American parents are way too focused on their kids’ self-esteem

 Our over-the-top efforts to ensure that kids feel valued and adored can actually make them feel inept.

For two kids who share so much of their DNA, my children couldn’t be more different in their displays of self-confidence. My 7-year-old recently got toothpaste on her dress while brushing her teeth, and in response, she burst into tears, dropped to the floor, and rolled around screaming, “I’m the worst person ever!” My 10-year-old, however, acts as though his knowledge already surpasses that of Albert Einstein. Whenever we point out that he’s wrong about something, he disagrees, as if the number of moons orbiting Jupiter is a matter of opinion. Sometimes I wonder if my daughter’s self-esteem is too low and my son’s is too high. How important is having the right amount of self-esteem? Does the right amount even exist?

As an American parent, I’ve always assumed that having a healthy amount of self-esteem is crucial for my kids’ well-being. Once that’s secure, the thinking goes, everything else will just fall into place. This idea is such a given that when I was researching my book, How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes, one of my good friends—also a parenting journalist—advised me to make my first chapter about self-esteem.

But as I dug into the research, I learned that many American parents have been woefully overvaluing and misunderstanding the concept. Having healthy self-esteem does not ensure that kids will fare well or stay out of trouble. And although self-esteem is a tricky concept to study, research suggests that the steps parents take to foster self-esteem in their kids often have the paradoxical effect of undermining it. Our over-the-top efforts to ensure that kids feel valued and adored can actually make them feel inept—whereas intentionally exposing our kids to disappointment and failure, which so many parents are loath to do, can give children a satisfying sense of self-efficacy.

Christopher Anderson / Magnum

For decades, Americans have been a little obsessed with the concept of self-esteem, a measure of how much confidence and value people feel they have. In 1986, the governor of California, George Deukmejian, signed legislation that created the Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility, which concluded that boosting Californians’ collective levels of self-esteem would lower rates of crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, welfare dependency, and school underachievement. The task force’s final report referred to self-esteem as a “social vaccine” that is “central to most of the personal and social problems that plague human life in today’s world.”

That’s a bold statement, based on a bold assumption that the U.S. is suffering from an ongoing epidemic of low self-esteem, and that this deficiency is dangerous. You’ve probably heard that teens with low self-esteem are more likely than other kids to be depressed, to be anxious, to drink, to do drugs, and to commit crimes. This is all true. But what might come as a surprise is that the inverse of this statement is not also true. High self-esteem is not a panacea against all things bad, and kids with high self-esteem often make bad choices too.

“It’s unclear, actually, just how important self-esteem may be in terms of predicting healthy outcomes,” says Grace Cho, a developmental psychologist at St. Olaf College, in Minnesota, and the co-author of Self-Esteem in Time and Place: How American Families Imagine, Enact, and Personalize a Cultural Ideal. “The literature is actually really kind of messy and mixed.” In an exhaustive review of the research literature, the Florida State University social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues concluded that “raising self-esteem will not by itself make young people perform better in school, obey the law, stay out of trouble, get along better with their fellows, or respect the rights of others.”

Healthy self-esteem cannot be universally essential for another reason too: It is largely an American construct. Many other countries, including Japan and China, do not give self-esteem much, if any, consideration (some languages don’t even have a word for it). “Even in very modern societies, cultures that we think are very similar to ours don’t necessarily view self-esteem with the same set of ideals that we do,” Cho told me.

America’s obsession with self-esteem makes evaluating and encouraging it difficult and messy. U.S. parents often have a hard time estimating how much self-esteem their children have. “It’s a really complex construct in our day-to-day lives,” Chris Barry, a developmental psychologist at Washington State University, told me. For instance, some American kids (and adults) with low self-esteem outwardly project confidence in an attempt to appear self-confident. On top of that, parents tend to overestimate their children’s self-esteem—perhaps both because kids are adept at hiding their issues, and because parents assume that healthy self-esteem is crucial and desperately want to believe their kids are doing fine.

Parents also try to boost their kids’ sense of self-worth in the wrong way, through effusive praise. One survey found that 87 percent of U.S. parents believe that children need praise to feel good about themselves. But research conducted by Eddie Brummelman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, suggests that praise can sometimes have the opposite effect. When parents give kids with low self-esteem what he calls “inflated” praise—such as saying “Oh, that is incredibly gorgeous!” to a kid who just made a stick-figure drawing—their self-esteem drops even more. Brummelman theorizes that when kids with low self-esteem hear inflated praise, they interpret it as pressure to continue performing exceptionally. They then launch into self-protection mode and end up doubting their ability more. (On the flip side, other research suggests that when we make our kids feel like the center of the universe all the time, we also increase the chance that they will grow up to become narcissists.)

