We may be Arabizing the Latin American children of illegal immigrants in the United States

Q: Depending on what happens on Nov. 7, what do you think is going to happen with the immigration debate, the whole spring mobilization?

A: At the very least, what we saw in the spring was a unification of the Mexican migrant family. My worry has been that children born in the United States of parents who are illegally here end up with a confusion of identities. Their parents are not settled in the United States, they do not vote here, they do not participate in a full way in the United States. Their children are born here but they hear about their parents every sort of negative chorus -- that their parents are freeloaders, that their parents are indeed illegal. No other children in America hear about their parents what the children of illegal immigrants hear.

One of the darkest conclusions I have is that we may be creating the very thing we say we are afraid of. We may be Arabizing the Latin American children of illegal immigrants in the United States, making them rather like the Arab children of France, that while they may have citizenship in the United States, they are not part of the United States. And within that anger we may be creating the very violence that we built a fence to forestall.

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