What was it like to be selected to these delegations of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences?

 

The Holy Father, as a child of immigrants, as the spiritual leader whose life has embodied a dedication to the poor, is deeply concerned with how education should benefit our most vulnerable populations worldwide. Poverty, hunger, immigration, access to education and the context that rob all human beings of dignity and opportunity are urgent priorities of the Holy Father.

 

At the Pontifical Academy of Sciences earlier this month, scientists, researchers and practitioners from around the world gathered to consider the most recent evidence and to make recommendations to Pope Francis to guide the global conversation on bringing critical gaps and needed interventions moving forward. We were deeply honored to respond to his call to examine the nexus between immigration, poverty, and education.

 

 

In your abstract on “Educating the Children of Immigrants,” you write about the immigrant paradox. What is it?

 

While immigrants are poorer than their non-immigrant counterparts, they tend to have better outcomes in a range of physical, psychological and educational domains. However, the longer immigrants reside in their new societies, they lose that initial advantage.

 

This flies in the face of conventional expectations as many recently arrived immigrants face a wide range of stressors and risks — like high rates of poverty, discrimination, micro-aggressions, unauthorized status, fewer years of schooling and social isolation. And yet they do better than their counterparts who remain in their countries of origin as well as better than second- and third- generation immigrants. This immigrant paradox has emerged in many postindustrial nations and seems to indicate that in many countries, we are failing in our task to embrace our newcomers as members of our societies.

 

 

How do you explain the determination and resilience of immigrants?

 

Immigrants self-select and tend to be driven by optimism and the motivation to do better for their families. Let’s call it an immigrant vigor — an enormous national resource that should be harnessed and treasured.

 

 

 

 

In our session, we made recommendations for practice based on an NSF-funded study of promising practice schools in New York City and Sweden serving immigrant origin students.

 

 

How can access to the digital environment change the landscape for the most impoverished students?

 

New digital technologies have an enormous potential to reach learners in the most remote areas of the world where there is no literacy, no teachers and obviously no classrooms. Professor Maryanne Wolf, working with a team of MIT Media Lab researchers, is doing exemplary work bringing tablets with smart apps to children in the most remote areas of Ethiopia with intriguing initial results suggesting that children can make these tablets their own, teach each other and, in a generational reversal, teach their elders basic literacies. The potentialities are breathtaking, though still, of course, in initial stages, requiring culturally and locally relevant synergies.

 

 

How is the Vatican planning to address issues of education and poverty?

 

The Holy Father has spoken with a steady voice and great moral clarity on inequality, poverty and the rights of all immigrants. The Pontifical Academy will soon release a statement outlining priorities as well as concrete steps to be taken by the Vatican State. Concurrently, a book of collected essays based on the original papers presented will be published within the year, aimed at the scholarly and policy communities, but also to all concerned citizens.

 

 

In a separate Vatican workshop you presented on human trafficking — apart from the conditions of poverty and lawlessness, what allows human trafficking to become so pervasive and undetectable?

 

Trafficking is now a fully globalized part and parcel of an ever more interconnected, miniaturized, and yes, dystopic world. Forced labor is turned into economic value or profit for the traffickers. It thrives in the era of advanced technologies, mobile devices and social media. It is a global empire generating billions of dollars in profits. It involves failed states with weak or no institutions and rachitic economies, as well as the advanced high-income post-industrial democracies of North America and Europe. It encompasses all continents and races, the world’s religions and languages.

 

The victims and the crimes are at once everywhere and nowhere. Like Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” it is hidden in plain sight. In trafficking, the movement is nearly always from low– or lower–income origins to high- or higher–income destinations. Well-traveled corridors include trafficking from Bangladesh, the Philippines and Thailand to the Gulf countries; the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America to the United States; and from the former Soviet Union to the European Union. Trafficking involves the exploitation of the strong over the weak — in the case of children for sex or labor — the exploitation is from older to younger generations.

 

 

 

Part of the problem is that trafficking resists easy generalizations. Its constituent units are diverse and causally linked to disparate origins: the enslavement of Thai girls for sexual tourists, the trafficking of immigrants from Mexico and Central America for labor exploitation in Southern California, and the [indenture] of child soldiers in Africa. It also involves cultural practices such as the estimated 150,000-500,000 “restavec” children in forced domestic labor in Haiti, and the trafficking of brides from North Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia to Taiwan, Japan and China.

 

When it comes to children, [trafficking] involves a broad set of domains such as agricultural work, including debt bondage; domestic work; commercial sexual exploitation, including Internet pornography; the use of children for drug trafficking; child soldiers; illegal adoptions; begging; and organ trafficking. National and supranational bodies — including signatories to the 1949 UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the 117 co-signatories of the 2000 United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons (the so-called Palermo Protocol) – have primary responsibility to enforce national and international anti-trafficking laws, treaties and regulations.

 

Trafficking is a severe human rights violation of the integrity and inherent dignity of all human beings. There are individual successes in our country and globally. Guatemala’s swift development of a national DNA data bank to detect illegal adoptions – really a baby theft and selling conspiracy — is a good example. But tragically, trafficking on the whole is probably on the rise. We all need to open our eyes and act as members of the human family, as citizens, but also as consumers, to punish individuals, mafias, conglomerates and companies with blood in their hands.

 

 

What happens when the trafficking of children goes unchecked?

 

Trafficking is a crime enslaving millions of people — perhaps as many as there are people in Afghanistan (29.8 million, according to the 2013 Global Slavery Index). Twenty-seven percent of all detected trafficked are children, and two out of three are girls.

 

Trafficking rips children from their family and community, rupturing trust and attachment. Forced child labor involves three criteria. First, it turns a child into an “instrument of gain” by extracting profit from forced labor. Secondly, it removes them from the proscribed pathways that enable children the world over to reach and master culturally determined developmental milestones in the biological, emotional, cognitive, moral and social realms required to successfully make the transition to adulthood. Thirdly, it is life-thwarting, harming of the child’s physical, psychological, moral and social well-being, placing children in contexts that are inherently dangerous and beyond the developmental readiness and maturational capabilities to meet horrendous challenges.

 

We find PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)-consistent symptomatology — flashbacks, nightmares, depression, helplessness, hopelessness, anxiety disorder, panic disorder, somatic symptoms, as well as insomnia, guilt/shame and loss of self-esteem. There is social withdrawal, amnesia and disassociation. We find elevated rates of substance abuse, eating disorders, [and] suicidal ideation, gestures and acts. Maltreatment from traffickers, employers and exploiters often result in malnutrition, broken bones and teeth, dislocations, [and] head and brain injuries. Sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS as well as complications from hepatitis B and C, uterine infections, complications in pregnancy and infertility, are all secondary to trafficking. Other illnesses that are reported to be high among trafficked victims include malaria, asthma and other lung diseases, anemia and gastrointestinal diseases.

 

Children in the empire of suffering are the victims of two simultaneous crimes: They are violently assaulted and robbed of their childhood, but they are also robbed of their future. When children the world over are working through the developmental milestones, the littlest denizens in the empire of suffering are removed from the challenges and joys of normative child development, swimming against a powerful undertow ever threatening to drawn them. We completely concur with Pope Francis that these most horrendous of crimes must be given absolute priority for eradication.