By Davindranauth Shiwratan

I applaud the 2013 reauthorization of the 1994 landmark law Violence Against Women Act (V.A.W.A.). Although the VAWA legislative amendments improved the protection available to battered immigrant women, these enactments are meaningless if affected women do not know their rights.

Demographers’ estimated over 5.3 million females among the unauthorized alien population in 2011. Immigrant women workers are vulnerable to rape, sexual abuse and harassment, or other gender-motivated exploitation in the workplace. The Pew Hispanic Center reported that only 58 percent of working-age women are undocumented immigrants in the labor force.

Some immigrant women are brought to the United States through human trafficking networks and forced under conditions of surveillance, threats of deportation, and physical harm. Roughly 100,000 survivors of human trafficking live in the U.S. today, according to the US State Department, whose assessments suggest as many as 17,500 foreign-born victims are brought in each year.

In order for abused women to sufficiently understand the options available to them, advocates must increase community outreach and education. Educational programs can be given at churches and community centers. Battered women’s shelters can partner with legal services providers and allow advocates to meet with these women in a place where clients feel safe. Advocates providing these services understand the unique cultural restraints that the battered immigrant woman is faced with.

While immigrant partners and wives face obstacles similar to those of domestic ones, there are several cultural barriers that intensify these problems for immigrants, which require a remedy. First, immigrant women may be unaware that partner abuse is against the law in the U.S. because it is legal in many other countries. Moreover, these women may be wary of requesting police services in the US due to law enforcement inefficiencies in their host countries.

Second, while many domestic women feel pressure to stay in relationships due to social conventions, immigrant women are often more likely to stay in relationships due to the varying social conventions of their countries of origin. This creates the fear that, not only may they be deported if they report their batterer to the police, but that they may also have to face family members as a shunned divorcee.

Finally, language serves as the most obvious barrier that prevents many immigrant women from taking legal action against their abusers. Not only may a woman have difficulty conveying the physical and mental abuse perpetrated against her by her batterer, she may also be isolated from the legal and social services available to her due to a language barrier.

Liberals support legal immigration. They uphold blanket amnesty for those who enter the U.S. illegally. Liberals believe that undocumented immigrants have a right to the educational and health benefits that U.S. citizens receive regardless of legal status. It is unfair to arrest millions of undocumented immigrants.

Immigration attorneys and advocates highlight changes to the V.A.W.A. that would facilitate its intended objective of protecting abused foreign nationals from their abusers and independently providing them with a path to lawful permanent residence.

Conservatives oppose amnesty for those who enter the U.S. illegally. Those who break the law by entering the U.S. illegally do not have the same rights as those who obey the law and immigrate legally. The borders should be secured before addressing the problem of illegal immigrants currently in the country.

Other observers highlight the vulnerability of U.S. immigration policy to fraud within V.A.W.A. and the provision to determine whether a marriage was bona fide.

If battered immigrant women were informed of their rights and the protection available to them in the V.A.W.A., then the implementation of the law would be successful.