It’s often the love they feel for their families that leads people to migrate. “Our situation doesn’t give us the luxury to live together and live well; it can’t be done,” Mexican immigrant Ramón Castillo explained to filmmaker Heather Courtney in the 2001 documentary Los Trabajadores (The Workers). Unable to make ends meet in Mexico, Castillo left his wife and two daughters behind to find work in Austin, Texas. He sent most of the money he earned back home to pay for his daughters’ schooling, in the hopes that they could become professionals and have a better future. “You either live well, or you live together. If you live together, you don’t live well, because there isn’t enough to live on. If you live well, you need to leave your family to make good money, so they can live well.”4
How can you tell who’s undocumented?
The United States has no national ID card for its citizens, because so many people see national ID cards as an infringement of privacy rights and civil liberties. This means there is no easy way for the authorities, or anyone else, to figure out who’s an immigrant and who’s not.
We can’t distinguish a native-born U.S. citizen from an immigrant by their physical appearance or accent, since native-born citizens have diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, just as immigrants do. The “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment makes it unconstitutional to question people just because of the way they look or talk.5
In reality, law enforcement officers make judgments about whether someone is an immigrant based on their own prejudices, but it can be difficult to prove that they’ve engaged in racial profiling. The Supreme Court made it still more difficult in 1996 by ruling that to challenge an arrest, you need “to show that the government declined to prosecute similarly situated suspects of other races.”6 Still, the profiling of immigrants has at times been challenged successfully. In July 2005, an immigration judge in Arizona halted the deportation of four high school students arrested during a school trip to Niagara Falls, ruling that Border Patrol agents had illegally singled them out for questioning on the basis of their appearance. The four students were from Mexico, but had lived in the United States since they were children.7 In May 2013 a federal judge found that the Sheriff’s Office in Arizona’s Maricopa County had used racial profiling in making traffic stops of Latinos. The judge ordered notoriously anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his officers to undergo training to prevent further unlawful detentions, and required the county to compensate people who were detained in violation of the court order.8
If questioned by government officials, immigrants, even those who have become U.S. citizens, have the burden of proving they are in the United States legally. Native-born citizens, by contrast, cannot be required to show identification proving their status. It’s a federal crime to lie to an agent, but if you decline to tell agents that you were born outside the United States, then unless they have evidence, the burden of proof remains on them to demonstrate that you lack legal status.9 However, it can be extremely difficult to stay silent during questioning and to resist coercion; most of the time agents are experienced at getting people to admit that they are not native-born citizens. Even if you don’t reveal your place of birth, they can detain you based on suspicion for several weeks.
Do undocumented people live in fear?
Out-of-status immigrants don’t necessarily live in a state of permanent, intense fear, because it’s too stressful to live that way, but many do experience ongoing, heightened levels of anxiety. Spouses or other relatives left caring for the home may worry daily about whether family breadwinners will fail to come home that evening because they have been detained at work. Children may be anxious and unable to concentrate at school because they are afraid their parents will be arrested and deported.
When immigration raids occur, they often set off a wave of terror within the affected communities and beyond. People become afraid to venture into the streets, even to shop for food or take their children to school. The kids who do make it to class spend the day worrying about losing their parents. In April 2006 immigration agents arrested 1,200 workers across the country in a single day as part of an investigation into the pallet company IFCO Systems; at the same time there were separate raids in Florida towns for immigrants who had been ordered deported. The sweeps sparked what Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center director Cheryl Little called “the worst climate of fear … in more than two decades.”
“People are scared to even go in the streets now, fearing they are going to be picked up, questioned,” said Dennis D. Grant, the Jamaican-American senior pastor of Restoration Ministries in Margate and Miramar, Florida. “They are in a state of panic right now.”10
The same thing happened in early January 2016, when the federal government began rounding up Central American refugee women and children whose petitions for asylum had been denied. Rumors about the operation spread quickly, creating alarm even in communities where no raids had yet taken place. Nancy Hiemstra, a professor of migration studies at Stony Brook University, described how such raids set back immigrants’ efforts to integrate into society. Noting the impact on one undocumented resident, the mother of a friend of her own children, Hiemstra wrote: “All fall she had been walking to a nearby church three times a week for English lessons, and proudly testing out her new language skills on neighbors. But now, she’s too scared to continue.” The woman told Hiemstra: “My husband says I shouldn’t even go to the kids’ school, not even for the concert coming up; we can’t risk it.”11
Are undocumented immigrants victims of crime?
Some people believe out-of-status immigrants are especially likely to commit crimes. That’s a myth that multiple studies have proven false.12 In reality, undocumented immigrants are disproportionately likely to be victims.
A 2009 survey the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) carried out among 500 low-income Latinos in five areas of the South (including U.S. citizens and both documented and undocumented immigrants) found that the undocumented had “become prime targets for robbery and other crimes.” Criminals know the victims “are unlikely to go to the police,” the SPLC researchers wrote, and they know that “because most undocumented immigrants can’t open bank accounts … they are more likely than others to be carrying large sums of cash.” Muggers see immigrants as “walking ATMs,” according to an immigrant rights advocate working in New Orleans.13
Immigrant victims of domestic violence also have a low rate of seeking help from authorities. A survey conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit immigrant service agency Ayuda in 1993 noted that 83 percent of the battered immigrants interviewed did not contact law enforcement agencies about their abuse. One-fifth of the women surveyed reported that abusive partners had threatened them with deportation or refusal to file immigration papers.14 A 2009 study by the Family Violence Prevention Fund had similar findings. Though intimate partner violence “is not more prevalent, and, in fact, is probably less prevalent, among immigrant and refugee population groups,” the study said, factors like fear of deportation and discrimination “make it especially difficult for victims in these populations to seek or obtain help.”15
Immigrants are also targeted in hate crimes. For example, in Farmingville, Long Island (New York), in 2000 two white men carried out a premeditated racist attack against two undocumented Mexican day laborers, beating them nearly to death. Because of the violence of the assault, and the publicity that accompanied it, the attackers were sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for attempted murder. In November 2008 Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero was stabbed to death just a few miles away in Patchogue, Long Island, during an attack by a group of seven teens who had been regularly assaulting immigrants—a practice they called “beaner hopping.” The teens received prison sentences ranging from six to twenty-five years.16
Attacks on immigrants seem to have jumped dramatically from 2004 to 2012, at a time of stepped-up anti-immigrant rhetoric from politicians and the media. The government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimated that although the overall number of hate crimes remained about the