The Foreign Service Journal, October 2016

48 OCTOBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL O n a sunny morning in October 2015, a middle-aged Mexican woman stands with her four chil- dren eyeing the line that snakes into the U.S. consulate general in Tijuana, Mexico. “I heard my children could get a U.S. passport,” she says, gripping a plastic folder containing their U.S. birth certificates. When asked, she mumbles that her children were born while she was working without authorization in the fields of California. She heard of an information fair at the consul- ate for migrant families whose kids were born in the United States. She looks nervous and, in the end, decides not to get in line. “I’ll come back another day,” she says, pulling her children away and disappearing into the crowd. This woman and her family belong to a growing demographic An Invisible Tide: Undocumented U.S. Kids inMexico The problem of undocumented U.S. kids in Mexico is a facet of the immigration tangle that is putting pressure on both sides of the border. BY AME L I A SHAW FEATURE Before joining the State Department in 2014, Amelia Shaw was a Fulbright Scholar, an aid worker, a reporter for NPR and a United Nations peacekeeper. Public diplomacy-coned, she is currently serving as a first-tour consular officer in Tijuana. She is the 2015 recipient of AFSA’s W. Averell Harriman Award for Constructive Dissent. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not neces- sarily those of the U.S. government. in Mexico—migrant families who have returned to Mexico, either voluntarily or following removal proceedings, and whose children are U.S. citizens by birthright. Many of these U.S.-born children do not have proper identity documents, such as a U.S. passport or Mexican birth or residency papers. Without them, they face difficulties in registering for school or accessing medical and other basic services in Mexico. As many as 600,000 U.S.-citizen minors may find themselves in this situation across Mexico, possibly more. Their growing pres- ence illuminates a concern for governments of both countries: the urgent need to promote the rights of dual citizens in two tightly interwoven societies. “We don’t know howmany U.S. citizens are in Mexico,” says Karin Lang, former chief of the American Citizen Services unit at U.S. Embassy Mexico City. “Homeland Security tracks deporta- tion of Mexicans—around 2.4 million. No one keeps track of the accompanying family members, so we may be underestimating howmany U.S.-born kids are here.” Getting the Ball Rolling in Mexico Lang was a key figure in a new initiative launched in Mission Mexico called Documéntate Ya! (Get Documented!)—a huge undertaking. She received the 2015 Mary Ryan Award for her leadership on documenting binational children. The goal of Documéntate is simple: collaborate with Mexican authorities to reach migrant families and help them fully docu-