Immigration: On a Fixed Mindset, Will it Scar Children Forever?
Our president has a fixed mindset, since the onset of his presidency he has been fixated about all immigrants as he stated during his campaign to become president, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.” He added: “They’re sending people that have a lot of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
One of his main goals has been to halt illegal immigration at any price, he has cut programs that help immigrants such as DACA which was a program that allows some individuals who were brought to the United States before they were sixteen years old to request deferred action of removal for two years. He also ended the program, Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for nationals of several countries; he then reduced the refugee admissions. These are the lowest numbers since it was established in 1980. Immigrants form ten counties have TPS, currently there are 252,000 TPS recipients, most of them are from El Salvador and Honduras both of these TPS countries are due to expire January 2020. President Trump wants to end the status instead of allowing them to be renewed. Many immigrants who are applying for asylum are being denied. President Trump claims that any individual who enters this country illegally will be denied asylum, which is an illegal move on his part as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (INA), migrants can claim asylum even if they do not enter the country legally.
The immigration problem we are faced with needs to be discussed and needs to be resolved. All leaders of all nations must be included in this discussion because this is all nations problem not just Mexico’s or South American countries. It’s imperative that President Trump see’s this issue with a growth mindset. I do not pretend to know anything about government but I’m sure there are other ways this can be solved. President Trump with a growth mindset can become the hero nut just for this nation but all nations if he uses his intelligence to find better solutions rather than been fixated with “my way or the highway,” I know it is not easy but we have to start somewhere.
The United States immigration laws must be upheld but children should not be the victims of separation from their parents or family. Has anyone stopped to think of the long-term damage of separating children from their parents? It leaves lifelong scars. The article published in The Pacific Standard, states that:
“There are immediate health impacts of a prolonged border detention — and those effects can last a lifetime. First, there are the immediate health effects of a prolonged border detention, an experience defined by tent cities and enclosed, spartan pens in military bases in several Southwestern U.S. states. The absence of these children’s parents — which researchers would classify as an “adverse childhood experience” (ACE) — is a major catalyst for toxic stress, one that “causes disruption in the way the neural synapses connect with each other, in their brain architecture,” as American Academy of Pediatrics President Colleen Kraft told Vox on Monday. Kraft continued: “The foundational piece of their health and development is the relationship with their parent. When you take that away, you take away the basic tenets of pediatric health.”
Immigrant families are being separated by the immigration authorities. Parents are being incarcerated because they came into the United States illegally. A crime they were willing to commit so their children can have a better life and away from the violence from their home country. Children are being treated like criminals and are being put into cages in the desert where temperatures can reach up to 105 degrees.
Americans who support children being separated remind us that children are taken from parents who commit crimes in the United States. The difference is these children are placed with social services to be placed in foster homes, shelters or placed with relatives. Why shouldn’t immigrant children have something that equates to what social services are providing and not locking them in cages where they are also being separated from their parents.
On a personal experience I can relate to what some of the parents are going through by being separated from their families. Some of my siblings were born in the US because my father used to take my mother to a clinic in the United States. On doing so my father was creating the stepping stones for my siblings and me (7 in total) would have better opportunities in the United States if we ever decide to permanently move here. One day a relative that resided in the US came to visit us in Mexico, he told my dad he can alleviate the financial burden by taking any of us to the United States. To my biggest surprise when we were asked who wanted to go, my six year old sister jumped and said “I’ll go.” This broke my heart, as she would always be with me, she was my little helper and companion, it was very difficult for me to understand why she wanted to leave me. It took a long time to recover from this loss. It was a forever loss. The growth mindset that helped me get out of this profound depression was me telling myself, “this is not going to help the rest of your siblings, get up freshen up and put a happy face for the rest, they still need you.” When my sister grew up and we had finally migrated to the US as a family, she denied being related to us and said she did not know who we were. She would called the sibling that were not born in the US “wetbacks,” “illegal,” “go back to your country” and so on. More than forty years later she still does not recognize us as being her family we are simply strangers. Perhaps her mindset was a fixed mindset at the time she was taken, if she was not she certainly became a fixed mindset person, because in her view she is perfect and superior than others, as Professor Dweck describes the mindsets this is one of the main characteristics of a fixed mindset. On the contrary to the fixed mindset a person with the growth mindset will be understanding, for people with this mindset is about forgiving. They use their experiences to move on. Just like I did; I have learned to forgive my sister and have accepted the fact that I lost her when she was separated by choice from us. This to me proves that separating children from their family does leave many scars that may never be healed because of the mindsets we carry and are unwilling to change. It may fit our purposes at that particular time in our lives.
According to an article written in the Pacific Standard the average time spent in a detention center is 400 days, this is according to the American Civil Liberties Union. There are children as young as thirteen months old in these places, many of them are missing. The whereabouts of approximately 1,488 is unknown. These children went missing after they were placed with sponsors, the government lost track of them.
Where are the missing children? Where did they go? I can’t stop wondering, if they were killed or died and is being concealed so no one will ever know? Or were they victims of human trafficking? Or being used as workers by their “sponsors?” These questions have not been answered by anyone. Unless these questions are answered by the American government or these children are returned to their families. The United States will be labeled as “murderous criminal with power” by families and society alike.
The government is trying to remove the burden of guilt from themselves by making this horror of separating families into, “protecting our borders from criminals and it is a matter of national security.” We need to get out of the fixed mindset that all immigrants are bad people and realize that there are immigrants who do come for a better life.
Mr. Trump, our President has forgotten that this nation was founded by immigrants and that is what makes us a great nation. Did the Native American approved his family to migrate to this country when his great grandfather, Friedrich Trump migrated. Was he a labeled a murderer? Why did he come to this country? Better opportunities? Or did he come to kill Native Americans so he could rob them of their land?
We must work together as a nation to find a better ways to resolve the immigration chaos that we are living in now especially, since President Trump took office, but not at the expense of children and families. We need to change our mindset that immigrants are criminals, murderers, rapists and that they take American jobs. We know this is not true because most Americans will not work in the fields, many rather add to the welfare lines. We are punishing ninety nine percent of migrants because a one percent of criminals. We have many of those here in the United States home grown terrorists, who are United States citizens who kill rampantly, look at the one happening today at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, it was not a immigrant who killed at least four and wounded fourteen maybe more civilians, it was an American Citizen.
I urge our lawmakers and citizens alike to join forces and utilize our growth mindset to change our policies being set forth by our President. Lets stop the horrors that the most vulnerable victims, children are experiencing, by not separating them from their parents.
