 "Photo: Hilary Stohs-Krause")
TUSCON, ARIZ. - He rode from Guatemala stacked like lumber with other human slabs in a van.
He was along for the ride as passengers were crushed by the weight of others and trapped women were raped.
Dehydration knocked him out in the desert. He awoke horrified and full of tubes in Arizona, where he was wired to a dialysis machine.
“He thought he was being tortured,” said Sarah Roberts, a Tucson nurse, about the traumatized minor, an illegal immigrant. Roberts belongs to the Samaritans, a humanitarian group that delivers food, water and emergency aid and rescue to migrants traveling along the southern border.
Around Christmas, the minor from Guatemala was in a psychiatric ward, full of trust issues and burdened by pressure from family in South America who told him to buck up, start working and pay them back for the ticket price of his crossing.
But work would make him ineligible for the abandoned children’s visa he applied for.
The desperation that makes some leave their native countries, the dangerous journeys they take and the culture shock they experience upon arrival make for high rates of post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression among immigrants.
A late 1980s study of 7,000 Southeast Asian refugees showed subjects had three times the rate of psychological stress than the general American population, said Jeannine Chapelle, prevention supervisor at La Frontera Center, Inc. in Tucson.
Many of the refugees she encounters likewise exhibit signs of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress.
Unhealed wounds
Neither the scars of homeland hardships nor memories of atrocities en route fade once immigrants reach the United States, where they encounter an array of new stressors and, sometimes, discrimination.
“It’s a land of opportunity, but the circumstances we provide them create stress and more anxiety than what they already had,” Chapelle said.
Being immersed in a new place with an unfamiliar language and different cultural norms is trying by itself, but the adaptation process also depends on where immigrants are from and the level of education and urbanization they have.
People who lived in refugee camps where their lives were organized by others have a particularly hard time getting settled into the independent American lifestyle, Chapelle said.
It also depends on one’s nationality, said Ferdinand Lossou, director of migration and refugee services for Catholic Social Services in Tucson.
He described the adjustments of people from well-educated, Western-exposed Lebanon, Jordan and Syria as easy compared to people from remote areas in Somali with less access to education.
Lossou, who is from West Africa, said his transition to the U.S. was simple because he had lived in Europe previously.
For some, “it’s really hard to understand, and they will ask the question 100 million times,” said Irena Aksel, a clinician for adult outpatient therapy services at La Frontera. Aksel is a refugee from Russia. She learned English upon arrival in the U.S. from the children she supervised as a day care assistant.
Matching new arrivals with more assimilated, bilingual immigrants from the same culture makes the transitional processes easier, she said, but can backfire if they isolate themselves within their own ethnic communities, slowing adaptation to the American lifestyle.
Lossou said his agency provides networks for refugees, including welcome picnics and ethnic councils, but it tries not to place refugees of the same ethnicities in the same neighborhoods, hoping to force some assimilation.
Hardships of the American Dream
Immigrants feel pressure to “make it” in the U.S., but jobs are hard to come by in a place that doesn’t always recognize foreign degrees and scoffs at accents.
The professional failure that can result cripples immigrants’ self-esteem.
“We are a country of idiots in our inability to understand an accent,” Chapelle said, explaining that immigrants who speak good English are often dismissed by potential employers who don’t want to deal with foreign pronunciation.
Aksel had degrees in psychology and speech-language pathology in Russia; neither is considered valid in the U.S., so she had to duplicate her post-secondary education in Arizona.
“We have people with tremendous skills not able to find jobs here,” Chapelle said. “They left what they knew and are unable to be the people they were before, here. It’s a tremendous pressure we put on people.”
A widened generational gap
While working-age immigrants may have trouble adapting to the U.S., teenagers and children learn English and absorb American culture all day long at school. They tend to outstrip their parents in assimilation, sometimes rupturing family structures.
“Kids are called upon to translate. They know how America works,” Chapelle said. “It’s easy for them to begin to take on responsibilities beyond their years.”
The upturned family order and new culture can make parental discipline difficult, and social workers here aren’t always sure how to balance respect of one culture with realities of another.
Closely monitoring older boys isn’t stressed in African culture, Chapelle said, but the lack of supervision worried the Tucson Police Department because immigrant children are more at risk to join gangs than children born here.
Criminal activity sometimes looks like economic opportunity to these children, she said, and they’re desperate to fit in.
“They all want to feel like they’re accepted and belong,” Chapelle said. “The first people who reach out to these kids are the ones who are marginalized, too.”
School is immigrant children’s shot at success in the U.S., and might be the only service they are guaranteed if they arrive illegally.
Hurdles in finding support
Language barriers impede legal immigrants’ access to services including care for the mental health issues their struggles may bring on. By law, services that receive federal funds must provide translators for non-English speakers in what Chapelle calls an “unfunded mandate.”
Because providers must bear the cost of translators, some service providers tell immigrant clients they need to bring English-speaking friends or family to appointments, although this is not a client responsibility.
Others rely on blue phones, electronic translators that make some patients nervous, fearing entanglement with a machine.
