Don't Revise the CCA2000; Stop Deportations

Removal of non-citizen adoptees has gotten a lot of attention again in the U.S. because of Adam Crasper's impending removal hearing. The CCA's main problem is that it limited the protection to those who were younger than 18 at the time when the act became effective and to those whose adoptions were finalized. Many are now calling for automatic citizenship for all adoptees, regardless of age.

Action to prevent his removal is necessary, and fortunately his case is getting a ton of press, but the answer is not a revision of the CCA2000. The answer is to work for fair and just comprehensive immigration reform in line with all other immigrant rights organizations and activists. In the meantime, advocates and activists should be asking for the quicker blanket deferred action for adoptees, modeled after the actions the DREAMers got the Obama administration to enact.

There are many problems with just amending the CCA2000. First, an amendment will not pass through both houses of Congress in time to save Adam. Second, I don't think that goes far enough, leaving too many still vulnerable to deportation, and lastly it takes away our choice about naturalizing.

Here's my proposal:

• Automatic immunity from deportation for all who were sent to the US to be adopted, including those whose adoptions were not finalized, and those who were not adopted like the babylift cases.
• The choice to naturalize without the criminal background and health checks
• Naturalization processing fees waived, including the biometrics and medical exam fees
• Return of deported people who had been sent to the US to be adopted

Of course the first and most pressing concern is protecting those who were sent to the US to be adopted from removal. We must remember that it is not only Koreans who will be affected by an amendment or change to intercountry adoption laws. This becomes even more pressing as the Guatemalan wave comes of age, as they will be most vulnerable to profiling as immigrants. Fortunately, the majority were admitted to the US on IR-3 visas, and they are covered under the current CCA, but there are some who will not be covered, as the rampant mishandling of the Guatemalan adoptions gives me little hope that they were all processed legally and fully. As Kathryn Joyce pointed out, a lot of the adoption happening from Latin America (including Haiti) and Africa were instigated by fundamental Christians with megafamilies, and in many cases little sophistication regarding immigration matters. 

Furthermore, the Babylifts of Vietnam, Korea, Haiti, Cuba, etc. resulted in many children being sent to the US, ostensibly to be adopted, but many were left in foster care instead, and unnaturalized. These people need to be protected as well. Finally children and babies sent to be adopted but whose adoptions weren't finalized for any reason are not currently mentioned in either the original CCA2000 or amendment proposals. 

Removing the choice of citizenship was one of the reasons cited when adoptees campaigned for dual citizenship with their adoptive countries and South Korea. They acknowledged that removing this choice was an injustice. Let's not advocate for the same injustice. Making U.S. citizenship automatic probably removes the choice for adoptees from other countries, not only those from ROK. However, we should advocate for removing the blocks impeding naturalization from those who do wish to change their citizenship. Many adoptees struggle financially or with medical conditions.

The current fees to naturalize include the naturalization application, biometrics (to prove identity), health screening, and other things like shipping, photos, and notaries. There are several medical conditions which could make a person inadmissible or disqualify her or him from naturalization such as communicable diseases, mental illnesses, and addiction. 

The current laws also require anyone who has committed various misdemeanors or felonies from being ineligible for naturalization and can send them into removal proceedings. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA1996) makes some offenses especially likely for adoptees deportable offenses, including voting without citizenship and claiming to be a citizen by applying for a US passport without being a citizen. 

Like us, many DREAMers, adults who were brought to the US when they were children but who are now undocumented, got the right to stay in the US with work permission. They can get social security numbers and driver's licenses and join American society for the most part. Although this measure is volatile (the next administration can cancel it just as easily as Obama enacted it) it would "save" Adam. The experience that the DREAMers and immigrant rights' organizers have should be an asset to the adoption community, but we've repeatedly refused to support them or ask them for help. 

Any legislative action should also allow those who already have been deported to return to the US. Currently about 30 publicized cases or so have resulted in people who were adopted or who were sent to the US to be adopted being removed. Let's not forget them.

