SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 4 (Xinhua) -- America's punitive immigration policy is a source of fear for some immigrants from Latin America who prefer to remain undocumented even if they have a chance to obtain legal status in the United States, a Stanford newsletter said Tuesday.
Stanford University sociologist Asad L. Asad, who interviewed dozens of undocumented and documented immigrants living in the Dallas metropolitan area between 2013 and 2015, conducted an extensive study on how those immigrants perceive and respond to threats of deportation from the country, according to Stanford Report, a newsletter delivering news about the university community via email.
For some LatAm immigrants, obtaining the right to permanent residency, such as a green card, in the United States would subject them to greater fears of deportation because they are known to immigration authorities, Asad found in his study published in the recent edition of Law & Society Review.
Some immigrants considered it more advantageous for them to ensure their long-term presence in the United States if they keep themselves undetectable to U.S. immigration law-enforcing agents, the research showed.
With such fears, the immigrants chose to live in the United States "off the radar" even if eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, a policy approved by former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2012 that allowed undocumented immigrants without a criminal record to obtain a work permit in the United States.
Asad said DACA holders had no sense of security either, because even a traffic ticket that failed to be paid up could have them arrested, thus easily leading to their deportation because they ended up "tagged in the system."
Documentation is hardly a shield from deportation fears, which hailed from decades of immigration reform that placed deportation at the center of its policy, Asad found.
As deportation conditions have expanded dramatically since the 1980s, the number of deportations has skyrocketed over the past 40 years, according to the study.
Such a punitive immigration policy, which forces undocumented immigrants to give up "rare opportunities for legal status," would undermine the long-term well-being of their children born in the Untied States and who naturally acquired U.S. citizenship, Asad concluded.
