Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

A few years ago, in a conversation with my husband’s oldest brother, I said that I thought the only solution to illegal immigration was to help create jobs in the handful of countries that send about four in every five undocumented immigrants to the U.S.

My husband’s brother, assuming I was talking about U.S. foreign aid, got very angry. He reached for his pant pocket and yanked out his wallet. He slapped it down on the picnic table. “This is my money!” he told me. No one, he said, was going to use his hard-earned cash to help a bunch of people in another country he didn’t even know.

In times of economic crisis, his is a sentiment that is certainly shared by some Americans. Many, as evidenced by the comments to my piece, at least wonder if assistance aimed at countries like Honduras or Mexico only lands in the fat wallets of corrupt officials.

Having lived as a teenager in a country rife with corruption (Argentina) I certainly share this concern.

Still, I argued to my husband’s brother, the cost of doing nothing is potentially greater if Americans keep their wallets closed.

It’s true that sometimes places like Honduras seem hopeless. Last year, Transparency International ranked 180 countries for corruption, beginning with the cleanest, No. 1 ranked New Zealand. Mexico was No. 89; Honduras fared even worse, at No. 130. (The U.S. was No. 19).

Corruption was often evident as I reported Enrique’s Journey. For example, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, I spent days trying to reach one city’s mayor. I was trying to get him to recount the heart-warming details of how he had helped save Enrique, the migrant boy I was writing about, when Enrique was nearly beaten to death in Mexico by bandits.

The mayor wouldn’t return my calls. Finally, I sat on the stoop to his office one morning until he arrived, and he reluctantly let me in. He explained that most reporters in Mexico only tried to reach him when they wanted a bribe—to withhold publication of something negative they had unearthed about the mayor.

Studies show that corruption slows economic growth, reduces domestic and foreign investments, and limits competition.  Indeed, studies have shown that foreign aid does not raise per capita income in poorly governed countries. Too often, aid ends up in dictators’ pockets (or in their Swiss bank accounts), money that helps tyrants stay in power.

That said, in recent years giving nations, recognizing this problem, have begun attaching anti-corruption conditions to foreign aid, measures that require goal-setting and vigilant monitoring. Also, donors are increasingly recognizing that corruption thrives in nations with weak institutions, and money is being targeted to bolster those institutions, such as the police and judicial systems.      

The Millennium Challenge Corp., begun by the U.S. government in 2004, only allocates aid if a country can meet certain criteria showing they are working toward promoting free markets and low corruption. In its first year, Honduras and El Salvador were among 17 countries that were eligible. By last October, a total of $109 million had been spent in Honduras to improve transport routes (by helping to build a highway and three secondary roads), and to give nearly 6,000 small farmers technical assistance in producing and marketing high-value crops. (Following the coup in Honduras last year, all funding ceased.)

In addition to these measures, the U.S. could work to circumvent corrupt governments and help create jobs and improve schools by directly funding non-governmental organizations in places like Honduras that have track records for getting things done.

In its trade policies, the U.S. could favor goods from countries that send the largest numbers of undocumented immigrants to the U.S.

If, for example, the U.S. imports medical scrubs from Honduras and also from Malaysia, why can’t our trade policies favor scrubs from Honduras if we know that will generate employment in a country that sends the second largest number of illegal immigrants to the U.S. each year (only second to Mexico)?

Why not use trade policies to help reduce migration?

Many microloan programs around the world have proven quite successful at helping women begin small businesses that provide employment. Why couldn’t the U.S. help provide loans to programs that have good track records in places like Honduras?

On my website, I also suggest many ways in which individuals can help create jobs south of our border. There are suggestions on how to buy fair trade coffee, clothing and gifts. These products ensure that the people producing them are paid a living wage. I list many other non-profit groups that are doing good work in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere to create jobs so fewer women feel forced to leave their children.

Some readers have gone through these groups to provide a microloan to an individual woman in Honduras. Others have demanded that their college cafeteria start serving fair trade coffee. A staff member at an Illinois university took what was perhaps the most deeply personal approach. She said Enrique’s Journey prompted her to quit her job and start a café in Honduras, where she now employs 10 people.

Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

by Sonia Nazario, author of Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a  Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother (Random House 2007).

Congress and the Obama Administration are again proposing new “solutions” to curtail illegal immigration. Sadly, they are the same tired ideas that have been tried — and failed — in the past. No one is proposing the one thing that would work.

First, a few facts. In recent years, driven by a dearth of jobs in the U.S., illegal immigration has dropped . Still, half a million people continue to enter the U.S. illegally each year; in all 4% of the population in the U.S. is undocumented. In Los Angeles, 4 of 10 people are from another country.