Praising kids specifically for their ability or smarts—which parents do when they say things like “You’re so smart!” or “You’re such a great artist!”—can also pose problems. Research by the Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck has shown that this kind of praise, compared with praising kids for their effort, increases the chance that kids will buckle in the face of setbacks and have deflated feelings of self-worth. They begin to question the ability they were told they had. Over time, they come to think of ability as a fixed trait—not something that can be cultivated with practice.

American parents today are also quick to protect their kids from disappointment and failure. We give participation trophies when kids don’t win first place; we fly into the school to deliver kids’ forgotten homework. But these well-meaning interventions backfire because a child with healthy self-esteem is a child who has learned, through experience, that he can overcome obstacles and disappointment. He’s had the opportunity to fail and has discovered that failing doesn’t preclude him from being loved.

When I asked Dario Cvencek, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences who studies self-esteem, to describe to me what children with healthy self-esteem act like, he said that they’re often kids who are willing to accept a new challenge or work longer on challenging tasks. Perhaps that’s because they have had to do so before, and they have learned that perseverance through disappointment pays off. Martin Seligman, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, has argued that “by cushioning feeling bad, it has made it harder for our children to feel good.”

What should parents do to foster healthy self-esteem in their kids? We should stop obsessing over the concept, because it is probably not the be-all and end-all that we think it is. According to Cho, research has shown, for instance, that many East Asian children score low on traditional self-esteem measures, but that they rarely suffer from psychological problems or do poorly in school as a result. This suggests that “self-esteem is just one thing in a myriad of practices that parents can engage in that could help children thrive,” Cho said. We’re not going to ruin our kids by not focusing on it—and we might even help them, given that our approaches for boosting self-esteem are often counterproductive.

We should also be careful about showering our children with indiscriminate praise. Instead, we should be more honest in our appraisals—not by shaming kids or putting them down, but by giving them feedback that is commensurate with their effort. Tell your kid that you like their off-key singing, but don’t tell them it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard. When we praise our kids, we should encourage their efforts, rather than celebrate them for their achievements, abilities, or smarts. And we should let them experience hardships. When kids face adversity and get through it, they learn that they are loved unconditionally and that failure is not a sign of ineptitude, but an opportunity to learn, grow, and come to believe in themselves.

This post is adapted from Wenner Moyer’s recent book, How to Raise Kids Who Aren't Assholes.

(Source: The Atlantic)

Minamata: How a Japanese corporation poisoned a community and an American photographer fought to expose it

 Minamata, directed by artist and film producer Andrew Levitas (Georgetown), is about the industrial poisoning of a Japanese fishing village by the Chisso chemical company, and the struggle, beginning in 1971, by famed photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith to reveal the disastrous human consequences of this corporate crime.

Between 1951 and 1968, Chisso dumped thousands of tons of untreated wastewater containing the highly-toxic methylmercury into Minamata Bay in southwest Japan, poisoning local fish and other sea life.

Local residents, having always eaten fish from the bay, noticed strange behaviour and illness amongst cats in the 1950s, and then, in 1956, the first human cases appeared.

In the years that followed thousands of residents, including children suffered muscle weakness, disability, insanity, coma and death from severe mercury poisoning, with the company denying any responsibility for the health catastrophe.

Aileen Mioko (Minami Bages) and W. Eugene Smith (Johnny Depp) in Minamata [Source: Metalwork Pictures]

Today, 2,283 people have been officially recognised as patients and it is widely acknowledged that over 75,000 people suffered from Minamata mercury poisoning. Over 1,700 lawsuits are still ongoing.

Minamata is a forceful examination of Chisso’s ruthless attempts to prevent any exposure of its operations and the suffering of its victims. Based on the book Minamata: A Warning to the World, by W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Mioko, the 115-minute film has brought its director into conflict with MGM, the movie’s North American distributor.

Levitas’s movie was completed in late 2019 and premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in early 2020 and was supposed to be released in the US and the UK in February 2021. This did not occur.

MGM, notwithstanding a handful of international screenings this year, has “buried” the film, refusing to announce a North American release date because of the alleged “personal problems” of the film’s lead actor Johnny Depp. We will return to MGM’s outrageous censorship below.