SOURCES:
http://poundpuplegacy.org/deportation_cases

http://www.uscis.gov/iframe/ilink/docView/PUBLAW/HTML/PUBLAW/0-0-0-10948.html

http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/us-immigration/what-expect-green-card-medical-exam.html

http://swampland.time.com/2013/07/09/explainer-why-it-costs-immigrants-680-to-apply-for-naturalization/

Korea’s History is My History

On the first ever overnight trip organized for adoptees by KoRoot, about 15 of us were relaxing by the bay in Suncheon, Jeollanam-do. We sat singing Jindo Arirang after a day visiting the municipal cemetery in Kwangju where the martyrs were buried from the 5.18 uprising before many of them were re-interred in the nearby National Cemetery, and where more of their comrades subsequently joined them as the decades passed. I feel a profound sense of gratitude and connection to those young democracy fighters, many of whom died at the same age of my smartphone-addicted university students. Their school photos show them clad in school uniforms, and I recognize the artifacts left behind as almost identical to the same school supplies I used 6000 miles away in the USA. I tried to convey these feelings in inadequate words to the other trip participants while our hosts relayed the basic facts of the uprising to us.

I get the impression that the connection that I feel to these events and people of the 1980 come as a surprise to many people I meet in Korea. These people often try to educate adoptees and other dongpos about the intricacies of Korean customs, history, and manners, assuming we know nothing. Of these three elements of culture, the very easiest to grasp is history, even if it’s difficult to unravel the truth from nation-building myths and propaganda. Non-Korean western scholars are often called on to interpret current events for global audiences in the news media, so why couldn't those of us who are Korean-born, with more insider access to Korean communities, also be entrusted to have a basic grasp of history?

Although as a discrete population, we adoptees may seem to be the least connected by family histories from which to learn, but as a part of the farthest-flung national diaspora on earth [“World’s widest diaspora born over 100 years ago.” Korea Joong Daily. 2 October 2013] , adoptees are profoundly affected by history [Mueller, Ander R. “Adoptee justice is about social justice.” The Korea Times. 9 October 2012.] which often prompts us to learn on our own. In fact, since I have no personal history, the nation’s history is a substitute personal narrative for me, and integral to my critical understanding of intercountry adoption as part of the history of Korea.

1970s Factory worker
with her baby

For example, when I met three women who worked in garment factories in the 1970s [Song, Dae-Han. “70s Women Workers.” Solidarity Stories. 8 May 2014.]  to create the “Miracle on the Han,” I imagined that perhaps my own mother had been a part of this cohort of teenagers who worked bent over for 14 hours a day. I can easily see them in my mind these young women who migrated to Seoul or Incheon where I was presumably born, being forced to choose between mothering their children and continuing to work for incomes, ultimately relinquishing their children to the intercountry adoption industry. This part of the peoples’ history runs parallel with the history of many diasporic Koreans who were was also funding the transformation of South Korea with overseas remittances after the government encouraged emigration and tried to control population growth. In Kwangju those photos of rebellious citizens were also contemporaries of my parents. The Yushin system and Chung Doo Hwan’s martial law rule certainly affected my mother and father, as it touched everyone in South Korea. Of course I do not know my parents’ opinions about these issues, but I as I turned 4 in May 1980, I’m sure they must have witnessed the uprising and talked about it.

But the history of Korea is not only a substitute for my own personal history. Historic events created a system for intercountry adoption out of South Korea and a mythology about its necessity based on humanitarian grounds. Although the current system of intercountry adoption is usually said to have started about 60 years ago, I think the forced opening of the Hermit Kingdom, the partial Christianization of Korea, colonization and independence, the American influence on South Korea are all pertinent parts of the whole picture. This national history is as equally important as the substitute personal history in relation to intercountry adoption and adoptees are also a part of the history of South Korea.

Women in Chosun Korea selling produce in a market

Some of this national history has been obscured to facilitate the adoption industry. Take, for example, unwed single mothers. While Chosun-era society usually is depicted with “respectable” women as being “inside people,” strictly held to prescribed gender roles, what about women who had lower status? After all, they were the majority of the population. What about the peasants who certainly worked outdoors in the fields? Or female merchants with businesses? Or itinerant groups such as the Namsadang entertainers who, despite their name, had female members later in their history? What about mudang? kisaeng? What about slaves and their children? Single parenting is as old as parenting and a part of every society. This reality is not mentioned in histories of Korea, but I have no doubt it existed. This history ought to be uncovered.

Some history, however, is well known yet still counters the dominant narrative about the reasons for intercountry adoption. The story of the beginning of adoption out of Korea conventionally begins with the mixed-race children who would not be accepted by Korean society which also does not adopt non-relatives. Yet, even official Korean history is peppered with marriages of Koreans to non-Koreans and adoption. In early history the legendary Queen Heo Hwang Ok, wife of King Suro, was a foreigner, maybe from India. Later the Mongolian-Koryo alliance was supported by marriage. Finally, the creator of modern “Korean culture”, the Yi dynasty of Chosun, also had marriages to Japanese and white American women [“[HISTORY] The last prince of Korea” Life in Korea blog 26 October 2013.], plus acknowledged adoptions. During the Yi rule, too, thousands of marriages between Koreans and Japanese existed in both lands. Yet, despite this, we are told that Korea deeply values its “pure” bloodlines and has no tradition of adoption due to conservative Confucian values.

