Don't forget to bring your visa to school

"Three decades after the Supreme Court ruled that immigration violations cannot be used as a basis to deny children equal access to a public school education, one in five school districts in New York State is routinely requiring a child’s immigration papers as a prerequisite to enrollment, or asking parents for information that only lawful immigrants can provide."

- New York Times, 7/22/10

The United States has the greatest number of immigrants worldwide, and almost one quarter of all youth are of immigrant origin. The stories of these individuals cannot be translated in simple terms, immigration is a family affair that webs with complex and sometimes traumatic turns. Children are the veritable fruit borne of immigration, says Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco, NYU professors of Immigration. Children are often the driving force behind a parent's choice to immigrate, they take on responsibilities in the new country, and all too often are tragically separated from their families.

"What are the consequences of this systemic wreckage on the lives of children?"

The reality of Immigration in the United States is a crisis. Suarez-Orozco, in their Huffington Post blog, define the system as 'broken.' And Carola Suarez-Orozco goes on to describe the kind of psychological affects this broken system has on the lives of children. In the United States there are 11 or 12 million undocumented immigrants, the sheer proportion of this number elucidates a great breach in our system.

"They unmask a policy architecture that is at once misaligned with the realities of global migration and plagued by unclear, contradictory, and unrealistic objectives. The result is an immigration system largely irrelevant to any rational labor market objectives, the integrity of the family, the vicissitudes of labor and business, and the requirements of citizenship and social cohesion in the 21st Century."

The issue of immigration has for too long been steeped with misinformation and irrelevance. The fact that children are potentially being deprived of their right to education is unconstitutional. In anticipation of Federal Immigration Reform many States have passed their own initiatives; some of these, like the Visa requirement in schools in NY state are a perpetuation of racial profiling and discrimination. Rather than providing the necessary continuity of schooling, children without proper papers are continuously plagued with fear; Fear of family separation, and the unease of a watchful eye at school.

The immigration debate is one that must be talked about in classrooms. Children and teachers need to be prepared to face and unpack the reality of immigration today. Almost one quarter (16 million) of youth in the U.S. are of immigrant origin - And it is predicted that over 1 third of youth in 2040 will be of immigrant households (Suarez-Orozco). So, how are we fitting this reality into the picture? Both our schools and policy need dramatic restructuring.