Student Feature: Indigenous People and Immigration in the US
Highland Support Project loves all of the support we receive from students. This piece was written by VCU Work Study student Zack Hendi.
There are patterns between the ways that the United States has addressed outsider populations, particularly between its treatment of Native Americans in the mid 20th century and immigrants today. Colonists have pushed Native Americans off of their land and pressured them to assimilate to a eurocentric lifestyle since the beginning of our country, and currently, the criminalization of the immigration system is breaking up families and deporting millions of immigrants. Furthermore, Indigenous populations in other countries that are attempting to migrate to the United States are especially facing challenges, as explained by the United Nations Permanent Forum’s indigenous peoples’ issues:
”Indigenous peoples worldwide are vulnerable to a range of social and economic factors that affect their human rights. They tend to lack access to education, and live on lands that are vulnerable to natural disasters, with inadequate or no sanitation, and poor or no access to health services, all of which contribute to lower productivity and incomes among indigenous populations.”
When people are immigrating from Indigenous or otherwise impoverished communities, they are often fleeing extenuating circumstances that force them to resort to illegal means of entering a country. According to ABC News, this has introduced a plethora of complications like detainees not being allowed to pay their bond while being held. As a result, the United States is now home to the biggest immigration detention system on the globe. Detainees face conditions set by ICE with no outside input or oversight.
This large-scale detention system has led to mass family separation. The Department of Homeland Security affirmed that approximately 256,000 people were deported by ICE in 2018 while almost 170,000 of them were detained by Border and Customs Protection and further processed by ICE(Immigration and Customs Enforcement). While offspring of immigrants may legally reside in the United States, their undocumented parents are prone to deportation. Often, the fathers will stay back home and send money to their forcefully separated families. ABC news goes as far as affirming,”another 1,768 were separated from their parents between October 2016 and February 2018, bringing the total number of separated kids to more than 4,100.”
This is not the first time the United States has split marginalized families apart. While immigrant families are often split up at the border, or permanently ripped apart when parents are deported and children are left behind, Native American families have historically been divided through a cruel boarding school system. These boarding schools would abduct Native American children into boarding schools where they were indoctrinated with “Americanized” beliefs. In an article posted by Native Words Native Warriors, it clearly states,”At boarding schools, Indian children were separated from their families and cultural ways for long periods, sometimes four or more years. The children were forced to cut their hair and give up their traditional clothing. They had to give up their meaningful Native names and take English ones. They were not only taught to speak English, but were punished for speaking their own languages.” These analogous circumstances highlight an ongoing ideology of “othering” those who are different and pushing them out of society. Even today, most of the population living within the United States is living on historically Indigenous lands stolen by the genocide of Native Americans who lived on this continent long before the arrival of settler colonialists.
Featured photo is from NBC News.