Alienation of “Vulnerable Immigrant Students” Blamed for Teen Suicides

Most mainstream media coverage is overtly pro illegal immigrant but one major newspaper has taken it a huge step further, suggesting in a lengthy piece that a public school’s “ethnic integration problem” is responsible for the suicide of three Hispanic students.

The story involves the small and upscale New York town of East Hampton, where the Hispanic population nearly doubled in the first decade of the new millennium, according to census figures cited in the article. By 2012 Hispanics made up 41% of the area’s public school population, a “dramatic demographic change,” according to the school district’s superintendent.

To accommodate the new “immigrant” students the district launched robust English as a Second Language (ESL) programs and it hired three Spanish-speaking social workers and two Spanish-speaking secretaries. But the ESL classrooms were stigmatized as “Little Mexico” because they were together in a cluster, the article points out. It’s not difficult to see where this is going. Let’s take an excerpt from the story to further drive the point home.

“The divide, administrators found, was adding to a sense of alienation among some of the more vulnerable immigrant students, many of whom had moved to East Hampton years after their parents had arrived, having to readjust to their mothers and fathers at the same time as they entered a new school, with a new language, in a place that is rarefied even by the standards of the average American student.”

Inevitably, the reporter concludes that this created a “division between the relatively small and economically comfortable group of Anglo-Saxons for whom the school was founded and newer, poorer Hispanic residents, whose numbers have been rising rapidly.” To back this up the story offers this as evidence; three Hispanic students committed suicide in three years.   

The second one was a 16-year-old junior from Ecuador, David Hernandez, who hanged himself just a few days after homecoming in September. It marked the second suicide by a Hispanic student in three years. Two months later, another Hispanic student who was about to transfer to the school also committed suicide. What else could possibly be responsible for these tragic events if not the anti-immigrant discrimination the article assures drove these teens to end their young lives.

Could other factors have played a role in the tragedies? Only one of the teens, David Hernandez, was identified in the story so let’s take a look at other information involving his case. His mother left him in Ecuador to come to America when he was a toddler, according to the article, and he joined her just three years ago in a foreign country where he didn’t speak the language. Perhaps that, combined with the fact that his mother abandoned him for all those years, played a role in his actions.

What about this? David was also questioning his sexuality, according to friends and officials cited in the story, and there were “allegations of bullying from fellow Hispanic students, and evidence of previous attempts to kill himself.” So, the article reveals that “fellow Hispanic students” may have bullied this poor kid because he might be gay yet this information is buried deep in the piece after the anti-immigrant argument was well established as the likely reason that drove him to suicide.

Making matters worse, the deceased student’s mother (Carmita Barros), the one who left her toddler in a foreign country for most of his life to come to America, accuses the school of ignoring her son’s case because he was Hispanic! One more thing, Barros and a group of other Hispanic parents also complained that they felt “distance from the school in general,” because they are Hispanic of course.