In November 1968, when I was six years old, I met a stranger in JFK Airport in New York. My mother had left Jamaica when I was three years old, but I had no memory of her departure or goodbye. It was a family separation that my three-year-old mind couldn’t really comprehend.
In my article, ”Just Be There: Consistency in Parenting”, I’ve explored how crucial constancy is in child development. This parenting attribute is often abandoned by immigrant families, mainly for pragmatic reasons. My family was a lived example.
Mom had left us in the care of her elderly sister in Kingston, after she moved to New York to pursue legal US immigration for the betterment of our future. She had been orphaned by 14, and the money that had been left for her education in her small Jamaican country town had disappeared. She had learned to sew and vowed that her children would be educated. What followed her through life was a feeling of inadequacy because she had not completed high school.
I had two older brothers and a sister, and I was the baby of the family. Over three years later, the scene in the wild, cold of the airport was our immigrant family reunion, tainted by my fear and confusion.
During those three years apart, I had only been shown a photograph of my mother and told who she was. But standing in JFK, I couldn’t reconcile this flesh-and-blood woman with that static image. In the fluorescent terminal, I remember thinking, “Who is she?”The winter coat she wrapped around me shielded me from one New York’s coldest winters on record, but it didn’t do anything to save me from the frost that now coated our mother/daughter relationship. The divide between us was never fully breached.
As we settled into a first-floor apartment in the Bronx, I was intrigued by the photographs of three young children my mother had encased in the family album. I remember asking her who these happy, pink-cheeked children were. She would look at me and slowly shake her head. She wouldn’t say another word and left the room. I stopped asking.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that the penny dropped regarding who the children in those five small pictures were – they were THE children.
Long-Term Effects of Childhood Immigration Trauma
As a child of three, I learned self-reliance in the hardest way possible. During those formative years between the age of three to six, I was without both parents. I learned that I had to cope on my own and it was frightening. A child of three should not know what life without parents can be. It was the birth of a cycle of anxiety that would follow me throughout my life.
Now, in my sixties, watching modern coverage of immigrant family separation, I recognize the same patterns of trauma:
- Disrupted parent-child bonds
- Early onset anxiety
- Forced independence at a developmental stage meant for attachment
- Lasting impact on trust and relationships
The Reality of Legal Immigration
The legal immigration process isn’t simply about filling out forms, as many Americans believe. For my mother, it meant:
- Securing sponsors for green cards
- Proving savings of $4,000 per family member ($24,000 total in 1960s currency)
- Enduring over three years of family separation
- Managing the psychological impact on young children
Securing a sponsor was not an easy task. In those days, becoming a nanny was one of the few jobs that facilitated sponsorship. Later in life I would hear horror stories of women who were turned into virtual slaves for the wealthy families that were their potential sponsors. Thankfully, my mother’s sponsoring family were kind to her.
I am instantly angry when folks blithely say that immigrant families simply need to go through the legal process. Yes, American laws need to be followed as well as the monitoring of immigration numbers; but the legal process often results in cleaving of families at certain key childhood development milestones.
I recoiled from the lack of empathy and ignorance regarding the struggle of these families. Frequently the dismissive reason for these families’ desperate actions was the view that they were only after the enhancement of their financial circumstances.
Moving Toward Empathy and Understanding
Many in the Western world view immigration through a lens of privilege, where access to the following is taken for granted:
- Clean water
- Free education
- Nutritious food
- Quality healthcare
The desire to provide these basics for your children isn’t unreasonable—it’s fundamental.
Moving Toward Understanding
Going forward, as a former immigrant child, I’d like for everyone to actively acknowledge that there are faces, names and life stories behind the labels of the migration story. A bit of empathy and critical thinking is required to really get to the heart of the depth of loss experienced by people leaving everything they have known to start a new life elsewhere.
While individual family cases can evolve into a successful tale of achieving the American dream, for children, the immigrant experience can be not only life changing, but leave can emotionally scar. When anyone offers simplistic dismissal of the immigration story by emphasising the need for an improvement in legal processes, there needs to be deeper perception of the complexity of the impact of the experience on an immigrant child’s psyche.
Part of becoming diversity aware is not only aesthetically viewing other cultures but rejecting simplistic representations of complex issues. To be able to reject stock phrases and solutions that never scratch the surface while adapting true ally-ship and fostering a depth of comprehension.
It’s also onboarding a willingness to admit that you don’t have all the answers, and an openness to learning more and embracing a different cultural and social perspective. In essence, it’s about becoming aware and leaning to listen, question, and step back when faced with prepackaged perspectives, and lastly, to be mindful that labels are poison to the free will of your ability to form independent opinions.
