 Okay, questions? I have a general question for the panel. And because I actually live on the Mexican border, and when I was in Chiapas just a couple of weeks ago, one of the things that I see as a problem is that there is, you know, State of Mexico has to take a stand on this, but there's neither the political will nor the economic resources particularly in the state of Chiapas to be able to do much with that. And so it seems to be, it's nice to be able to say that, but I'm not sure what, I know, like the toa de tima. It's the problem. And then the other issue kind of going with the situation within Juarte, what about itself, is that there seems to be, when you talk about the lack of protection and the national police and the military are going basically the continuation of the Civil War, and I wonder how much of that is rooted within the racism about the indigenous people, not really being complete citizens of their common question of thought. No, I totally agree that it's the lack of political will. Mexican government is just, like the U.S. pretty much, just reacting to what is happening and not really having ambition and trying to see, well, what is going to happen with the economy, the labor and the demography of Mexico, the United States and Central America in the next 20 years, and how we are going to connect everything from the economy to be successful, from Mexico to be successful. Migration is a very sensitive issue and everybody is trying to avoid, to solve. But now. And the other thing about the economic resources, I will debate that Mexico, if we have the political will, can do a lot more in the south of Mexico and also can really help more Central American countries. But we can debate that. Just a quick comment on the racism in Guatemala, which I agree was your comment, Guatemala is about half Mayan and it's, for lack of a better word, it's almost like a caste system that there's a lot of discrimination and racism against the Maya in Guatemala. In many places they're not allowed to go into hotel lobbies or restaurants, whatever. And in fact, one of the great things for them in their migration is coming to the U.S., they leave that behind. And now there are a new minority here, everybody calls them Latinos because they're from Guatemala. The Maya don't know what, they see themselves as naturalist, original people. But you're exactly right that the big barrier here is not just that the government needs to do more, whatever, but that there is an enduring racism. And it was precisely because of the Maya protest and in turn for constitutional reform to give them more rights that the army and the police came in and started shooting and actually killed some. United States board policy, trade policy, and drug policy have caused much of the turmoil in the U.S., Colorado, and elsewhere. Don't you feel that the United States government should be doing more for these children instead of willingly? I mean, it seems like they're eager to deport these kids violating their due process. And when it is our government that caused the issues in their countries to begin with. I think, and I know a lot of my colleagues agree that the children should be taken through due process, right? That we have laws already and that they should be used with the children to see, okay, well, who really qualifies for refugee status or asylum, whatever, right? Rather than Congress trying to, you know, set a new record of how fast can we deport them, right? And I understand that we're not gonna, there's no way you can accept everyone who comes to the border. We have to implement laws, but that's precisely what I think a lot of people that I work with, lawyers, pro bono, whatever we're saying, they need to have access to the laws and those who qualify to stay here should stay here. Every year we get 60,000 or more refugees from the Middle East or Africa or whatever and so it surprises us to think that we can get refugees from Central America because we supported a lot of those governments and by that I mean their militaries, right? And so I don't think people are saying that every kid should be allowed to stay here. Some people are and I understand that, that compassion, but what we're saying is let them have access to the law that's already here and not be in a race to see how fast we can deport them. I think too, as sociologists, we know that there's always some unintended consequences of actions and many of the laws that we've passed rapidly or out of fear or out of political expediency have serious consequences that people haven't thought through and I think this is an issue that needs research, it needs, you know, a lot of analysis before we make policies that are humane policies that respect human rights and that respect the legal processes of people but there are unintended consequences with many of our actions. Next question in the back to the red sweater. Yes. With regards to the dramatic drop in the number of unaccompanied Mexican children who've been mad at people on the border, I'm interested in your thoughts on the 2011 Mexican law having an impact on our across the causal factor of the legitimacy increase in the unaccompanied Mexican children. So what do you think explain what aspects of the law or what kind of implementation of the law might be contributing to that or did that miss other states' comments? Probably because the law is more about immigration and the exit and interest of Mexican nationals. It's not really... Actually, no, it's not connected. Actually, since I was in the negotiations of the law because it was a more complex subject to discuss Mexican migration to the U.S. and the role of the government to provide services outside, let's say in the United States, the law was pretty much out of discussion during the law and it's something that is still pending to see how Mexico is going to really approach from a policy perspective, the out-migration and the huge diaspora that we have in this country. Is that a question here in the front? In a broader regard, it looks almost like America, anyway. And we go down to Chiapas and of course things are a lot worse. Is it a question of economics? And this is a pearl to the question. If it's a question of economics, is it a possible thing that we are, as Mexico becomes more democratized as in the other countries that people will enjoy better conditions there and can we in the United States talk about how we go in that process? Oh, that's a very good and difficult question. The south part of Mexico, as you probably know, has the largest percentage of indigenous population in Mexico compared with central part and the north, which is totally different. I think what they have lagged behind is the provision of services, important services, especially still fertility is high in those states compared with the national average, which is already around 2.4 children per women, but they still have four or five, which put a lot of pressure also on the resources there. And the investment on education and health is not the same in those states than in the rest of the country. It's a huge challenge for Mexico what to do with the southern part of Mexico and has been honestly totally neglected for the last 25 years to 30 years. Next question here in the green shirt. Yes, well, we did have some guest worker programs like the Bracero program, which was exploited in many ways on both sides of the border. But some kind of temporary work program, I think would help because many of these families don't want to leave their country of origin. They just want an opportunity to have, you know, gain a stake, an economic stake, go back or gain skills and go back to their communities where their extended families are, where they feel comfortable, where their roots are, their culture is. So if we could provide some opportunities because there are many jobs here that we need to fill. And I think that some guest worker program that is carefully monitored so that the workers are not exploited and they're not treated as slaves as sometimes that happens in some communities or some countries, that it might help in