4 Elementary School–Aged Children 105there is yet another category, that of young travelers who are pulled along by
a tide they do not understand and often resent, not yet having the social or
emotional maturity to understand that moving may have been perceived as
the best of a series of choices.
Children often have very little information or understanding of the pro-
cesses of leaving their homes and moving to another continent. Whether they
are refugees or voluntary immigrants, the process can take years, and stu-
dents may have forgotten—if they were ever told—that this kind of plan was
“in the works.” One day they are dressed in their “party clothes” and taken
to an airport where, like Huong, they are on the far side of a red velvet rope
separating them from everything that they had previously called home.
There are many reasons why adults might not tell children of emigration
plans until they are en route; parents are not confident the process will result
in success; children are not deemed to be “stakeholders” in the decisions or the
logistics of such events; or adults are too busy completing the process to think
about the effect it might have on the children. If the move is outside the bounds
of legal processes—undocumented entry into new country—children might
be intentionally uninformed so that they cannot be implicated should some-
thing go awry. They are rarely privy to the complicated issues of immigration,
including documentation of medical and other requirements. School “inquisi-
tions” about such details can leave them frightened and fearful. Children often
do not yet have the English proficiency to answer questions in ways in which
they could in their first language and they feel powerlessness over a situation
that is often murky to them, at best.
In many cases, immigrant children have had little experience with travel
beyond their home villages or cities. When asked where they are from, younger
immigrant children are likely to respond “my country.” They sometimes do
not have a sense of country identification, much less one of being “African”
or “Asian.” Yet as soon as they arrive in the United States, they are labeled in
such ways, and expected to use and respond to these terms. It is no wonder
that many look literally shell-shocked when they arrive. It is, indeed, like hav-
ing landed on a foreign planet. In their new world, students are asked to define
their identities in ways that they might never have had to explain before—
even to themselves—and in a language for which they do not yet have the
words. The work of acculturating to a new environment is doubled as children
have to define who they were “before.”
In this new world, everything is strange—houses, food, words, toilets
(particularly toilets), seasons, schools, teachers, homework, cars, crosswalks,
littering—each day is an endless litany of systems a young child had taken
for granted, even if in a refugee camp. The procedures that Huong navigated
for her mother—rent, utilities, school relationships—are even more daunting
when the activities are those of adults, and one does not yet have the language
to interpret or question activities that seem senseless or random.
Of course, students who arrive by crossing the United States/Mexico bor-
der illegally have a vastly different experience of leaving their home country
and arriving in the United States. The added stress of physical and psychologi-
cal danger places additional stress on children, and on their relationships with
the adults responsible for their care. Due to the unremittingly complicated
vagaries of immigration law and visa statuses, children are often separated