 It's a good time to be discussing this issue of immigration. We're witnessing now really the biggest crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the last few decades. And it's really a response to mounting frustration that people feel around the country over seeming inability to control the borders. And perhaps this issue has roiled no place longer than California where about three million people who are undocumented live. For me, this issue really became very personal one morning. I had a woman who would come and clean my house twice a month. And she was trying that morning when she had arrived to figure out what was wrong with me because I was 37 years old at the time. I had been married for six years and obviously I'm Latina and I had no children. And so she figured, wow, she seems so nice but there's obviously some sort of monster lurking within given that there has been no reproduction taking place. And so she finally, I remember that morning over my kitchen aisle and she finally got up the gumption to ask the question, when are you going to have a baby? And I didn't want to, like any good reporter who doesn't want to answer a question, I deflected. And I said, what about you, Carmen? Are you thinking about having more kids? And Carmen was this normally very happy, very chatty woman but suddenly she went stone silent and she started sobbing on my kitchen aisle and she told me that in Guatemala, she was a single mother and her husband had left her for another woman and she had these four children and a lot of nights they would ask her for food, they would beg her for food and she could only feed them once or twice a day and so she just had absolutely nothing to give them. And I remember her telling me that morning that in response to these cries of hunger, at night she would gently coax them to roll over in bed and she would say to them, sleep face down so your stomach doesn't rumble so much. And I remember her telling me how she had left these four kids with their grandmother in Guatemala and headed north to the United States to work here and I remember that morning her telling me that she had spent 12 years apart from these kids. She had not seen them. And how her youngest was a one-year-old girl who was still breastfeeding when she had walked away from her that morning 12 years before. My housekeeper got him in answer quite frankly, it just stunned me. I couldn't understand, you know, how does a parent walk away from their child? How does a mother walk away, a mother? And she goes 2,000 miles away to the United States to LA and she doesn't know when or if she's ever going to see her kids again. What level of desperation causes a mother to do something like that? And then I remember asking myself if I ever had children, what choice would I make? Even, you know, knowing that I would be coming to the United States undocumented or illegally but if I had kids who were crying with hunger that way. And it was that kind of central question that really launched me on this incredible journey that would take me from California to Honduras and along these migrant routes through Mexico and into the homes of dozens and dozens of these immigrant women here in California and in Texas and in other parts of the country. To me, my housekeeper, Garmin's choice was a horrible choice, one that I wouldn't wish on any parent. I mean, these women, they come here and they're taking care of other people's children and they're there to feed them and play with them. And yet they're missing their own children's first words and first steps and birthdays. They're not there for Christmas Day. They're not there for their kids, their daughters Quinceaneras. But what I learned was that what condiment had experienced was incredibly common here in the United States. There was one study that showed that in Los Angeles four out of every five living nannies still has a child left behind in their home country. And you know, a lot of us know these women. They're either women in our families, they're women who clean our offices, they're women who clean our homes, who take care of our kids here in California. What I saw as I started to kind of delve into this issue was that there was more and more family disintegration in Latin America. And that family disintegration was really transforming who it is who comes today to the United States. You know, in a lot of the literature and I think in the way people think about immigrants, we tend to think of immigrants as overwhelmingly men. But today there are millions and millions of women who, many of them these single mothers who have come from Central America and Mexico to the United States and have left their children behind. And in fact, if you looked at the 12 million people who are estimated to be in the United States now undocumented, 51% of those are women and children, not men. The majority are women and kids. We're really experiencing the largest wave of immigration in our nation's history. About one out of every eight people in this country now are born in another country. And we have about one million people who come every year to this country legally and a staggering 850,000 who come every year illegally. And that's about double the rate of the 1980s and the early 1990s. Here in California, that's about two and a half to three million people who are in this state undocumented today. And if you look at our nation's schools, amazingly, one out of every four kids is either an immigrant or the child of an immigrant today in the public schools. And a big part of who these migrants are are these single moms. I started to go wait in and talk to a lot of these women in their homes. And it was surprising to me that almost to a one they told the same story. That on that day when they had pulled themselves away from their kids, they had done so with one promise to their kids. I'll come back to you in one or two years max. The reality is that life in the United States is a lot harder than advertised. I know this as the child of immigrants that when people talk back to their home countries, you know, they say I'm making $8, $9 an hour. I have a great job compared to in Guatemala or in Honduras. What they don't advertise is that they're working one or two, maybe two jobs, that they're 15 people are stuffed into a single apartment, that they're living in converted garages, that because they're working two jobs, they're sleeping five hours a night, and that they're having to work overtime to pay the bills here to send money back so their kids can eat and study past the third grade and to try to save what's now gone up to about $8,000 per child to bring a kid north with a smuggler. And so it isn't one or two years. What they find is that it stretches into five or ten years or more typically here in California. And these kids, they just get desperate to be with their mothers again. And so they get this idea, okay, if mom can't come back to