Foreword

Human Rights for Undocumented Students and

Their Families
M ARY C. WATERS
Harvard University
Despite attempts at reform by both Presidents Bush and Obama, Congress
has failed to deal with what most Americans recognize to be a deeply flawed
immigration system. Currently, more than eleven million people live in the
United States without legal authorization. These immigrants have been forming families, working, buying homes, sending their children to school, attending church, playing sports, watching televisionin short, they have been
integrating into American society. Yet they can be deported at any time, must
work under the table or with false papers, and are not eligible for nonemergency health care or almost any government services, with the exception of
K12 education. These undocumented immigrants experience many violations of the human rights laid out in the UNs (1948) Universal Declaration
of Human Rights: the right of families to stay together (Article 16), the right
to be treated equally before the law (Article 7), the right to work and to be
paid fairly (Article 23), the right to political participation (Article 21), and the
right to social services to provide a decent standard of living (Article 25). This
special issue of the Harvard Educational Review contributes to our understanding of children in families living under these conditions and explores their
experiences with the educational system.
Because of the 1982 Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court decision, undocumented
children are entitled to K12 education and so attend elementary and high
school with other children, ostensibly on an equal footing. Thus, schools are
one of the only institutions in American society where undocumented children legally belong and are entitled to equal treatment. An estimated 5.2 million children have at least one undocumented parent. The vast majority of
the children of these immigrants are citizens because they were born in the
United States, but an estimated 775,000 are undocumented (Passel, Cohn,
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Krogstad, & Gonzalez-Barrera, 2014). Children of undocumented parents

thus constitute about a third of all first- and second-generation children and
about 5.5 percent of all US K12 students (Passel & Cohn, 2014). The citizen
children of undocumented parents live with the knowledge that their parents
can be deported at any time. Meanwhile, the children who are themselves
undocumented face an additional looming U-turn in their integration experiences. Fully incorporated in elementary and high school, they awaken to a
nightmare in young adulthood when they do not have the right to work, face
possible deportation, and, in many parts of the country, do not have financial
aid to attend college (Gonzales & Chavez, 2012). The cruel experiment that
we are conducting involves denying full equality to these young people while
at the same time teaching them that they are Americans in a land founded on
the principle that all people are created equal (Smith, 2013, p. 250).
Today, an estimated 11.2 million of the nations 41 million immigrants are
undocumented (Passel & Cohn, 2014). This number has risen rapidly since
1990, when there were 3.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United
States (Pew Research Center, 2014). They are present in the classrooms across
our nation, yet we know little about how they navigate difficult circumstances
and how schools as institutions react to their special status.
We do know that since 1996 the circumstances of the undocumented have
become harsher. Both the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act laid the legal groundwork for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and greatly increased the deportations of legal immigrants who are
convicted of a felony. Furthermore, the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act, popularly known as Welfare Reform, broadened the restrictions on public benefits for undocumented immigrants.
These laws have combined with administrative changes that also increased
the integration of everyday policing and immigration data systems, leading
to a sharp rise of what is called internal enforcement. The administrative
integration of immigration status into federal and state databases means that
everyday activities of the undocumented now expose them to the very real
danger of deportation. A routine traffic stop for a broken headlight or an
expired inspection sticker will trigger an alert about immigration status on
the onboard computer in a patrol car. As a result, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement increasingly deports people who are settled immigrants, not
just those apprehended at the border. Deportations of undocumented immigrants have soared from an average of 20,000 per year before the mid-1990s
to 400,000 per year since 2008. Between July 2010 and October 2012, more
than 200,000 undocumented parents with US-born children were deported
(Vicens, 2014).
The insecurity and stress that undocumented families experience are harming children. Research has shown that children of undocumented parents are

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mary c. waters

less likely than their peers to receive benefits for which they are legally eligible (Yoshikawa, 2011). They are also more likely to experience anxiety and
depression in adolescence and have lower levels of educational attainment
in middle childhood (Brabeck & Xu, 2010). Undocumented immigrants and
their relatives live in constant fear of being apprehended, and families are
often separated by the deportation process (Dreby, 2012; Hagan, Rodriguez,
& Castro, 2011). Recent research suggests that for children living in high-poverty and violent neighborhoods, elevated levels of toxic stress can create longlasting adverse health effects that can even affect future generations through
epigenetic changes (Fox & Shonkoff, 2011; Thompson, 2014). While no systematic research yet exists, it would not be surprising if future studies find
the same adverse health outcomes for children living with the anxiety that
their undocumented parents could be deported. Undocumented status of parents, like poverty, is a risk factor for childrens emotional well-being, cognitive
development, and educational attainment.
Many scholars have compared the experience of undocumented immigrants to the denial of rights to blacks in the period between the Civil War
and the civil rights movement in the 1960s (e.g., Rodriguez, 2013). In addition, the DREAMers movement of undocumented young people is modeled
after the civil and gay rights movements (Nicholls, 2013). These young people
have held demonstrations and sit-ins, modeled on the civil rights movement
(Altschuler, 2011), and have come out as undocumented, modeled on the
gay rights movement.
Yet, the civil rights movement demanded civil rights for African Americans who, as citizens, were entitled to protection from discrimination and to
civic participationmost crucially the right to vote. As Gunnar Myrdal (1944)
pointed out, this was an American Dilemma, because blacks were included
as Americans yet denied these American rights. In contrast, though many
undocumented immigrants have assimilated into US society, they are legally
defined as not Americans and cannot, by definition, lay claim to civil rights.
When opponents of unauthorized immigration carry signs with slogans such
as What part of illegal do you not understand? and define people as illegal
aliens, they are stressing the bright legal barrier between us and them. In
sum, discrimination against unauthorized immigrants is not only legal, it is in
many ways required by the law.
As such, we need a new model for a movement to champion the rights
of undocumented immigrants in American societyone that stresses their
human rights, not their civil rights (Waters & Kasinitz, in press). The United
States has little experience with movements based in the human rights tradition; yet, a legal human rights framework can provide a strong basis for challenging laws that discriminate against people based on citizenship status and
the denial of access to health care, public housing, higher education, and the
labor market. Perhaps it is time to move beyond the civil rights framework that

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has not been able to protect these undocumented families and recognize their
basic human right to inclusion in the society we all share.
The civil rights movement is rightfully heralded as a victory for justice over
legal discrimination. Yet we now have a new kind of legal discrimination affecting a new generation of Americans. There are now more unauthorized immigrants living in the United States than there were African Americans living in
the South under Jim Crow in the 1950s. The scholarship on how people experience their unauthorized status, how it affects institutions such as schools,
and how being in a family headed by an undocumented parent affects children is in its early stages. This special issue will contribute to our understanding of the importance of undocumented status to the educational experiences
of young people living under these precarious and harmful conditions.

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