Korea’s recent and ancient history holds importance to me personally and as a way to understand the place adoption holds in this country. It connects me to an imagined past rooted in plausible reality. Exposing and publicizing the real history of Korean society, especially of women, allows for pointed questions about the justifications for adoption.

Returnees Organizing Korea Out of the Intercountry Adoption Industry

Originally written and posted to ISC Solidarity Stories


By Kristin R. Pak


The intercountry adoption (ICA) market is driven by demand from rich countries and commodifies the most vulnerable people. It’s unsustainable as child welfare, and does great harm wherever the market emerges. Realpolitik policies that trade in humans for leverage are unconscionable, but dress them in fateful red thread narratives and a savior aura, and they are not just palatable, but seem magnanimous and altruistic. The marketing and branding of poor children as orphans with no past and no hope for the future started here in South Korea, and has been replicated again and again throughout the (former) second and third worlds. The justifications for UN-regulated human trafficking range from discrimination to poverty to evangelism. Ignored is how little ICA does to address the systemic problems that created poverty, the legal and institutionalized discrimination that force people to the margins of society, and the failed government programs that restrict families to one child. Furthermore, the continuing interference that the west (particularly the United States) perpetrates in the developing world, disrupts traditional communities and livelihoods.





South Korea is still among the top suppliers of children for the ICA industry. SOURCE: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/adoptionstatsintl.html


Babies and children are traded in return for money– profits for adoption agencies, hard currency for poor countries, fees for lawyers, revenue for hospitals, and “donation” income for orphanages while at the same time releasing a bit of pressure that these rather-be-forgotten troubles put on a society. Poor families, biracial babies, unwed mothers, addicts and mentally ill patients all should be hidden or gotten rid of in the speediest, most profitable way possible, but only a limited amount can be sent away. We can’t be kept out. Thousands of us are returning every year, demanding the truth. We’re joining in solidarity with others who have stayed to change laws, provide services, and reform society.


Why have some of the 200,000 of us who were sent away to be adopted returning?* Why do we come to visit South Korea in the thousands every year? Why are we in solidarity with unwed and single mothers and families who have lost their children to adoption? We don’t (necessarily) come back to South Korea because our childhoods were bad (although many were horrendous). We come back to learn the truth about what Korea is in a way that only a visit can. We come to find our families and the truth because the adoption agencies constantly lie to us. We choose to live here for extended times to reclaim our mother tongue. We settle here to change Korean society so no more children are separated from their mothers, fathers, histories and personal truths.


And we organize. Adoption Solidarity Korea (ASK), Truth and Reconciliation Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK), and Global Overseas Adoptee Link (GOA’L) were founded by adoptees living in Korea so the thousands who come back every year have a community and support to find their way in Korea and their place in history. We work in solidarity with unwed mothers so families can stay together, despite unjust policies driven by stigmas against the women and their children. We identify as migrants who were forced away from Korea and perhaps compelled to return again as economic refugees or deported Americans, along with the other new face of Korea which is multilingual, multicultural, and more diverse. We hope to transform Korea, and we have the right to do so as Koreans.





Back in the late 1990s the government tried to use us as bridges between our adoptive countries and South Korea. Although I disagree with the assumption that we would automatically feel any obligation to do so, it was clear from the First Lady’s address to us in 1999 that the Blue House was including us in the great Korean diaspora. In our quasi-Korean/foreigner hybridity, we learned tolerance was the least a society owes to its most maligned, even if the right to equality is ignored. We are claiming our birthright as born ROK citizens and making statements about justice and human rights here. Our experiences as foreigners in our adoptive countries and the racism and discrimination that goes along with it has equipped us to fight as citizens even if we have foreigner status on our ARCs.


We had to change laws to get those, too. Although we’re now eligible for F4 visas, which allow us to live in Korea and work (as long as it’s not as a laborer), we had to convince Immigration that we were also overseas Koreans because there was no category for us. You see, we weren’t supposed to return. The marketing worked so well that it became the Truth: we were saved from growing up in a poor country, in poor families. That was the story from the end of the war and continues until 2014. South Korea is now a highly developed country economically, thanks in part to the hard currency we brought in. We were supposed to be fully assimilated into white Christian families and forget we were Korean, grateful for all the West would give to us. Instead, we commit political acts just by living in Korea, by making waves and demanding a change in the laws.


