Responding to the Interests of Children Whose Parents Face Deportation

37 Pages Posted: 22 Feb 2011 Last revised: 6 Apr 2011

See all articles by Michael J. Sullivan

Michael J. Sullivan

Saint Mary's University of San Antonio

Date Written: February 1, 2011

Abstract

While current family-based US immigration policy is among the most generous in the world for adult citizens and their non-citizen family members seeking admission to the United States, it is not responsive to the interests of citizen and permanent resident children in remaining together in their country of birth with their families. In this paper, I will propose and consider a possible response that involves recasting the parent's permission to remain in the country to care for their citizen and/or permanent resident children as a duty to the state and to their children with conditions attached to their residence that ensure this responsibility is fulfilled. This marks a departure from past US immigration policy that provided parents who are successful in obtaining cancellation of removal on the basis of exceptional and extremely unusual hardship to their citizen-children with an unrestricted individual right to remain. Instead, the parent's permission to remain would be tied to the interests of the state and its citizens in foregoing the long-term social and economic costs of raising an abandoned child as a ward of the state, or reintegrating a citizen-child who left with her parents into American society as an adult. In this way, we can reconceptualize the interest in allowing an unauthorized parent to remain in the United States as pertaining to the community which claims an interest in deporting her, rather than as a humanitarian gesture or an individual rights claim.

Suggested Citation

Sullivan, Michael J., Responding to the Interests of Children Whose Parents Face Deportation (February 1, 2011). Western Political Science Association 2011 Annual Meeting Paper , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1766744

Michael J. Sullivan (Contact Author)

Saint Mary's University of San Antonio ( email )

1 Camino Santa Maria
San Antonio, TX 78023
United States

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