Banished to the Homeland

The 1996 U.S. Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act has led to the forcible deportation of more than thirty thousand Dominicans from the United States, with little protest or even notice from the public. Since these deportees return to the country of their origin, many Americans assume repatriation will be easy and the emotional and financial hardships will be few, but in fact the opposite is true. Deportees suffer greatly when they are torn from their American families and social networks, and they are further demeaned as they resettle former homelands, blamed for crime waves, c.