An educational program is helping some of the U.S. citizen children who have essentially been deported along with their undocumented immigrant parents back to Mexico cope with a new language, a new school system, and a new home. Researchers call these children “los invisibles,” the “invisible ones,” because lacking fluency in Spanish, they are often held back, or leave school altogether out of frustration. In Tijuana, educators are attempting to help:
At 20 de Noviembre Elementary, for example, roughly one-tenth of the school's 700 students were born in the U.S. Administrators and teachers here have embraced kids like Anthony David Martinez, a skinny 9-year-old who recently arrived from Barstow, Calif. That's where he was born.
Anthony could have stayed in California because he's a U.S. citizen, but his parents are not. They were forced to return to Mexico and didn't want to split up the family. [...]
Anthony's fourth-grade teacher says his Spanish is "a work in progress," but he has learned how to read and write in Spanish fairly quickly. [...] He's still not used to saying the name of his school in English — 20 November. "It's kind of weird," he chuckles.
At 20 de Noviembre, children like Anthony are not segregated or put in some corner of the school. They're paired with native Spanish-speakers and they get lots of one-on-one tutoring to build their vocabulary and grammar in Spanish. To keep them from feeling frustrated or isolated, they're allowed to mingle with other English-speaking kids during the day so it's not uncommon to hear English at recess or lunch.
According to the American Immigration Council, over four million U.S. citizen children under the age of 18 have at least one parent who is undocumented, and an estimated 5,000 U.S. citizen children are in foster care following the detainment or deportation of a parent. Immigrant parents facing deportation proceedings are oftentimes forced to make a heart-wrenching decision: leave their children in the care of relatives or others in the U.S., or tear them from their country so that at least the family won’t get torn apart. For the parents who have been forced to decide the latter, there is 20 de Noviembre.
Researchers say this is the model for how schools should treat and teach the half million U.S.-born students who've enrolled throughout Mexico. It has become more urgent because their numbers are growing, says Amparo Lopez, a state coordinator with Baja California's Department of Education.
This school year alone, she says, more than 12,000 students from all parts of the U.S. enrolled in schools across the state. That's on top of the 58,000 who were already here. Only the border state of Chihuahua has received more.
Lopez says the surge began in 2006 with a sharp increase in deportations, followed by even bigger increases during the Obama administration. And it wasn't just because people were being deported. Many Mexican immigrants working illegally in the U.S. returned on their own because they lost their job during the recession.
Today, many of these families are struggling in Mexico, and their kids are feeling the stress in school. In Tijuana, school officials have been quick to identify those who need the most help. Recent arrivals are invited to meet with tutors and counselors at the school district's offices at least once a week.
While the program helps with tutoring, “counselors say these kids need a lot more than that. Their self-esteem is really low when they arrive. Most are deeply sad about leaving their homes in the U.S. and schools don't always know how to help them.” Even here in the U.S., children are skipping school out of fear of ICE raids or coming home and discovering their moms and dads are gone. No child, regardless of their legal status, deserves that. But sadly, that’s the reality of our outdated immigration system and those in power who refuse to reform it.