The Impact of Unintended Consequences of the 1996 U.S. Immigration Reform Act on Women

Abstract

This spiritual, performed by the Fisk University Jubilee singers during the 1870s, has its origins in the days of slavery when the children of African slaves were sold and separated from their mothers. This lyrical lament can be applied to the current plight of women, mothers, and grandmothers, who experience the trauma and emotional distress of forced return migration from the United States to their ‘‘homelands,’’ while their U.S.-born children, being citizens, remain in the United States. Uprootment from the United States and forcible return to the country of birth by deportation is a highly traumatic and life-altering experience. Women who are deported, many of whom left their countries of birth as infants, are placed in untenable situations of being separated from their children who were born in the United States. One of the unintended consequences of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), also known as the 1996 Immigration Reform Act, which was designed to address the issues of illegal immigration in the United States, is the fracturing of families. For some female deportees who have lived in the United States since infancy, deportation is a case of double despair because they are sent away from both the country to which they have been socialized and their families and are exiled to their countries of birth, where they are strangers.