What happens when one fine morning there’s a loud knock on your door and the very next moment, you find yourself handcuffed with a rucksack heaped on your back heading towards your ‘own’ country? What happens when the country you were born and bred in and which gave you your entire identity for the past 18 years refuses to accept you any more because your parents were illegal immigrants?
The fate of the estimated hundreds of children now hangs in the balance as the crackdown of illegal migrants in the United States of America gains momentum. Adolescents and young adults born and bred in the US but owing their origins to Latin America nations are confronting the gruesome prospect of being deported to their original nation, one that they have never ever been to.
Most of these children don’t have a clue to what’s happening around them. These kids are mostly high school graduates but the sin of the parents to enter the US illegally is one huge obstacle in their path to glory. The kids speak and think like Americans but fail to secure a job or college education for their illegal status in the country. And in now increasingly common instances, they are facing deportation.
Things look bleak at the moment with debates raging wild all across the US on this highly sensitive issue. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill is striving hard to pass a motion to secure American citizenship for these technically illegal children whereas pro-deportation activists argue that should these children be given special treatment and allowed to stay in the US, they would provide stiff and undeserved competition to the local talents.
Names such as Fiorella Maza, Ana Cecilia Gonzalez Vigil and Marie Gonzalez would hardly mean anything to an outsider but these are the kids who have had to either leave their dreams behind in the States or had to split away from their families to maintain their US citizenship status. True, what their parents did was illegal and ought to be punished, but where do these innocent children come into the equation? These children are normal like any other in any part of the world and they need to be understood and helped to have their dreams realized.
Image Source: Classical Values
Source: USA Today
