While the approval of immigration reform legislation is being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives, public discussions on the necessity of immigration legislation are reaching higher levels of attention.
Economic factors and the residential status of undocumented immigrants are not the only issues. If the U.S. Senate's immigration bill, which was approved by the Senate last June, is not passed, other issues regarding the undocumented community, especially women, could directly affect the Hispanic community.
According to a report recently published in Colorlines, immigrant women, which represent over 50 percent of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., are the group most vulnerable to Congress' decision and who stands to lose the most if the bill is not passed.
Immigrant women who enter American soil illegally are one of the groups least protected by laws, the report finds. Many times, said women suffer physical, sexual and emotional abuse from their spouses or other men, since there is no law protecting undocumented women from gender violence in the U.S.
The reform proposal, currently in the House of Representatives awaiting a vote, includes measures protecting women suffering these types of abuses.
According to the report, studies reveal that immigrant women experience higher rates of gender violence than women born in the U.S.; however, there are no objective statistics regarding this, since most of the time, undocumented women prefer not to report abuse-related incidents for fear of being deported.
According to the pro-women's rights organization Breakthrough, immigrant women are 3 to 6 times more likely to suffer domestic violence than American women. Between 34 and 49 percent of women who are not citizens suffer domestic and gender violence, a risk that rises to 60 percent in those who are married and up to 77 percent for women that depend on their spouses to maintain legal status.
Immigration Reform Bill That Properly Cares For Women Needed
For many organizations in favor of U.S. immigration laws, properly addressing the at-risk situation in which thousands of undocumented U.S.-based women live in is one of the most important points.
Pramila Jayapal, co-president of the "We Belong Together" campaign, one of the most critical voices of immigration reform in the past, says the problems and necessities of undocumented women has not properly been approached in immigration overhaul discussions.
"51 percent of immigrants in the U.S. are women, and three-fourths are women and children," Jayapal told Colorlines. "And the debate on immigration for so long has not been defined as a problem for women and children. We're used to seeing a bunch of pictures of immigrants in which men climb the border wall, which is just a small percentage of all the ways people get here. We want to make sure that people know what the real debate here is".