Tomoko in Her Bath by W. Eugene Smith, Japan, 1972 [Source: Wikipedia]

Minamata opens with Smith (Depp) in the process of photographing “Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath,” his acclaimed shot of a mother cradling her severely deformed, naked daughter, who is afflicted by Minamata disease, in a traditional Japanese bath.

The extraordinarily moving black-and-white image, later considered by many as one of Smith’s greatest achievements, along with others from the Minamata series published by Life magazine, brought to American and international audiences the horror of Chisso’s mercury poisoning.

The film then flashes back to a year earlier. Smith, a semi-recluse in his Manhattan loft, is at a creative impasse. Alienated from his former wife and children, the acclaimed photographer is frustrated with publishers, still suffering post-traumatic stress from serious wounds and harrowing experiences in World War II and drinking heavily. (Sara Fishko’s 2015 documentary, The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith, is a valuable companion piece to Levitas’s movie [see: WSWS review and interview with the director.])

Aware of his socially conscious photographic work, Aileen Mioko (Minami Bages) approaches Smith to help expose the situation in Minamata. “There’s a resistance on the ground but we need global attention,” she says.

At first reluctant, Smith eventually decides to approach long-time collaborator and Life magazine editor Robert Hayes (Bill Nighy) and insists the latter send him to Japan in order to blow the story open.

On arrival, Smith discovers that the villagers, after years of fighting Chisso, are exhausted and intimidated. Armed with as many cameras as the villagers could find, and a makeshift dark-room, Smith sets about winning the villagers’ confidence and gathering evidence against the company.

Aileen Mioko (Minami Bages) and W. Eugene Smith (Johnny Depp) with Minamata disease patient [Source: Metalwork Pictures]

Smith, Aileen and activist Kiyoshi (Ryo Kase) visit the Chisso company hospital in disguise and photograph those suffering the worst of the disease. They also uncover documents showing that the company hid the findings of private research, proving the river water was indeed poisonous for over 15 years.

Chisso’s president, Junichi Nojima (Jun Kunimura), is aware of Smith’s arrival in the community and tries a number of tactics—including bribery and physical violence—to dissuade or block the photographer’s work.

Running parallel with Smith’s efforts is another group representing a minority of victims still determined to fight the company. Though some are afraid of challenging the company, group leader Mitsuo Yamazaki (Hiroyuki Sanada), in a moving scene, urges them on. “This is not just about this town,” he declares. “Big companies invade small towns all over the world and pollute their existence.… It’s happened before, and it will happen again!”

Smith eventually wins the trust of Tomoko Uemura’s mother and is finally allowed to take the soon to be famous photograph. This and other outstanding Minamata images published by Life made up Smith’s last photo-essay before his death in 1978.

Minamata makes clear that the disaster that hit the southwestern Japanese fishing community was not a one-off. The film concludes with an extended list of similar tragedies in the decades since the Minamata disaster: mercury pollution in Indonesia, radiation in Chernobyl and Fukushima, toxic mine waste poisoning in Africa, Latin and South America, the lead poisoning of Flint water supplies in Michigan and numerous other cases.

Reviews of Minamata have been mostly positive but there have been some sour responses by critics from Indiewire and the UK-based Independent and the Telegraph. Underlying their critiques is an insistence that no one should get too emotional about the disaster, let alone be passionately committed to exposing the plight of the Minamata victims. Any filmmaker venturing outside this framework is beyond the pale.

Indiewire critic Eric Kohn, for example, denounces the film as a “mopey drama” in an article headlined, “Johnny Depp’s Gonzo Performance Can’t Rescue an Overzealous Biopic.”

The “occasional poignant observation can’t salvage a movie trying this hard to tug every heartstring at its disposal,” Kohn declares, and accuses the film of “defaulting to histrionics.”

Geoffrey McNab in the Independent says that the film “pulls in contradictory directions” and gives it two stars. “It can’t work out whether it’s a crusading social drama or the story of a troubled artist’s redemption. The result is a film that neither engages nor moves the viewer in the way that might have been expected.”

The Telegraph declares Minamata is a “self-glorifying” biopic and accuses Levitas of “shaping the story to flatter Smith with a fairly groanworthy redemption arc.”

Contrary to these arrogant and self-satisfied claims, Minamata, is a passionate and thoroughly objective work and one that thoughtfully shows how Smith’s determination to expose Chisso’s crimes, and the corporation’s victims, reinvigorated his creative spirit.