Perhaps because of the returnees like me, Korea will create a template for closing its intercountry adoption program like it has repeatedly promised to do since it was shamed1 as a baby-exporting country. I hope it does, because intercountry adoption is a demand driven industry that hurts Korea. It has retarded the growth of an adequate social welfare state, a major characteristic of a developed society. (We still have childcare facilities, because adoption does not solve child welfare problems.) ICA makes Korea complicit in human trafficking for hard currency it no longer needs. Just as the rest of the world followed Korea’s example into selling away its children, Korea can lead the way out of the ICA industry.


*I use the passive voice here deliberately because the people who were sent for adoption were not the protagonists, but the object of the action.


1”The year 1988 was a turning point in South Korea’s adoption history. The Seoul International Olympics attracted the attention of journalists worldwide about many aspects of Korean culture, and much of thisattention focused on Korea’s primary export: its babies. Journalists like Bryant Gumbel of NBC commented that Korea’s primary export commodity was its babies, and articles like “Babies for Export” (The New York Times) and “Babies for Sale: South Koreans Make Them, Americans Buy Them” (The Progressive), embarrassed the South Korean government. North Korea also criticized South Korea’s adoption program, pointing out that selling its children to Western countries was the ultimate form of capitalism. As a result, the South Korean government delayed the scheduled departure of adopted children before and during the Olympics. And the number of Korean children adopted by American families began to decrease, from over 6,200 in 1986 to just over 1,700 in 1993.”http://www.pbs.org/pov/firstpersonplural/history_southkorea.php

Korean Woman, Adopted as Infant, Facing Deportation in Arizona

Korean Woman, Adopted as Infant, Facing Deportation in Arizona

http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2011/01/korean-woman-adopted-infant-facing-deportation-arizona

Originally posted at New America Media
by Seung Woo Park/Translation: Aruna Lee
A Korean woman in Arizona, who was adopted and brought to the US when she was eight months old, is facing deportation after a second conviction for theft, reports the Korea Times. The 31-year-old mother of three is currently being held in a federal detention center in Arizona.

According to officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Seo (not her real name) was first convicted on theft charges in 2008, for which she served a seven-month sentence. She was arrested on a second theft charge in 2009, and sentenced to a year-and-half in jail. In January, ICE initiated deportation proceedings against her, requesting for a travel certificate from the Korean consulate in Los Angeles.

Officials say the decision to deport the woman was based on the nature of her crimes and on the likelihood of repeat offenses. Current law stipulates that legal residents can be deported if they are convicted for crimes involving drugs, prostitution or other nefarious activities, or if they are sentenced to more than a year in prison.

The Korean consulate, meanwhile, has requested that the deportation decision be withdrawn for humanitarian reasons, citing the fact that the woman has never returned to her country of birth since her adoption, her inability to speak Korean and her three children, all of whom were born in the United States.

According to Korea’s L.A. Consul General Jae-soo Kim, it would be “impossible for the woman to live a normal life in Korea given that she has no contact with relatives or friends there.” That aside, he adds, being a single mother, her deportation would leave her three children at the mercy of government institutions.

“Although [she] was adopted as an infant, she is only a green card holder and not a citizen,” says Kim, adding that adoption laws were changed after 2004, long after Seo’s adoption, to grant adoptees citizenship 45 days after their arrival in the country. “I’m not sure why she never applied for citizenship as an adult,” he says.

According to ICE, a large number of adoptees have been deported in recent years. Many of them said they were unaware of their non-citizen status.

“For the sake of Seo and her three children I hope ICE reconsiders their decision to deport her.”

White-washed Adoptees

I wrote before about privilege and classism in the adoption community and our reluctance to be in solidarity with other immigrants now I want to ask a provocative question: is it because we're too white washed?

Transracial non-white adoptees who identify as white, and who benefit from privilege borrowed from their white parents as children have to be politicized as non-whites. I think a majority of TRA never take on a full identity as a non-white person. Those actively involved in the adoptee community are probably even less likely to see themselves as a non-white, Korean, Chinese, Indian, Latin@, Mayan, Colombian, Philipino, Arab, or Roma… person.