me as she promised or she can't send for me as she promised, I'm going to go find her. And what I found in 2001 was that there was this small army of children heading north, 48,000 children per year who come north alone without either parent and enter the United States undocumented from Mexico and Central America alone. And to give you a sense of how this is growing, that number is about 100,000 children per year who come from these countries alone and enter the United States. And for the Central American kids, I found that about three out of every four kids were coming to find one of these single moms who had left them behind. So I told this through the story of this one boy. Enrique is just five years old when his mom walks away from him that morning in Tegucigalpa in the capital of Honduras. You can imagine, I mean he's just bewildered. His mom has always been there and suddenly she's gone, she's disappeared. And many days he begs his paternal grandmother who he's left with, when is she coming back for me? Is she coming back? And on Christmas day when he's 11 and he's 12 years old, he stands all day at the door of his grandmother's wooden shack and he prays to God that he return his mother to him on that day as his present. And so many times in his neighborhood he sees other children walking the dusty streets with their moms hand in hand. And of course he wishes he had that too. And he goes really from being a very lonely boy to a pretty troubled adolescent without his mom by his side. So after 11 years of not seeing her, of being apart from his mother Lourdes, he sets off to go find her. And like a lot of these kids, Enrique just wants to answer one question. Does she love me? She said she was coming back but she didn't come back or send for me. Does she really love me? And he leaves with little more than this tiny scrap of paper with her phone number inked on it in North Carolina. And it's amazing when you're on these migrant routes, you'll see these kids, they'll pull it out of the soul of their shoe, this little piece of paper or they hide it in the waistband of their jeans or different places in their clothing. And it's often wrapped in this bit of plastic so when they forge rivers or it rains on them, the ink won't smudge. And so Enrique leaves with this little scrap of paper and he's virtually penniless like a lot of these kids. So he goes the only way that he can, which is clinging to the tops and sides of these freight trains that travel up the length of Mexico. There are thousands and thousands of children each year who make the journey this way on the freight trains through Mexico. And I think what most stunned me about it was that these kids I found were as young as seven years old. I think most of the parents here in the audience, I rode with a 12-year-old boy named Dennis who was coming to find his mom in San Diego. This boy, this high with a Tweety Bird t-shirt, you know at seven or 12 most of the parents here wouldn't allow their kid to cross the street alone and go to school alone. And yet here are these kids, they're traversing four countries alone, partly strapped to the top of a freight train. I really wouldn't have believed it unless I saw it. It's an incredible adventure and it's also harrowing beyond belief. Most of these kids try several times to get through Mexico and end up back in their home countries defeated by the effort. Some of them are killed along the way. They're torn apart by the train wheels. And they're literally hunted down like animals all along the way through Mexico by these bandits who operate up and down the side of the rails. And they grab these kids and they strip them of their clothing and to find the coins hidden in the clothing. And sometimes just for the heck of it, they beat them and sometimes they kill them. There's about a dozen police agencies who target migrants on the train, these corrupt cops who do much the same in Mexico. They grab these kids and other migrants and rob them and sometimes beat them and kick them back to the southern border to Guatemala. Mexico deports about 200,000 people per year, mostly Central Americans. And they have the train itself as the enemy because the Central Americans are traversing Mexico illegally and the immigration authorities control the train stations. So the Central Americans have to get on and off the trains as they're moving and to avoid those train stations and it's very, very difficult. I think for me the toughest part of this journey was the southern state of, southern most state of Mexico, of Chiapas. You know, people hear when they talk about immigration, they think the tough part is the US-Mexico border. But the Central Americans know the really tough part is in Chiapas, which they call the beast, la bestia. And when they start going through Mexico, they say, ahora nos enfrentamos a la bestia. Now we face the beast. And to give you a sense of how hard this is, there are these gangsters who prowl on top of these trains in Chiapas. And they control the tops of the trains. It's like they're turf, basically. And often on most trains, there's 10 or 20 of these guys. And they are armed with machetes and knives and wooden bats and even guns sometimes. And they're often hopped up on crack cocaine. And they'll go car to car and they'll surround the group of migrants on top of a car. And they almost always say the same thing, your money or your life. And they'll strip you of your clothing and try to find the coins there. And sometimes just for the heck of it, they'll beat you and throw you down to the churning wheels below. And this happens to Enrique one night. He's on top of a fuel tanker, a rounded car. It's the middle of the night. These six guys creep up the ladders. They throw him face down on the train. They start to beat his face with a wooden club. They shatter three teeth. They strip him of his clothes. Then they see that he doesn't have any money. They're really mad and they beat him even harder. And one of these guys starts to strangle him with his bit of clothing. And Enrique is like trying to, he's trying to buffer these blows to his face and trying to pull this away from his throat. And he's thinking, I'm going to die here tonight and my mother will never know what happened to me. Suddenly the guy who's strangling him slips and he's able to, he's able to get up on his knees and stand up and run down this train and fling himself off this train that's going 40 miles an hour. And when he finally comes to the next day, he's walking down the tracks. All they've left him are his underwear. He's bathed in blood. His eyes are full of blood. And the women from the town gather around him and they say, they press these coins in his hand and they say, go home. And he says, I can't. I have to reach the United States. The migrants, as Jack said, they call it el tren de la muerte, the train of death. And that night on the train is just the beginning of so many things that Enrique and these other kids have to face just trying to get through Mexico to get to that U.S.