Immigration Crises and Family Values

In between the gross excesses of the U.S. political campaigns blared daily on the evening news programs you might find a few minutes, or occasionally a longer, thoughtful story, on the unending immigration crisis. I mean the immigration crisis playing itself out in Europe, though I can think of no reason why it should end there. Earlier we saw huge boatloads of refugees from war, crossing treacherous waters and arriving on land, and the ensuing chaos as the people tried to move farther along in their journey but were stopped by bureaucracies and fear. Many of these first arrivals were men who had left early and were trying to find a new home for their families. Now the families have joined the journey, and we tend to see unending lines, comparatively orderly, of men, women, and children walking hundreds of miles in long queues, still on their way north, still trying to find countries that will take them in, if only for the length of time it takes to pass through to a place that will accept them legally.

Here in the U.S. we tend to focus on our own immigration crisis. I have been dipping into an extraordinary book about the toll that illegal status places on children in families in the U.S. The author, Joanna Dreby, speaks about families in New Jersey and in Ohio. Everyday Illegal: When Policies Undermine Immigrant Families is an academic book; her research is thorough, but imparted in plain English. What makes this academic title also a book for general audiences, however, is her recounting of her own story and that of her two children, who somehow entered into the uncertainty of a family living with illegality through some mishandling of paperwork discovered in a divorce transaction. There are hundreds of gotchas that affect thousands of children, and this book shows in painful detail how families can be torn apart in our own immigration crisis.

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Even though I haven't read it all, I need to take this book back to the library soon. I've already renewed it once and I just don't think it's right to keep it longer. But it's worth mentioning that getting the book represents a minor everyday miracle of the library system in Ohio. This title was not available through the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library system, but it came to my local public library from Capitol University, via OhioLINK, the consortium that links many libraries of different types in the state. I worked for multitype library lending and cooperation many years ago (in Massachusetts) and Ohio was a best practices model then. It is nice to see that the system still works. And it's always nice to see my tax dollars going for something good.