Adult adoptees introduce themselves online as having been adopted by "Caucasians". One poster referred to non-white people as "minorities". Non-white people hardly ever use these terms. PC white people – and white-washed non-white people—do. We identify ourselves by the nation or race we feel we belong to. I don't say I'm a minority. I'm Korean or Korean American. My adoptive parents weren't Caucasian. They were white.

Other adoptees claim that they are more enlightened than the people who bore them even if they acknowledge that they're not white because they've suffered from racism in the countries where they live. Their white-washed brains judge their birth countries as inferior in luxuries and comfort, human rights, equality, education, and progress in general. Those who still hold the colonial mindset of Europeans (and their ideological descendants) feel they're helping to civilize more backward nations and communities who don't value their female babies, or who don't accept Jesus, or are from societies that are just too poor, violent, and corrupt for children to live in.


White washing gets non-white people to identify with their white oppressors rather than their non-white sisters and brothers. It makes them subscribe to white supremacy and judge non-western societies as less developed than those based on Judeo-Christian European cultures. Symptoms include arbitrarily rejecting cultural markers of our birth countries, using euphemisms of race and class, and having more friends and associates who are white than from our own nationality. The result is self-hatred, internalized racism, and a weakening of our communities' strength. White-washed people hope that we will be again granted the privilege of white people or at least as a special non-white person. The House Nigger, the Imperial Collaborator, the white-washed adoptee.

Exceptionalism

You were "chosen". "Your parents really wanted you." You're "special."

America is the best country in world. Everyone wants to come here. This is the freest country in the world. We're number 1!

These are myths that need to be refuted because they're untrue and they do harm.

When you know, without a doubt, you're special or the best, you're disinclined to be empathetic about others' struggles. You understand power imbalance and stratification to be normal and accept it as inevitable.

Non-white international adoptees who are taught and believe that they're special and/or chosen, may fail to acknowledge that their privileges are borrowed are granted but not a birth right. They can be revoked at any time. Sometimes it's hurtful, but trivial, like in Adopted the Movie when Jen, a Korean adoptee, is told she will not be included with her family in the annals of the Sons of the American Revolution.

Jen is blindsided when she's told she's not eligible to be listed with her family. Why should she be so surprised that she cried? Because she deluded herself in believing that she was special. Like so many adoptees she became an overachiever to prove how special she is. She also became an addict.

Learning that American exceptionalism is also a claim that rests on lies is also a painful realization for many people, including American adoptees. We're told that people come here for freedom then we not only find out the slave trade brought people to the United States in chains. We learn in middle school about the poor huddled masses that immigrated between 1880 and 1930 and are told that everyone wants to come to the U.S. We're not taught that more people left than entered the U.S. in the 1930s, nor the fact, throughout the history of the country, half of all immigrants returned to their countries of origin. As adults we read reports in the media that the U.S. does not have the best students, the richest citizens, nor the healthiest population anymore.

This hurts us because the immigrants we need to just stay in the top tier of nations are being attracted to other countries with better health care, education, welfare, and standards of living. Our belief in American exceptionalism is also has more insidious results. The military industrial complex of the U.S. has committed genocide and continues to perpetuate violence domestically and abroad, yet the average American believes our magnanimity to the point of denial about human rights violations and feel morally superior to China, North Korea, and all other nations. We don't condemn our governments' policies nor hold private enterprises responsible for crimes because we can't fathom that we're really as capable as everyone else of callousness, violence, greed, and deceit.

When we realize that we're just average yellow, brown, or black people and not so special, it causes us emotional pain. When we face what our government is guilty of ignoring and perpetuating, it causes uncomfortable redefining of ourselves.


 

 
(This post was prompted by this article about Jewish exceptionalism.)

Classism in the Adoption Community

I think one reason that the adoption community does not readily take up the immigration cause is classism. While the community now acknowledges “racial difference” (although not always actual racism), classism remains a taboo topic for adoptees and adoptive parents. It’s discussed when we talk about birth parents and exploitation of poor and disempowered women, but the privilege of wealth is denied by adoptees and even more vehemently by adoptive parents. 

Adoptee organizers and the most outspoken representatives of adoptees overwhelmingly come from the middle and upper-classes. I’ve seen this reflected in numerous ways which effectively shuts out lower- and working-class adoptees. For example, in adult adoptee-run organizations I have heard board members say that only social workers (who seem to be overrepresented in the adoptee community) should run the programs, especially the mentorship programs. Adoptee trips tend toward expensive ski trips and golf outings. “Gatherings” of adoptees often involve costly travel and lodging, taking time off from work, and socializing well beyond the means of wage-earners. Less privileged adoptees end up not participating and not being heard, and so they become invisible.