-Mexico border. These migrants, they encounter great cruelty and amazing acts of kindness on the trains. And I know this because I saw it myself. I met Enrique when he had already made it to northern Mexico, to Nuevo Laredo, which is right across the border from Laredo, Texas. And you know, I was just, I was so moved by what this kid had been through. He was 1,700 miles from home. He was on his eighth attempt to get through Mexico. He was sleeping on the muddy banks of the Rio Grande. He was scavenging for whatever food he could eat every day, usually just eating once a day. And I really wanted to understand his journey and all the dangers that he and these children face. And I really wanted to take people on top of these trains and take them along on this ride and this really whole world on top of these freight trains. So I decided to do the journey myself. I spent a couple of weeks with Enrique and I asked him everything he had been through so far on his eight attempts to make it through Mexico. And I went back to Honduras and I did the journey step by step exactly as he had done it a few weeks before. So I traveled about 1,600 miles and about half of that on top of seven freight trains up the length of Mexico. I took a lot of precautions. I got a letter from the personal assistant to the president of Mexico and I came to call that the golden letter, the carta de oro, because it kept me out of jail three times. I got permission from all four train companies and I traveled with little more than a little black bag, some toilet paper, a little bit of money. Not a lot of notebooks because I discovered on the first ride that if you don't hold on with both arms, you're not going to stay on this bucking train. So I would put a tape recorder in my chest pocket which had immigrants talking to my chest all day long, which was amusing on all sorts of levels. And a rain jacket strapped around my waist and I would tell the conductors, hey, look back occasionally. If I'm madly waving the red jacket, it means something really bad's about to happen. Try to do something. I soon discovered, very soon discovered that this was a totally idiotic idea because there's no time to, when something bad happens, it happens very quickly and there's no time to kind of gallantly wave the red jacket. I took a lot of precautions but it was still a very high stakes ride. My first night on the train, I talked to dozens of kids in the United States who had made this journey. They had warned me of all the possible bad things that could happen. But not a one of them told me about these branches that envelop the tops of the trains and in Chiapas which is very, very lush and jungle like. And it was pitch dark, my first train ride and the migrants nearest the locomotive started calling back a warning, one to another, there were about a hundred on this train. Rama branch. The train is very loud and I couldn't hear what they were saying and I was holding on with both hands to this bucking train but this huge branch hit me square on the face and it sent me sprawling back almost off the train. I was able to grab onto this rail on the side and pull myself back up on top of the train. And when this train finally stopped the next day, there were two teenagers on the car behind mine and they said that another teen that they were with had been swiped by the same branch off the train and they didn't know if he was dead or alive because when the train moves forward it produces this sucking wind underneath and so it pulls you down into the wheels as you fall down. When I was in the south of Mexico, I could see at the end of my train gangsters knifing people and robbing people and once when I was in the north of Mexico I was that one time close to the front of the train and this guy lunched at me he was clearly trying to do me harm and I was able to jump forward three cars and seek help from the conductor and I remember being on a train where the train right in front of ours had derailed and I'd heard so many stories from these kids that if you're on those cars that tip over you can be crushed as the hoppers fall on you or if they had seen people who had been on hoppers that were filled with sand and they had been buried alive as these trains derailed. You know it took me three months to get through to reconstruct Enrique's journey to make the same journey and when I came back from that to the United States I had this recurring nightmare every night that there was a gangster on top of the train running after me who was trying to rape me and I had to go into therapy to try to deal with that nightmare. I was tense and I was filthy and I was in fear of being beaten or raped or robbed many days when I was along the rails. In the south in Chiapas it is so hot it's 105 degrees and you're sitting on a piece of metal. It's so hot that it actually warps the rails and you literally can't touch the train. In the north it's so frigidly cold that ice forms on the train and people literally freeze to death on the cars. You know at the end of each train ride I felt like I am at my breaking point. I cannot take anymore I've got to get off this train but I would get off the train and I'd go to a hotel and I'd sleep in a warm bed and eat a warm meal every time and what amazed me was that what I went through and I would reach my breaking point was one iota of what these children endure on this ride. Kids like Enrique really endured months of misery and danger and you know sleeping out in the elements every night Enrique would sleep in these sewage culverts that ran alongside the rails or he would sleep in dirt crawl spaces under houses to hide from the Mexican immigration authorities. Kids described sleeping in trees to protect themselves from predatory animals and you know he would have to beg for whatever food that he got. I remember when the train would stop and we would be in the south and it was so broiling hot and there was nowhere to run to beg for water these kids would scoop up the sewage water that ran in these ditches alongside the rails and they would filter it through their t-shirts thinking that that would somehow filter out the impurities just to get some form of liquid and I remember people talking about immigrants who had gone five days with no food where they would literally fall off these trains from hunger I couldn't fathom what these kids were willing to go through to get through Mexico but to Enrique he explained to me that really these obstacles to him were nothing compared to his incredible yearning to be with his mother again that he felt alone his whole life he had told me and he told me over and over again that when he saw an obstacle he saw a challenge along the way he always remembered in his mind that his mother's conversations to him and Honduras on the phone they always ended with the