The benefits of this influx are clear. These migrants do some of the most backbreaking, dirty, dangerous jobs U.S.-born workers largely won’t do—and for rock-bottom wages. Immigrants’ low wages keep some businesses from closing or going abroad in order to compete. A 1997 study by the National Research Council, still considered the most objective and authoritative on the effects of immigration, found that immigrant labor also lowers the cost of food and clothing for all of us. Indeed, 5% of every good or service Americans buy is cheaper because of immigrant labor. That means more Americans can avail themselves of essential services offered at lower prices—like child care. Now, the downside….

 Because they have lower incomes, immigrants and their U.S.-born children qualify for and use more government services—including welfare—than the native-born. They have more youngsters, which means more children in the nation’s public schools. Compared to native households, immigrants and their native-born children pay one-third less taxes per capita than others in the U.S.  A Harvard University study found immigrant pay scales have lowered wages for the least educated—and neediest—among the native-born, mostly African Americans and previous waves of Latino immigrants.

Perhaps those most hurt by immigration are the migrants themselves. When mothers come to the U.S. and leave their children behind, they are able to send money to their home countries so the kids can eat better and go to school past the third grade. But after spending years apart from their mothers, these children often feel abandoned, and resent—even hate—their mothers for leaving them. Many mothers ultimately lose what is most important to them: the love of their child.

Now President Obama and congressional leaders, mindful that an overwhelming majority of Americans want illegal immigration to stop, have trotted out three solutions strikingly similar to proposals that were implemented in recent decades. Studies show these solutions—some embraced by liberals, others by conservatives–actually produced the opposite effect of what was intended. They caused illegal immigration to soar.

Take greater border enforcement. Starting in 1993, the number of agents patrolling the border and the amount of money spent on enforcement tripled, according to a 2002 Public Policy Institute of California study. Yet the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. only grew more quickly. Why? More immigrants came and more stayed for good, knowing that entry and re-entry would be more difficult and costly in the future. In 1986, half of the Mexicans who came illegally went home within a year; now fewer than a quarter do.

Second, politicians say they want to “control” illegal immigration by implementing a large guest-worker program. Bring more workers in temporarily to do jobs Americans don’t want to do. Yet the last large guest-worker program, in which Mexican braceros filled agricultural jobs between 1942 and 1964, laid the groundwork for the massive illegal migration of workers from Mexico that followed. Guest-workers were required to go home when their visa expired, but most didn’t.

Third, President Obama has said he wants to bring migrants in the country illegally out of the shadows. Allow them to become legal. The last time the U.S. offered illegal immigrants a path to a green card, in 1986 , it resulted in about 2.7 million immigrants becoming legal, but it didn’t stem the tide of newcomers. Many crossed the border believing that there would eventually be another amnesty. Many who became legal invited family and friends to join them—illegally. The U.S. went from 2.7 million illegal immigrants to zero following the 1986 amnesty to 12 million today.

So what should the U.S. do?

There is only one way to stem illegal immigration—at its source, in what are just four or five countries that send about 80% of all migrants who come to the U.S. illegally. Mexico. Guatemala. Honduras.

In Mexico, I met women who had left their children behind and headed north. They knew it was the only way they could feed them more than once a day. They could no longer bear to hear their childrens’ cries of hunger at night.

Desperate people find ways around obstacles such as walls and temporary guest-worker rules.

Instead of arguing about wall heights and local ordinances that bar undocumented immigrants from renting homes or getting jobs, the U.S. must formulate a new foreign policy focused on the issue of illegal immigration. It would use every tool in this nation’s arsenal—trade policies, foreign aide, microloans, promoting more democratic and less corrupt governments in Latin America—to help create more jobs in these countries. Trade policies could give preference to goods from immigrant-sending countries to spur job growth. More aid could be invested there for the same purpose. Microloans to individual women, a practice that has proven highly successful around the world, could help women establish small businesses and employ others.

The truth is that most immigrants would rather stay in their home countries with their extended families, with everything they know, than take the enormous risks required to cross the border and to make a new life here.

The women I met making their way North through Mexico say it wouldn’t take radical changes in their countries to keep them at home. They say that if they had food to feed their children and clothes to put on their backs, if they could send them to school, or even if they had just the hope of doing so, they would never walk away, leaving behind their homes, their lives, their children.

Sonia Nazario has spent more than two decades reporting and writing about social issues, earning her dozens of national awards. The newspaper series upon which this book is based won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, the George Polk Award for International Reporting, and the Grand Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.