While it is not possible here to critically examine the depth and significance of all Smith’s work (see the International Center for Photography’s online collection), his contribution to photography—as a powerful journalistic tool and artistic medium—is significant and underpinned by a profound humanity.

Smith’s post-war photo-essays—Spanish Village (1951), Nurse Midwife (1951), Country Doctor (1954) and others—established a new paradigm in contemporary photojournalism.

Above all, Smith was driven by a passionate belief that fighting to expose the truth could animate others and change society for the better. As he once said, “A photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes—just sometimes—one photograph, or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness… a catalyst to thought.”

While these sentiments strongly underpin Minamata, Levitas now confronts a media corporation hostile to these concerns and is using an ongoing #MeToo-style campaign against Depp to “bury” the film and punish all those involved in its production.

In 2018, Depp’s former wife Amber Heard, penned an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, claiming she was victim of domestic abuse. This set off the usual media and career-trashing hysteria against Depp, who was not named in the Post story. None of the incidents alleged by Heard have ever been the subject of any criminal investigations, let alone charges.

Depp was quickly removed from the scheduled next production of Pirates of the Caribbean and then last year was asked to “resign” his role as Gellert Grindelwald in the third movie of the Fantastic Beasts franchise. Depp’s removal came after he lost a libel case against the Murdoch-owned, UK-based Sun tabloid after it published sensationalist material denouncing him as a “wife-beater.”

Last week Levitas made public a letter he sent to MGM condemning the giant entertainment corporation. “MGM [in early 2020] was intent on bringing to light the suffering of the thousands of victims of one of the most heinous industrial pollution incidents the world has ever seen.

“In re-exposing their pain in the sharing of their story, this long marginalized community hoped for only one thing—to lift history from the shadows so that other innocents would never be afflicted as they have… and it seemed in that moment, with MGM’s partnership, a decades-long wish was finally coming true,” the letter states.

Andrew Levitas [Source: Metalwork Pictures]

“Now, imagine the devastation when they learned this past week, that despite an already successful global roll out, MGM had decided to ‘bury the film’ (acquisitions head Mr. Sam Wollman’s words) because MGM was concerned about the possibility that the personal issues of an actor in the film could reflect negatively upon them and that from MGM’s perspective the victims and their families were secondary to this.”

Levitas recalled speaking to Mr. Uemura whose daughter “suffered every single day of her life” because a “large faceless corporation didn’t live up to their moral obligation to humanity, decency and righteousness.” His letter demanded MGM executives speak to Uemura and other Minamata victims and “explain why you think an actor’s personal life is more important than their dead children, their siblings, their parents, and all victims of industrial pollution and corporate malfeasance.”

The letter noted that “people all over the world are victimized by corporations who do not value them or consider them as real” and urged MGM to reverse its decision “to actively hinder the distribution and promotion of Minamata.”

It concluded with a YouTube video of one of the victims—Shinobu Sakamoto—talking about her experiences.

MGM has responded with a contemptuous and anodyne statement. “The film was acquired for release via American International Pictures, a division of MGM which handles day-and-date releases. Minamata continues to be among future AIP releases and at this time, the film’s US release date is TBA [to be announced].” Any decision by MGM, currently being taken over by Amazon, will undoubtedly be influenced by economic calculations.

(Source: WSWS)

‘They’ve had enough of everything’: Record numbers of Americans are giving up their US citizenship

Handling of coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump, and onerous tax filing requirements cited as reasons 

Record numbers of Americans are renouncing their citizenship according to numbers reported by a New York accountancy firm.

Bambridge Accountants reports that 5,816 people gave up US citizenship in the first half of 2020 — a 1,210 per cent increase on the previous six months in which only 444 cases were recorded.

The first two quarters of 2020 also rank as having the first and second highest numbers on record at 2,909 and 2,907 respectively.

In the whole of 2019, a total of only 2,072 Americans gave up their citizenship.

Bambridge specialises in preparing and filing taxes for US and UK expats, particularly those in creative fields such as acting.

The firm cites the pandemic as a motivating factor for US expats to cut ties and avoid the current political climate and onerous tax reporting.

Alistair Bambridge, a partner at the firm, told CNN: “These are mainly people who already left the US and just decided they’ve had enough of everything.”

He adds: “What we’ve seen is people are over everything happening with President Donald Trump, how the coronavirus pandemic is being handled, and the political policies in the US at the moment.”

There are approximately 9 million Americans living outside of the US.

Each year they are required to file tax returns, and report all of their foreign bank accounts, investments and pensions.

