal advice and more” (Northwest Seasonal). They are a non-profit organization that also does not take government funding, whose mission it is to help underpaid seasonal and service workers. Once a month they hold events for a specific need in the community. They get doctors, lawyers, and community members together to go and help at these events for free. The most popular event is the legal counseling. Many immigrant families who can not afford a lawyer attend one or more of these events in order to be able to present their legal case to an immigration lawyer in hopes of being told that they qualify for their legal residency to stay in the