words I love you, I miss you and that's what would really drive him forward he's preyed upon mercilessly all along the way in Mexico but he was also visited by incredible acts of kindness and I think this is the most joyous part of what I remembered of this journey Chiapas, the southernmost state, it really is the heart of darkness most of these kids, they've been robbed and beaten several times before they get out of this first of 13 states that they need to cross but the south-central Mexican state of Veracruz really restored Enrique and my faith in humanity there are these towns in Veracruz where there's a curve in the tracks or there's a little town where the tracks are bad or for some reason the train has to slow down and in these places when people hear the whistle of the train there are 10, 20, 30 people who rush out of their houses with these bundles of food in their arms and they wave and they smile and they shout out to the people on top of the train and they throw bread, they throw tortillas they throw whatever fruit is in season, oranges, pineapples when I was on the train they were throwing bananas and rolls of crackers up to me if they have no food to give they throw bottles of water and if they have no bottles of water to give they come out and they give a silent prayer to the migrants as they pass by on top of the train these are the poorest Mexicans who live along the rails as in many countries these are people who make one or two dollars a day who can barely feed their own kids rice and beans and tortillas but they give to total strangers from other countries who they're never going to see again and they give because they believe this is the right thing to do this is the Christian thing to do and they say that this is what Jesus Christ would do this is what they taught was the right thing to do and a lot of them say that they've seen the suffering of some of these migrants up close when I was on the train I would sometimes see migrants start sobbing when one of these bundles would land in their arms because they hadn't eaten in one or two days and I think what I most remembered from that part of the journey was this woman who claimed to be over 100 years old and she said that during the Mexican Revolution she had been reduced to eating the bark of a plantain tree and her hands were very gnarled with age but she would force them to make these little bags with tortillas and beans so that when she heard the whistle of the train she would hand this to her 70 year old daughter who would run down this rocky slope and throw these bags up to the migrants on the train and I always remember what she told me if I have one tortilla I'll give half away I know God will bring me more I've never seen people live their faith like I saw in Veracruz I've written about immigrants on and off for 20, 25 years but there were some things that I really didn't get until I made the journey on these trains I think the incredible desperation that's driving a lot of these women out of countries like Honduras I think most Americans don't understand that kind of desperation in Honduras there's 42% unemployment and sub-employment and newspaper ads tell women if you're 28 years or older don't bother applying, you're too old to get a job through a newspaper ad in Honduras and one woman that really stood out in my mind from this journey was this woman called Leti Isabela Mejia-Yanes she was a single mom in Honduras, she had three kids and she told me, I met her in Chiapas she told me that all she could give these kids to eat each day was two pieces of bread and a watery cup of coffee and her youngest boy, Daniel, who's one year old only got one piece of bread and breast milk and like so many of these women she described at night when they cried with hunger she would fill this big glass with water and she'd mix in a little teaspoon of sugar or a little dollop of tortilla dough to try to fill their stomachs with something and stop the crying and she said, she lived in this wooden shack with this dirt floor, no running water and she lived a lot better than a lot of women that I saw even in Te Ucigalpa in Enrique's neighborhood some of these women stitched together rags and they make a teepee over their head basically with a dirt floor and like any parent she said I want something better for my children than this to live in this grinding misery I'm going to go north and her nine year old boy Marvin said mommy don't go I already know how to write my name I'll quit school and I'll help you work, don't go and she said, no, I don't want that and she had headed north and when I met Leti she had just recently stumbled trying to get on one of these moving freight trains and she had lost both of her entire legs to the train you know, when I started this journey that morning in my home in Los Angeles talking to my housekeeper I was judgmental you know, how does a mom walk away from what kind of mom walks away from her kids and she could, Carmen could hear it in my voice she said, well there's millions of women who have done this I'm not the only one but I really, in the course of this journey became a lot less judgmental of these women and their choices when I saw the consequences for children whose moms who decide to stay in some place like Honduras a lot of the kids whose moms stay in Enrique's neighborhood end up working at this dump that's in the capital and it's on top of this mountain and there would be these trucks that would rumble up to the top and women and kids would fight for position on either side of these trucks and as the trucks would tip their load and this trash would ooze down they'd feverishly try to pick out bits of tin or plastic or anything at all that they could sell and some of these loads I learned came from this local hospital so they were full of blood and placentas and I remember we were standing in this stinking soup and above us there was this swirling black cloud which was these black vultures that were literally defecating on the people below this was like something out of the inferno this was such an assault on the senses I've never as a reporter been in a situation where I literally could not breathe and yet here were kids who were six and seven years old who were working in this dump in the capital I was stunned on this journey by the gritty determination of people to make it through Mexico I think a lot of Americans don't understand this kind of determination when people talk about building a wall they don't understand this kind of determination and how people this determined will find a way under a wall over a wall around a wall one hunter and teenager who had tried 27 times to make it through Mexico and that day he had been held with a machete to his throat for a couple of hours by these bandits alongside the rails and the girl in their party had been taken by one bandit after another into this cornfield and raped repeatedly and the immigration's