Mr Bambridge explains: “The current pandemic has allowed individuals the time to review their ties to the US and decide that the current political climate and annual US tax reporting is just too much to bear.”

On a positive note, those who have retained their citizenship remain eligible for any stimulus payments authorised by the US government in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Asked about the impact of the November election on the number of people giving up their citizenship, Mr Bambridge said: “If President Trump is re-elected, we believe there will be another wave of people who will decide to renounce their citizenship.”

In order to renounce their citizenship, Americans must pay a $2,350 government fee, and those based overseas must do so in person at a US Embassy.

Every three months the US government publishes the names of those who have given up their citizenship.

Department of Homeland Security records show that in 2018, the year with the most recent data available, 761,901 people were naturalised as US citizens.

(Source: The Independent)

Mrs America: A smart take on the blind spots of 20th-century feminism

The Emmy-nominated series brilliantly depicts the women’s liberation movement of the Seventies and its critics, but the heroes and villains are not so clear-cut, says Fiona Sturges

There’s a moment in the television series Mrs America when the journalist and feminist campaigner Gloria Steinem makes a late-night phone call to Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. Friedan’s book argued against the post-war cult of the housewife and lit the touch paper for feminism’s second wave in America. In the series, Friedan and Steinem are at loggerheads. Friedan can’t stand Steinem’s softly-softly diplomacy and is irked by her prettiness; Steinem isn’t a fan of Friedan’s bull-in-a-china shop tactics. “Every time I reach out to her, I pull back a bloody stump,” complains Steinem to a colleague. But then she is reminded by a fellow campaigner, Natalie Gittelson, that “we get to do what we do because [Friedan] risked everything. So before you tell her what she can and cannot do, consider just saying thank you.” And so, a few days later, Steinem picks up the phone and does just that. “I don’t know if I ever told you,” she tells Friedan, “but your book changed my life.”

Cate Blanchett stars as anti-feminist campaigner Phyllis Schlafly in the BBC drama ( BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos )

Mrs America is a stylish ensemble piece about the struggle for gender equality in the Seventies that was thrown into focus by the equal rights amendment (ERA), a proposed change to the constitution guaranteeing equal rights for women (spoiler alert: it was defeated). Along with Steinem and Friedan, the series also highlights the achievements of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, and Bella Abzug, a lawyer and social activist who went on to lead Jimmy Carter’s National Advisory Committee for Women. As Mrs America tells it, their biggest opponent was Phyllis Schlafly (played with starchy brilliance by Cate Blanchett, who has been nominated for an Emmy for the role), who mobilised housewives and the evangelical right to do her bidding. It also proved a handy peg on which to hang her own ambitions as a political activist. Defence was her passion – though, in those days, no one wanted to hear a woman talk about that.

Schlafly is a formidable rival, a sharp-elbowed bigot in twinset and pearls who fetishised domesticity and motherhood, despite having outsourced it in her own home to a black housekeeper. When, in Mrs America, one of her fellow anti-ERA activists reveals she is a member of the John Birch Society, an anti-communist group with alleged ties to the Ku Klux Klan, she smiles benignly and replies, “That’s your right, and I think maybe you should just keep that to yourself.” On hearing of secretaries being sexually assaulted by their male bosses on Capitol Hill, she shrugs and says they must be “inviting it” since “virtuous women are rarely accosted by unwelcome sexual propositions”.

Just as compelling as the gulf between Schlafly and the women’s liberation movement, however, is Mrs America’s depiction of the competing agendas of feminists. Race is a grave blind spot among the white, middle-class campaigners who habitually talk over their black peers. When Margaret Sloan-Hunter, the only black writer at Steinem’s Ms magazine, pitches an idea during an editorial meeting about tokenism in the workplace, her co-workers stare blankly at her. “You’re not saying you feel like that here – look at our latest issue!” says one editor, waving a cover image featuring a black woman. Steinem soothingly adds that Sloan-Hunter should speak out if she ever feels overlooked because of her race, ignoring the fact that she just did.

Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem in ‘Mrs America’ (BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos)

The term intersectionality hadn’t been invented in the Seventies, though the hierarchy of privilege on display is jolting in its familiarity. So too the factions – black vs white, young vs old, gay vs straight, working mothers vs stay-at-home ones. Such divisions have always been there, though today they are amplified and heightened by social media to the point where resolution, or even a calm conversation, can seem impossible.

In Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, the author Helen Lewis looks at the victories secured by 19th- and 20th-century British feminists that we now take for granted, among them the right to divorce, vote, study at university, work, consent to sex, abort babies and escape male violence. “Progress erases struggle,” says Lewis, noting how much of their work is forgotten, along with the opposition they faced. The women who brought about change, she points out, were often bloody-minded, defensive and mean-spirited. They were, to use today’s parlance, problematic. But to expect ideological perfection from our feminist forebears is to wish for the moon on a stick.

Betty Friedan could be narcissistic, judgmental and petty. She famously called lesbians the “lavender menace” and wanted to exclude them from the movement. She also had a hell of a temper, as evidenced at a public debate with Phyllis Schlafly where, after being goaded about her divorce, she yelled: “You are a witch! God, I’d like to burn you at the stake.”

Every political cause has its heroes and villains, though Mrs America expertly depicts the grey space between them. It shows how movements rise up through desperation and the desire to do good, but how stubbornness and self-interest are often vital ingredients in getting stuff done. It shows how marginalised people routinely fail to notice those more marginalised than themselves, and that humans are infuriating and complicated. Rather than dismiss those feminists who battled for the freedoms we enjoy today, we need to acknowledge them, understand them and learn from their mistakes.

‘Mrs America’ is available to watch on BBC iPlayer

(Source: Independent)

A woman without a country: Adopted at birth and deportable at 30

She grew up thinking she was American. When she realised that she wasn’t, her quest to fix the problem put her at risk of deportation. 

When Rebecca Trimble was a little girl, she wore red, white and blue to Independence Day parades. In middle school, she was a flag-bearer for the Girl Scouts. During her teenage years, the Backstreet Boys blared from a boom box in her bedroom.

It was on the eve of getting married in 2012 that she realized there was something amiss in her all-American upbringing. Adopted as an infant from Mexico, she discovered that what she thought was a minor mix-up in her paperwork was something else entirely. Eventually, she realized that not only was she not American, she did not, in the government’s view, belong in the United States at all.

This year, a letter from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services arrived in the remote corner of western Alaska where Ms. Trimble cooks for homeless people and where her husband, John, is the only dentist in town.

“You are not authorized to remain in the United States,” it said, ordering her to depart the country within 33 days or face deportation.

Rebecca Trimble has been on a tangled journey through the vast American immigration bureaucracy. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

“I feel incredibly vulnerable,” Ms. Trimble, 30, said as her two boys, Elliot, 5, and Jay, 4, played in their Bethel apartment on a sun-smacked afternoon. “I am putting my faith in a miracle.”

Lax oversight of international adoptions for years fueled a booming trade in babies. In the 1980s and ’90s, Americans seeking children were tricked into paying organized rings for babies smuggled across the border. In the early 2000s, children wrongly taken from their parents by brokers in Vietnam, Guatemala and other countries were presented as orphans to American adoption agencies. In other cases, parents did not understand, or did not follow, the rules for making foreign adoptions fully legal.

Adherence by countries like Mexico to international conventions to prevent the abduction, sale or trafficking of children has curbed illicit adoptions in recent years. But some of the irregular practices of the past are upending the lives of adoptees like Ms. Trimble as they reach adulthood.

“There are too many people in limbo through no fault of their own,” said Susan Jacobs, a retired ambassador who was the special adviser on adoptions at the State Department between 2010 and 2017. “They find out in their 20s, and are held accountable for what their parents did or didn’t do when they were babies.”

John and Rebecca Trimble moved to Bethel, Alaska, in 2017 so Dr. Trimble could work as a dentist in an underserved area. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

The Adoptee Rights Campaign, a group that promotes citizenship for adoptees, estimates that at least 35,000 people in the United States lack American citizenship because their adoptive parents failed to secure it for them.

They have started families of their own, only to learn the truth when they went to vote, tried to obtain a passport or got into trouble with the law. More recently, their precarious status has been laid bare when they applied for a Real ID, a license with stricter standards that will be required for domestic air travel in 2021.

“Adopted adults are discovering they are not citizens after thinking they were Americans all their lives,” said Gregory Luce, an immigration and adoptee rights lawyer in Minneapolis.

In 2001, Congress provided relief for adoptees below the age of 18 who lacked citizenship, and the federal government has been willing to help others adjust their status on a case-by-case basis. But that flexibility appears to have diminished under the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration agenda.

Ms. Trimble has found herself on a tangled journey through the immigration bureaucracy, where every appeal seems to end the same: She must return to a country she has not seen since she was 3 days old.

