Deportation Damage

Deportation puts added pressure on students, their teachers and schools. PTSD, so-called “scripts of silence,” isolation, depression and panic attacks roll through besieged communities — of the nation’s 50 million public school students, about 10 percent have one or two undocumented parent(s). Most are U.S. citizens, and may stay when the parent(s) go, or go when the option to stay was open: a de facto deportation into the war zones of spoils, extortion, slavery and random, arbitrary death.

Policy is wonky and unsatisfactory to anyone because it is a wrong policy built awkwardly to fit around untruths. Immigration is political, not criminal, but the point is moot when mercenaries, gangs, corruption and structural unemployment inevitably push people to the fabled land where cessation of hunger and the beginning of existential safety is blatantly advertised with every cell phone upgrade, pop song, blockbuster movie, designer jeans.

We have plenty of everything, but it’s in the hands of a few billionaires who think they are fixing the world just fine by starving it to death … like Jack and the Beanstalk, the Giant kills children with the audacity to steal crumbs.

Jesse Cox

Eugene