authorities had caught them later that day and he said to me, you know, today they'll deport me and tomorrow I'll make attempt number 28 to reach my mom in the United States Enrique he makes eight attempts over 122 days and he travels 12,000 miles and he takes these children take between seven and 30 freight trains to make it through Mexico you know it's really an epic journey a modern-day odyssey that these kids go on on these trains when you're on these trains I was on trains that had 80, 100 people the conductors describe seeing trains with 300, 400 up to 600 people on one freight train they say it looks like a beehive covered with human beings and they call it el tren peregrino the pilgrim's train and they joke the train conductors you know when we finally see the president of El Salvador on top of these freight trains we know the whole country is finally cleared out and it's not an idle joke in that about 25% of El Salvador's population now lives outside of the country much of that here in the United States if we're being brutally honest and in the interest of starting a lively conversation there really is a modern-day exodus out of many of these countries in Central America and parts of Mexico for me in writing about these women and kids in particular my hope really was to try to humanize these immigrants because it seems to me that in periods of rapid change as we're seeing really around the country I mean I'm going to speak to many states Indiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Illinois that are seeing huge influxes of immigrants recently sometimes it's easier to demonize people than to try to understand them I wanted people to put themselves in these women's shoes if you were living in one of these countries and your kids were crying at night with hunger and the cupboards are absolutely bare and you had nothing to give them no matter how you feel about illegal immigration if you're for or against it wouldn't you at least consider heading north so that you could feed your kids something and you might be able to send them to school past the third grade I wanted people to talk about and to put themselves in these women's shoes but I also came to understand on this journey that these levels of immigration about 4% of the people in this country now are here undocumented have a huge downside as well don't get me wrong there are many benefits to this influx Lourdes tells me, Enrique's mother that she does backbreaking work for minimum wage sometimes less with no health benefits, no vacation that others simply won't do she spent some time when she was cleaning homes where there had been a suicide that had taken place she thinks that you can't get an American to do that job at minimum wage and I would probably agree with her and I have seen many jobs I've seen people cut sugarcane in the swamps of Florida for minimum wage it's with a machete it's nasty brutal work in searing heat I doubt you'll get an American to do that job for minimum wage the best study done on this by the National Research Council found that immigrants coming here helped drive the economy and that they add a modest but significant amount to the $13 trillion economy and they make certain goods and services available to more Americans because they're cheaper quite frankly this study by the National Research Council probably the best one on this issue found that 5% of all the things that Americans buy are cheaper because of immigrant labor in this country and that's getting your lawn mowed or going to a restaurant for food or the clothes that you buy and a whole variety of things and a lot of people would say that this influx has prevented many businesses from having it being forced to close up shop or outsource many jobs to other countries if you look at I think immigrants bring new blood and new ideas and new ways of looking at things that really spur creativity and advances in this country if you look at Nobel laureates a disproportionate number of those who come from the United States are immigrants but I think if you're talking about immigration it's also important to remember that those who are most hurt by this influx are the 1 in 14 Americans who don't have a high school degree and those Americans have seen their wages drop by 8% in the last 20 years directly because of this influx of immigrants coming to this country and that's mostly African Americans and previous waves of Latino immigrants I have seen some jobs in Los Angeles for example that we've seen an influx of immigrants doing in construction for example that I do believe Americans will do if they're paid enough money to do those jobs so for me as someone who's long written about the poor and disadvantaged in this country I find that development deeply troubling the reality if we're being brutally honest is that immigrants who come to this country are predominantly poor and because of our system of taxation that's adjusted for how much you make immigrants on the whole pay a third less taxes than people who are born in this country and their children qualify for and use more government services we're not talking mostly about things like welfare we're talking mostly that immigrants who come here have twice as many children as people who are born in this country and those children go to public schools which is very costly it costs about $6 billion in the state of California alone for the schooling of the children of undocumented immigrants and I think the one issue that I've not talked about nearly enough in this whole equation that I found was that the cost-benefit calculation was just as troubling in some ways for the immigrants themselves it's undeniably true that when women come here they're able to send money back so their kids can eat and study and that's huge Enrique's sister Belki who is 7 when mom leaves is able to go to university and that's almost unheard of but it's also true that after years apart from their moms a lot of these kids quite simply feel abandoned by their mothers and they resent and even walk up to the line of hating their mothers and I see this in schools where there are a lot of immigrants throughout California where psychologists in these schools spend most of their time dealing with these conflicts in these homes after these kids reunify with their moms you know, you said you were coming back in one or two years what happened? you abandoned me and almost to a one they say I would have rather gone hungry than had the robo-cop toys than had the soccer balls and the Nike shoes sent to me I would have rather gone hungry but had you by my side here all those years these kids, they're really tough on their moms even a dog doesn't leave its litter and to me what was really sad was that these moms they really lose what's most important to them which is the love of their child to me it seemed media coverage of this issue of immigration really have failed to convey some important