A photo album with pictures of the Trimbles, high school sweethearts who got married in 2012. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

A baby born in Mexico

Ms. Trimble’s story began when her adoptive father, George Wilson, a recreational vehicle mechanic in Salem, Ore., and his wife, Pamela Edmonds, gave up on conceiving a child after eight years of trying. One day in 1989, they got word from friends in Mexico that a baby about to be born to a 12-year-old girl there would need a home. They agreed to pay the girl’s medical bills and headed for Mexico with a stash of diapers, baby bottles and newborn clothes.

Dr. Trimble holding a baby book that had been created by Ms. Trimble’s adoptive parents. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

Three days later, they were homebound with their daughter. At the border, a U.S. agent peered into their vehicle, where Rebecca was bundled up in her new mother’s arms; he waved them through. The next month, a birth certificate arrived from Mexico that listed them as Rebecca Lynn Wilson’s parents, which they thought — incorrectly — was all they needed to render the adoption legal.

Becky, as they called her, was a bubbly child with almond-shaped brown eyes and silky dark hair. “She was such a joy, so smart and so loving,” Ms. Edmonds, now 62, recalled.

Eventually, Becky learned that she was adopted. “I didn’t think I was any less American.”

After her parents separated, Ms. Trimble and her mother moved to Vancouver, Wash. At Hudson’s Bay High School, Becky excelled in her classes, took up bowling and managed the track team.

One of her teachers encouraged the class to register to vote ahead of the 2008 presidential election, and that November, Ms. Trimble voted for the only time in her life.

She fell in love with a fellow student, John Trimble, a distance runner who took her to the prom. After high school, the couple decided to get married and thought about a road trip to Canada for their honeymoon.

In the spring of 2012, Ms. Trimble applied for an enhanced ID, an alternative to a passport that Americans can use to enter the United States from Canada or Mexico.

A clerk studied her Mexican birth certificate, handed it back to her and said that Ms. Trimble had to show further proof of American citizenship, such as a naturalization certificate. She was stumped.

Ms. Trimble helps Jay, 4, prepare to brush his teeth, while Elliot, 5, looks on. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

“I go to my mom and ask her questions, and she doesn’t know. John and I started researching,” she recalled.

Confused, the couple chose to focus on their upcoming wedding. “I’m a pretty optimistic person,” Dr. Trimble, 29, recalled. “I thought, ‘We’ll figure it out.’”

Only much later did the extent of the problems with how her parents handled her adoption become apparent. Before leaving Mexico, Ms. Trimble’s parents should have obtained official custody of their new baby from a Mexican judge and then secured an immigrant visa for her at a U.S. consulate.

Ms. Trimble’s parents said they did not know that they had run afoul of any rules. The doctor who delivered her, they said, had informed them that all they needed to formalize the adoption was a birth certificate listing them as parents, and they were given one by the friends who had arranged the adoption. In Oregon, they applied for and received a Social Security card for Ms. Trimble. “As far as we knew, Becky was a citizen of the United States,” said Mr. Wilson, who is now 74.

What they would later learn was that Ms. Trimble did not have clear Mexican citizenship, either. Mexican authorities told them they had no record of the birth certificate the couple had received in the mail.

“I feel like, what’s the word for it, I have not done right by her,” Mr. Wilson said. “I feel like I failed her.”

Bethel, about 400 miles west from Anchorage, can be reached only by airplane or boat.

Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

Immigration Services officials said the agency does not comment on individual cases, but emphasized the need for adoptive parents to obtain visas for children brought into the country.

The Trimbles, who could not afford a lawyer, visited a legal aid group in 2015. During a wrenching meeting, they grasped the severity of Ms. Trimble’s situation for the first time. Not only was she not American. She also was unlawfully in the country.

As an undocumented immigrant, Ms. Trimble would be required to leave the United States and wait 10 years before re-entering as a green card applicant.

But there was hope. Having an American spouse in the military, which Dr. Trimble had joined to defray the cost of dental school, could provide a quicker path to a green card. Ms. Trimble was eligible to apply for an exemption that would allow her to remain in the United States while her application was pending.

Dr. Trimble noted on the form that his wife “literally knows zero people who live in Mexico.” She did not know the whereabouts of her biological parents. She did not speak Spanish.

But what happened next seemed to defy logic.

In February 2016, the government denied Ms. Trimble the exemption on the grounds that such a remedy is available only to those who have illegally entered the country. Ms. Trimble’s entry had not been unlawful, the agency said, because she had been waved through by a border agent.

