Failure to Mourn “White Nativism”: Impact of Deportation on Hispanic American–Born Children and Mixed-Status Families

Abstract

Contemporary American immigration policy since 1996 has sought to control the entrance of “illegal immigrants” while also facilitating their deportation, thereby dividing mixed-status families. American children born to non-native parents are rendered second-class citizens. Such policies claim to preserve the American economic and social order. The author posits that American immigration reform needs to be viewed in the context of legal statutes and social policies that are embedded in a complex, unconscious intrapsychic defense system of “White nativism,” aimed to avert the mourning of the “White native” cultural identity. Deportation and immigration reform is therefore a “White native,” legal, and policy-driven annihilatory tool, designed to extricate the American-born Hispanic child from the United States in order to avert the inevitable transformation of the “White natives” collective external group symbolic representations, or reservoirs, that are linked to individual and collective affective mother–me experiences.