facts we've tried better enforcement we've tried an amnesty or pathway to citizenship in the past we've had a guest worker program and most of the studies show and I can talk about this most of the studies show that all three approaches that the politicians are again talking about have only led to increased levels of undocumented immigration so what should the United States do if we are to believe Americans who are polled who say two-thirds of them say that they want levels of immigration to decrease to this country if you travel these migrant routes and you talk to people along the rails almost to a one they say that the only thing that you can do to really tackle this flow this flow north is to deal with this exodus added source by creating jobs in the four or five countries that are sending about 80% of the people who come north to the United States and what people really talk about is the need for the United States to have a policy that's really centered around the issue of illegal immigration I was talking earlier to someone here from Honduras who described being from the Kennedy neighborhood of Tegucigalpa and really most people in Honduras and many countries in Latin America will tell you that they feel ignored by the United States since the Kennedy administration and that the U.S. really needs a renewed focus if the goal really is to reduce this influx of the United States and people say that this foreign policy could include a lot of different things not only for an aid but things like micro loans a gentleman from Pakistan just won the Nobel Prize if you give women in Honduras these small loans to start a business they start a little bakery and then they pay back the money I hate to tell the gentleman that the loans 99% of them go to women because apparently they're a lot better but they pay it back and then the money goes to another woman to start a business or targeted trade policies to countries that send a lot of people north in Honduras I write about this one factory that sent scrubs that made scrubs for the U.S. medical market but the U.S. buyers the factory was about to shut down because these buyers could get these scrubs a few cents cheaper from China and what people in Honduras said was the number two sending country of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. why don't you allow more scrubs in from Honduras than anywhere else and they talk about the U.S. encouraging governments in some of these countries that are more democratic that distribute the wealth that exists in these countries more evenly that attack corruption that attack overpopulation we've seen in Mexico where the government has had a policy to educate people about birth control and it's led to this massive reduction in the number of people kids that people have in Mexico from about six to about two and a half kids per family in the last 20 years it's been astounding the reality is that most immigrants would rather stay in their country with everything they know their language, their family, their culture then come somewhere totally new I mean who wants to come somewhere totally new where you don't know anyone you don't know the language and start all over again these women that I talked to met almost to a once said it wouldn't take radical changes to keep them at home Honduras doesn't have to become the United States they say that if they could feed their kids if they could put clothes on their kids backs if they could send them to school if they even had the hope of being able to send their kids to school they would never walk away from their children and we wouldn't see these thousands and thousands of children each year risking their lives on these freight trains trying to reach them in the United States so let me show you a few photographs from the journey and then I'd be happy to take your questions this is just south of Mexico City this lone boy heading north on the trains this is the journey that Enrique took in Tegucigalpa and where I met him in Nuevo Laredo and this is looking out from his paternal grandmother's home who he's left with across the valley of Tegucigalpa where his sister was left with their maternal grandmother on the other side and he lives with his paternal grandmother in this wooden shack it's just some wood slats that you can see daylight through there's a corrugated tin roof grandma catches the rainwater from the roof into these big barrels and uses that water to bathe and clean and there's basically a concrete hole outside which is the bathroom and she lives a lot better than many people I saw in the capital this is her in her shack and this is the dump that I described I don't know if we can dim the lights a little bit this is the dump that I described and you see this boy, very young boy that day he had grabbed a piece of bread in his blackened hand from this muck and was eating it I should say the wonderful photos here by Don Bartlett of the Los Angeles Times they want to pull a surprise and the bad ones are mine this is a photograph of Enrique when I met him in Nuevo Laredo and you can still see the injury that scar on his forehead several weeks later from the beating he took and his eye the droops and it still droops these many years later from that injury and here he's watching cars in Nuevo Laredo he had been robbed during that assault on top of the train of his little slip of paper with his mom's phone number and luckily he remembered one phone number in Honduras he could try to call and get mom's phone number again and hopefully continue on his journey but he was trying to raise a hundred pesos ten bucks to get that phone call and phone card and make that call I met dozens of kids in Nuevo Laredo who had made it that far twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old they'd been robbed their little slip of paper and there was no phone in their village to call back or they hadn't thought to memorize the phone because they don't use phones a lot and so they were realizing that they were going to have to go back to the beginning after months of traveling and start all over again and here you see the pilgrims train in Chiapas in the south still very lush in the south and these are the branches and this is twelve year old Dennis who the photographer and I were traveling with coming to find mom in San Diego you can see the exhaustion from this was after a day on the trains the migrants do all sorts of things to try to stay awake thinking that they've got a better shot against these thugs on the train if they're awake but just the heat really saps you and this is Dennis jumping from this twelve year old jumping from car to car a lot of kids do this to induce adrenaline like Enrique did to try to stay awake on the trains but they have short legs and oftentimes they're doing this as the train is moving so sometimes they miss there's a five to ten foot span between these cars and they fall down to the coupler and the