Adoptive parents often claim that they are not rich. They even fundraise online to pay for their adoptions! Adoptive parents with all the trappings of privilege will argue that they are middle class. Their accoutrements included nannies and housekeeping staff, international vacations, advanced degrees, and 2 (or more) cars in the garage of the big house or condo that they own. Like most Americans, adoptive parents in the USA claim to be middle-class, even if by most measures they are wealthy. They fundraise so that they won’t go into debt paying for the adoption instead of giving up any of the luxuries they’ve become accustomed to. (Yes, these are sweeping generalizations I’m indulging in.)

Immigrants, of course, range from conspicuously wealthy to pathetically poor, but the poor are the people that are in the mind’s eye when we talk about immigrant rights and reform. The wretched masses picking our tomatoes, mowing our lawns, delivering our take-out pad Thai, yelling orders for pork fried rice, running the liquor stores, and cleaning the behinds of our babies and invalids are the people who need reform most desperately. Clearly members of the adoption community in America are not THESE kinds of immigrants! We’re not poor! We speak English! We value education! We have respect for The Law! We work hard! 

When we talk of exploited birth mothers and powerless women in grinding poverty in foreign countries, we make them into nobly suffering victims. It’s the white man’s burden to educate and rescue them, or at the very least their children, from manual jobs and menial labor. Never mind that manual work and menial labor are honorable jobs. Working in restaurants, factories, on farms, or at market places is not demeaning. Only those who judge those occupations as inferior would abhor these kinds of work and look down on the people doing it. Even in the worst cases of exploitation, it’s the exploitation, not the workers, who should be considered inferior.

Failing to identify with the poor in this country or in sending countries is one of the reasons that the adoption community does not take interest in immigration issues. But, before we can do that, we have to first acknowledge the classism in our own community.

International Adoption and Immigration

International adoption is one of the ways that immigrants enter the United States. Although some adoptees and adoptive parents would rather pretend that we are not immigrants, we share a lot with other immigrants who come alone or with their blood relatives.

Similarity in legal status
The majority of us are issued visas permitting us to enter the U.S. because an immediate relative is sponsoring our migration, just as the majority of non-adopted immigrants are. This is true even if the “relatives” are not legally related to us until the adoption is finalized. If we came to this country before the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 was in effect, we were permanent residents, or green-card holders, before we were naturalized (if we did change our citizenship from our original one to that of the U.S.) If we do not have U.S. citizenship before we turn 18, we also must pay approximately $1500 to be naturalized.

Some of us did not change our citizenship, so like all other non-citizens, we are deportable. Adoptees have been deported because they were not naturalized when they committed minor offenses. In extreme cases, even citizenship may possibly be revoked.

Cultural similarities that adopted and non-adopted immigrants share

If our features show origins in Asia or the Americas, we always will be perpetual foreigners. We will have to legitimize our Americaness to doubters who believe “American” means white or Black. We will hear racist insults and ignorant comments. We are just as likely to be profiled by authorities or become victims of hate crimes as non-adopted immigrants.

As adults we may prefer to live apart from the mainstream and within ethnic enclaves with others who share our nationality. These communities offer a respite from dealing with racism and stereotypes. They also supply cultural necessities. But often these neighborhoods lack the best amenities like parks, good schools, proximity to work, access to transportation, quality retail stores, well-stocked supermarkets, and other services which cater to the privileged.

Some of us may need to learn English when we arrive here. Like other children who immigrate to the U.S., our success in school may depend on good services for English language learners. If our communities include large populations of immigrants, services are much more likely to be in place, better equipped and experienced in providing language support for newly arrived school-age international adoptees.

The immigration debate and the adoption community

The anti-immigrant tone of the nativist side of the debate hurts adoptees. Xenophobia does not distinguish adoption-based immigration from other family based immigration. Hateful rhetoric citing unauthorized immigration and undocumented foreign nationals creates a hostile environment for any immigrant who may “look illegal”. For those of us from Asia and Latin America, this is especially true.

Joining the cause for immigrant rights

For these reasons and more, the international adoption community should engage in the discussion about immigration. We should be activists and advocate for immigration reform that is fair and humane. We should demand reform which ensures a way for all immigrants to enter and live with dignity in this country. This includes authorizing the undocumented, creating fair family reunification legislation, and support for immigrants once they arrive here.