Confident now that she could apply without a special exemption, Ms. Trimble filed a formal application for a green card in December 2016, with her husband as her sponsor.

Her packet contained dozens of pages of documents, including tax returns, a marriage certificate and photos of her wedding.

Months passed, and the couple heard nothing.

In early 2017, during Dr. Trimble’s last year of dental school, he began searching for jobs in underserved areas to fulfill the requirement of his military scholarship.

He accepted a position at the community clinic in Bethel — about 400 miles from Anchorage on the Kuskokwim River — which is covered with snow and ice much of the year and can be reached only by airplane or boat.

As the family was packing, Ms. Trimble was notified by Immigration Services that she had been scheduled, in late June, for an in-person interview — a crucial, and often last, step in the green card process.

At the meeting, the officer’s line of questioning veered to her voting record. Yes, Ms. Trimble said, she had voted in a national election when she was 19.

“I told her that I thought I was doing my civic duty,” Ms. Trimble recalled. “I had no reason to believe I wasn’t a U.S. citizen.”

“Our whole church family has bathed Becky’s situation in prayer,” said Adam London, the pastor of Bethel Evangelical Covenant Church. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

A new home in Alaska

The Trimbles arrived in Bethel in July 2017, just in time to forage for berries in the tundra.

As the only dentist at the local family clinic, Dr. Trimble saw his roster of patients from the tight-knit community quickly grow.

He played guitar in the band of Bethel Evangelical Covenant Church. Ms. Trimble became the head chef of the church’s Supper Club for the Homeless and began leading Bible study for young children.

Meanwhile, Immigration Services started raising questions about the authenticity of Ms. Trimble’s Mexican birth certificate.

One problem was that the birth certificate that had been given to her parents all those years ago was issued not in Baja California, where she was born, but in the state of Oaxaca, some 2,000 miles away. And though Ms. Trimble’s parents also had a copy of the hospital birth record in Baja California, there was no official record of her birth registered with the authorities there.

Last month, Immigration Services declined the request to reopen Ms. Trimble’s case.

Mexican authorities told her that a judge would have to analyze the circumstances surrounding her birth and interview witnesses to issue a new birth certificate, if one was needed. And Ms. Trimble would have to be present, they said — with no guarantee that she would be allowed to re-enter the United States.

Despite the uncertainty, the couple got on with life. Becky’s pear preserves won first place at the town fair that summer. The couple erected a shave ice stand, serving 21 flavors.

They began sharing snippets of their saga with friends.

At church, prayer requests poured in on their behalf.

“Our whole church family has bathed Becky’s situation in prayer,” said Adam London, the senior pastor of the 200-strong congregation.

One member, a state representative for Bethel, suggested that the couple contact the office of Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, for assistance. Immigration Services responded to the senator that the case was “under review.”

In May of last year, a member of their church organized a garage sale to benefit a family in need. Ms. Trimble was unaware that the proceeds — ultimately $1,486.01 — were to help with her legal fees.

The Trimbles hired Margaret Stock, an Anchorage lawyer who met a supervisor at Immigration Services to discuss the case. Several more months passed.

In February, Ms. Trimble received a two-page decision denying her a green card.

The denial stated that on Jan. 17, 2008, she had illegally registered to vote and that she had then voted in a general election that November. “Therefore, your application must be and hereby is denied,” it said.

Ms. Trimble had 33 days to depart the country, or face deportation.

“I felt I had no identity at that moment. I meant nothing,” she said, her voice breaking.

“I always thought I was American,” Ms. Trimble said. Credit... Ash Adams for The New York Times

In March, Ms. Stock filed a motion to reopen Ms. Trimble’s case, and the Bethel City Council passed a resolution urging federal representatives and agencies to recognize “the uniqueness of Rebecca Trimble’s situation.”

Last month, Immigration Services declined the request. Ms. Stock’s next move is to sue the agency in federal court to secure a green card or citizenship for her client.

Both Alaska senators have introduced a private bill “for the relief of Becky Trimble” that would be required to pass the House and the Senate, a process that could take years.

Ms. Trimble, whose legal bills have mounted, has not been informed that a deportation case has commenced against her, perhaps because the coronavirus pandemic has slowed immigration enforcement.

For now, she is trying to resume what she called “a quiet, normal life.” On Jay’s birthday, she baked lemon cake with tundra-blueberry frosting, and the family celebrated on Zoom with friends and relatives. She tried to suppress fears of immigration agents showing up to take her away.

(Source: NYT)