wheels below you can see how hard it is it's really tough to get on these trains as they're moving the roadbed slants at 45 degrees it's made up of these rocks that are as big as my fists the ties are soaked with creosote so they're very slippery and oftentimes unlike here there's several people jostling to get on one ladder and for the kids the first ladder comes up to their waist so they're trying to pull themselves up this and allude the immigration authorities and the cops trying to grab them at the same time so it's pretty tough and here you see different methods for trying to get on and some of them don't navigate it successfully like this boy who had lost parts of both legs to the train this was the first day his parents had seen him in Oaxaca or in northern Chiapas and this is a woman I describe in the book one of many heroes who treats she opened a shelter for migrants who are mutilated by the trains in Chiapas she's kind of an unheralded mother Teresa in Chiapas doing this work for free and this is Fausto who had lost half his foot to the train trying to get on she tries to heal their wounds and send them back to their home countries it's hard to describe what it's like when you're in this shelter and there's dozens of people who have lost arms and legs to this train they call it el tren de vorador the train that devours this boy who's 14 who lost the toes on one foot and the other leg to the train and this is the woman I told you about Leti the mom who had come left her three kids in Honduras and lost parts of her legs to the train as you're heading north through Chiapas there's a checkpoint where the immigration authorities back then would always stop the train and try to grab all the migrants on board as the train slows there's always this dance everybody comes down the ladder and prepares to jump and here the trick is you've got to run around the immigration checkpoint and allude the authorities and as you're going around the checkpoint that's where the bandits are waiting for you and in this checkpoint there are three to five swarms of bandits carrying everything including oozes and so they're looking you can see the look on their faces they're looking to making this run and try to get on the train as it's moving to the other side of the checkpoint and not be stranded at this point and fresh meat for the bandits and some of them do get caught by the immigration authorities like these this young boy and in the north as you're going north people do all sorts of things to try to keep from freezing they build fires with trash that they find if the train's going slow enough they'll jog alongside trying to keep warm they fit themselves like a rubrics cube in the hole at the end of a hopper and they'll carry a little slip of plastic that they put over the hole and use their body heat to keep from freezing to death on the cars and this is still lush in the south in the Mexican state of Veracruz and the food givers that day were giving oranges and it's a beautiful photo giving food with one arm okay and these are some of the people I met along the tracks who helped the migrants who I describe and this is crossing the Rio Grande into the Texas this is Lourdes and Riquez mother and her daughter who was born in the US and I'd be happy to take questions thank you, been a great audience so we do have time for a few questions tonight and Milton has the roving mic and we will ask that if you do get the opportunity to ask one of the few questions that we'll be able to take tonight that you keep it to a question rather than a series of comments so we can get as many as we can and Milton if you'll come down so you can see where the questions might come from we actually have a student who had planned a question and asked early on Christine from Logan High School is right there and that won't move there Steph so it'll have to be Milton with the roving mic and then we'll take a few questions from the crowd and Sonya will be happy to answer them as best we can before 7.30 or so at which time there will be a little bit of time for book signing there are a few books for sale in the back I think 25 and we're pleased that Book Bay and the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library have made that possible for us so let's get the first question and see what pops next Hi, my name is Christine from Logan High School in Union City and my question is you explore the feelings of Lordess who came to the US how do mothers who stay in their home countries feel about their decision for example how does Belki feel and where's Belki now? Okay I think many women who stay don't there's different reasons for staying I think as I said immigrants would rather stay in their home countries and I saw this with my own mother who when my father died when I was 13 dragged us all back to Argentina but I say dragged because it was at the beginning of the dirty war so it wasn't the best time to go but I think for some women they just don't have the resources to pay for a smuggler and usually I was the only woman on the trains because women know that your odds of getting raped are virtually 100% so most women will find some other way to make it north whether it's someone who can pay their smuggler so you have to have somebody in the United States or have somehow have enough resources to pay for a smuggler or just try to work your way up on buses or in some other way and your odds of being caught are pretty high so you have to have the resources to do that I think some women they know that they do understand increasingly the consequences of being separated from their children and the 10 years down the line their kid may hate them for leaving and I think that's entering increasingly into the equation so I would say those are some of the reasons why women are staying Belki is 7 when mom leaves and she had less resentment towards her mother than Enrique I think there's some of that there and she struggles with that emotionally very depressed at times while she's growing up but I think she has a better situation in Honduras she's left with the maternal grandmother and that's a better situation that Enrique had being left with his paternal grandmother but as I say in the end of the book I mean I got this offer when the book came out to be on kind of the Oprah Letterman combined of the Spanish speaking world called Don Francisco presenta and you know people you know Grey's Anatomy has 24 million viewers this has four times that just to give you a sense of how popular this is people who are not Spanish speaking don't really get that and I had heard that they do reunions sometimes of families and I said can we try to get a visa for Belki because when I met her in 2000 she said I have prayed since I was 7 for one thing just to see my mom one time and she had been sick often on Lourdes her mom and then when I saw her in 2003 she said you know I have given up praying because obviously