We Need Comprehensive and Commonsense Immigration Reform

Deportation affects families, children, and communities as a whole, and policymakers need to pass comprehensive reform to lessen the negative impacts on undocumented and documented immigrants alike.

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Idea of the Day

Idea of the Day

What happens to children when their parents are deported? How do these deportations, now more numerous than ever, affect families and the communities in which they live? This report looks at how immigration enforcement shapes family life in the United States, both among immigrant and mixed-status families, and in their wider communities.

Even as the United States has failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the past decade, it has increasingly taken a hardline stance on immigration enforcement, particularly in targeting unauthorized immigrants living in the country.

The number of immigrants removed has steadily risen, from close to 190,000 deportations in 2001 to close to 400,000 per year in the past four years. Even more troubling, in the first six months of 2011 alone, more than 46,000 parents of U.S. citizen children were deported.

With more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country, these deportations affect a wide swath of the population, including the undocumented and the citizen alike.

For more on this topic, please see:

How Today’s Immigration Enforcement Policies Impact Children, Families, and Communities by Joanna Dreby

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