Illegal immigrants have drastically less access to help with mental illness. Because serving illegal immigrants could cost federally-funded agencies their business licenses, many providers refuse to give them care.
Stephanie Keef, community health services associate for Cope Community Services in Tucson, said the agency does not ask clients for documentation, because insurance is the first step to service and filters out illegal immigrants before they even get to Cope.
Just the mention of legal or illegal status seemed to make Tucson agencies nervous. One health care provider even shut the door on Daily Nebraskan reporters who asked to talk about mental health issues among immigrant populations, quickly saying through a small crack between the door frame and door that the agency does not provide any service in Spanish.
The sign for the agency was bilingual, the larger green typeface the business’s Spanish name.
Always on guard
The heavy presence of law enforcement and fear of being suspected of illegal activity casts paranoia over border communities, explained Kat Rodriguez, coordinator for Coalición de Derechos Humanos, a Tucson human rights group with a warning on its front window that border patrol may not enter without a search warrant.
“Living in a militarized zone creates health risks,” she said, referring specifically to the high nerves among migrants indicated by a study taken in Yuma, Ariz., closer yet to the border than Tucson.
Authorities make even innocent people nervous, she said, comparing the feeling to checking one’s seat belt when police drive by.
The Border Action Network in Tucson records abuse complaints from the community. Of the accusations in its latest report, recorded between September and December 2008, 21 percent of complaints came from U.S. citizens and another 58 percent were non-citizens with legal documentation.
Complaints described mistreatment by landlords, employers and law enforcement.
“I think that the initial feeling is, ‘What did I do?’” said Katie O’Connor, program and grants coordinator for the Border Action Network. “They internalize it, and feeling very alone, it would just add to their fear of really everything, everything that may pertain to that abuse.”
It seems citizens and immigrants, both legal and illegal, are grouped together under a veil of scrutiny in Tucson, causing anxiety for all. The xenophobic attitudes of some public servants underscore this tension.
“I’ve been told by a state representative that everyone who comes from somewhere else is illegal,” Chapelle said.
Unwanted homecomings
Those who actually are in the U.S. illegally and are deported or repatriated to their home countries tend to experience trauma on the way back, as well.
Tucson humanitarian aid group No More Deaths’ 2008 report documents two years of stories from aid stations at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The compilation of accounts about U.S. Border Patrol holding centers outlines 12 repeatedly heard offenses, including denial of food, water and medical attention, inhumane holding environments, verbal and physical abuse and general humiliation of detainees.
Julian Figueroa-Cortés is 21 years old and was recently deported after living in the U.S. since age seven. Figueroa-Cortés and his family arrived legally, but his green card was revoked five years ago when he was caught working as prostitute to support himself after leaving the family home.
He rolled a tube of pink lip-gloss between his palms as he poured out his story in a soup kitchen in the Mexican half of the border-straddling city of Nogales.
When he was caught for prostitution a second time and deported, border patrol put him in an isolated room and denied him water for four days.
They claimed to have forgotten about him.
“They didn’t treat me like a human being,” Figueroa-Cortés said. “They weren’t respectful, either. They were saying that immigrants don’t deserve to be in their country.”
In Nogales, he was sent to a Mexican government-run shelter where repatriated and deported people are allowed to spend three nights. His money was stolen when he left his bag alone there, and he was told to leave after one night because the shelter did not want to house a gay man.
From there, Figueroa-Cortés began sleeping in a mausoleum at a local cemetery and eating at a soup kitchen where he asked volunteers for medicine to help him sleep so he wouldn’t have to listen the voices.
He wasn’t sure if the night noises were from other cemetery squatters or spirits.
He was waiting for bus fare to Jalisco from his mom, who is in California, because the two American pennies and one five-peso coin left in his wallet wouldn’t cover it.
On country’s edge
At a first aid station a few blocks away from the soup kitchen, closer to the line, groups of young people sat in the shade of trailers in the late afternoon sun. Some of them had just been deported or repatriated, at least one following a workplace raid.
Others were planning on crossing soon. A teenage girl with dark jeans tucked into dusty purple suede boots sat crossed-legged on the ground, occasionally looking at the barbed wire-topped fence around the border checkpoint.
A fridge, a few gray tables and some extension cords formed a makeshift kitchen with a red tarp ceiling. A sign in Spanish instructing people to throw their trash away and find help at nearby shelters warned in all-capital letters: “For your safety, don’t stay long in this place.”
By nightfall, the girl with the purple boots was gone.
rachelalbin@dailynebraskan.com
It is a shame Mr. Wiegand that you clearly show your lack of education with such a narrow minded and "white trash" argument....And oh yes, I DID mean to put those two words in quotes.......
Why do you put in quotes the word people? Are you implying that they should not be called people? Maybe animals.
And, are you Native American? Because if you are not, then your family followed some kind of migration pattern to get here, right? Migration happens all the time also in your family. Please, don't respond with the argument that your family did not break the law. When a person is hungry she/ he will break the law, including the Wiegand's.