God is not listening to me and they were able to get her a visa and there was this you know somewhat Jerry Springer like reunion very emotional on this show and the host Francisco kept asking her well was it worth it and she said you know on the one hand my mom built me this little house and I was able to come and have my first son and that's huge but you know I've had this hole in my heart since my mother walked away and she said you know I thought when I finally she had left a 40-day old son her first son child to come north because she figured this is my only shot to see my mom and she told him I thought when I finally when I had this boy that would finally fill that place in my soul you know, perhaps she answers this question best when a week later, she came on a visa and about 40% of people who are in this country undocumented, they don't cross the Rio Grande, they come here on a visa and they overstay their visa. She could have done that, but she hugs her mom, she gets on a plane and she goes back to her baby boy. And so she feels strongly that she wants to be in Honduras with her son, that that's the right thing to do. And she's doing fine there, yeah? Yes. Maria Sabel made it, and I don't want to say too much more to ruin it for anyone who might not have read it. But on your other, I'd be happy to answer any emails. But in terms of the child, that's the one thing that for security reasons, they've asked me not to talk about, so I'm gonna respect that. Yeah, there's a good reason for it. Yeah, in the back. I was wondering if you had spoken to anybody in the State Department or congressional representatives about some possibilities for more thoughtful immigration reform along the lines of some of your suggestions a few minutes ago. I've had politicians come to my talks. I've had many people who've come to my talks bombard their representatives with my book. You know, I think it's tough because there's no real constituency to push politically for creating jobs in Central America. And what most people who know a lot more about this issue than I do say is that they feel that for the last 20, 30 years, what's really driven immigration policy has been business's desire for cheap, compliant workers. And that that will likely continue to drive immigration policy in the future. And so what I basically say is we've tried approaches that are suggested by the left, by the right, and people in between. I mean, even if you look at border enforcement, which we've tripled the number of agents, we've tripled the amount of money we've spent, and the result has been that in 1986, if you were Mexican and you came here and documented, in 12 months, half of you went home and now less than a quarter go home. And so people come and they think it's gonna be not only harder to get in, but it's gonna be more expensive because as it gets harder, the smugglers jack up their prices. So I'm gonna stay here and I'm gonna bring my wife and kids undocumented as well. So we've seen the rates of illegal immigration only soar through this crackdown on the border. But you know, the American public wants to build a wall and that's what we're gonna do apparently. Yes? Hi, my name is Gina. I just wanna know if you have still contacted Enrique and Lordes, and also I want to know if there's Jasmine Journey's coming? A sequel? I don't know about a sequel. And your first question was, do I communicate with them? Do I talk to them? Yes, all the time. About every couple of months we talk, I talked with Lordes about a week ago. And she basically says that life is much the same. They live in Florida and just that things are much harder now because she was doing work in construction sites, cleaning up construction sites after they had been built. And obviously that's been one of the first industries to experience a slowdown. So what I'm seeing in Los Angeles is a lot of workers who were working in construction, they're trickling back down the ladder into jobs that were less desirable, into agricultural work, into washing cars, into work that didn't pay as much as construction work. So she's experiencing those same difficulties, yeah. Yes? What's happening with the fathers? Women don't have children by themselves. It's a family breaking up. Is this a change in the Latin cultures? Well, you know, I asked a lot about the dads in Honduras and perhaps our guests from Honduras could talk about that maybe and help me on this one. What women consistently told me was that men in Honduras are irresponsible and they have children with one wife and then they move on and do not provide for those children. There are obviously many men who do provide for their children. Some people trace this back to kind of the consolidation of farms in Central American countries into these mega farms and the men would travel from farm to farm and leave their wives behind and they would stray in more ways than geographically. So that that was kind of the beginning but that even in the 60s and 70s, there are very high rates of single mothers in Honduras and El Salvador and really that preceded what we saw happen in the United States in terms of single motherhood that that came earlier in some of these countries. I don't know if you can add anything to that or I don't want to put you on the spot. It's true. Yeah, right. Well, you know, I would ask the men about this too and they would say, yep, we're irresponsible about this. So, you know, I tried to give them a shot but they were not helping me. My name is Miles Lee and I'm from City Arts and Technology High School. I would like to know, was it like difficult for you going back to places and seeing people wounded and stuff like that from trying to get on the trains and going through all the stuff to get to their moms? If it was what to see those people? If it was like difficult for you to see them like that. Um, it's wrenching to see people like that. Um, you know, I have to say that as a reporter you have to put your emotions in check because you can't function otherwise. And you do that by telling yourself that you want to tell this story as effectively as possible and you want to get as much information from this person as possible to be able to tell their story in as powerful a way as possible. And if I'm, you know, breaking down in front of people and more focused on my emotions than trying to do my job well then I don't think I've served that person very well. So, you know, you try to walk a fine line between being open and understanding those emotions and feeling those emotions and trying to convey them to readers but not so much that you can't function effectively. So that's kind of the line that you tried to walk while you're doing that kind of interviewing. Yeah. Done? No more? Uh-oh. Okay. If you have an opportunity for the looks on you and the media, you can touch it. Have that attitude. Thank you very much. You've been a great audience. Thank you. I appreciate it.