some ways. I would just second that. And I know that Mexico has some kind of guest worker program with Canada. And so that seems to work. But Canada also does their immigration a little bit differently. They do it by a point system based on how many college degrees you have, things like that. They only help the upper echelon of society. How does private assessments of retirement homes in Central America and gay communities disruptive of the policing in Central America? When you have privatization of policing that's happening with the gay communities, I'm wondering if that's also contributing to the need for a gay organization and an alternative to the vacuum that's happening? Are you saying like the rich are better protected because they have their private police? Yes. That's true. Obviously in many of the upper class sectors more privileges better they send their children to U.S. schools and things like that. And so the rest of society doesn't have those resources obviously or maybe deprived of it, right? So, yeah. For a long time they were separate business. Yeah. Smuggling migrants and organized crime. But for reasons that are still hard to understand organized crime started to really see the opportunities that other business were there for them when they were controlling the red territories especially in the borders in the Mexican northern border cities Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana. They started to control those who what is it called, stealing cars, they were starting to control all kind of delinquency in the cities. And smugglers were part of that at some point. And also they realized not only because of Central American migrants and this is something I know from my own expertise when I work in the government is to bring migrants from India, China East Asia to the United States to very complex networks. It's a huge international business and organized crime in Mexico like the CETAS, especially the CETAS started to see the opportunity there and they started to act. And one of the main factors to really open more the understanding of migration and to have more access and more order in the way migration flows is that you will really hear a very huge business today of human traffic that is connected to organized crime. I'm not saying that everybody who is a smuggler is a CETA drug cartel guy or that's really involved in organized crime but very important territories of Mexico are controlled by them and they had to pay a fee to really cross those territories and in the case of Tamaulipas which is true, they control who crosses the border or not to the United States to drug cartels. They are not coyotes or smugglers that we used to know in the past actually some friends of ours were scholars who went to the border and talked to the coyotes as smugglers to see how that business worked. They cannot do it anymore. They don't have access to that because it would be very dangerous for them to really go to the border and do that kind of research. It was like before the smugglers would just pay the cartels to cross through their territory but now it's gone beyond that. The cartels have begun to actively organize the actual smuggling but it's more than smuggling and they make them call their families to get to be set free and so it's smuggling but it's also kidnapping and although it's very lucrative because of the high volume of migration. We just returned from the American Sociological Association and at one of the sessions they reported on research that showed that some of the coyotes who are the border crossers different from the ones that bring the people from the internal areas to the border were collaborating with the gang members and the drug cartels to allow the people that they're transporting to be robbed so that they knew where these people were going to cross. They knew where they were going to be and the robbers would come in and take their money and the coyote crossing never got robbed. They're thinking, they're hearing these stories from the migrants crossing that there's some kind of collaboration. It's definitely an economic enterprise that's going on that's also contributing to this. Just as a footnote, I mean kidnapping has become like the new booming business and it's even for small criminals. I mean kidnapping the barber's son or kidnapping the guy who the mechanic's daughter for $200 or something like quickly. So it's a new booming business in crime. Next question in the back. I would just say that completely agree with the witness assessment that smuggling the children is very profitable for the cartels but there are many children who also come on their own, they come on the train on top of the train and it's a cargo train, not a passenger train and so some of this are outside the protection of a smuggler or a cartel and they get assaulted and robbed and even murdered because there are many different ways through which children migrate they are vulnerable to different dangers during the journey. But the ones that are smuggled theoretically may be more protected because they've made payment, they're coming with a guide and the cartels are going to see that they get delivered to the border. That though we encourage free markets movement of goods but we still have unfree labor market and that those too cannot coexist without people being declared illegal. For much of our history we had open borders we had open borders with my 18th century ancestors. We had open borders with my 20th century with everyone's ancestors. Suddenly in the 1920's we decided to declare all kinds of people illegal, most of them complicated processes. Why can't we think in terms of if not completely open borders at least much more open borders. I agree. The border has changed dramatically and it's very difficult for people to cross for legitimate reasons and our immigration policy is very flawed. It's been piecemeal and changes that don't agree with other changes so we do need comprehensive immigration reform that will allow people to come and go. That was a big criticism of NAFTA that we allowed goods to come and go but nobody addressed because it was too politically sensitive the issue of people coming and going. Let me just say that my doctoral dissertation was on labor migration in the history of the world economy going back to the 1600's final conclusion is that the world has always been open for capital migration but it's usually an often restricted for workers to move and to let workers come from Central America to US defeats the plan the larger plan of capitalist development we want those workers to stay poor in Central America so they can be low wage and create our shirts and whatever we use bananas that we buy at HGP or whatever. When the workers come here they come to the capital because now they want the same wage as you and I have and it's hard to think we can let that happen that's not a good policy for capital capitalism. Well I think that when you look at the senate bill that was approved some immigration comprehensive immigration reform but it has pretty much lost in the lower house you will see how the agricultural producers did an amazing lobby in the bill to really foresee what is next. What is coming not only about solving what is the crisis now which they are facing in California especially but the need for labor in the future and they talk about the blue card a blue card that will allow Mexican workers to cross the border and come to the field even if they live in Mexico they still hard believe that one in the US that everybody that wants to come and work here wants to come and live here and wants to follow the American dream which is true for most migrants but there are many many migrants that they would like the opportunity to come and cross for a few months make enough income and have a good life in Mexico. If I can find more for that kind of visas and extensions of special visas for Mexico it's a big question for me but also if you want to look a good example how to see a very organized labor for a specific sector look at everything that agricultural producers really negotiated in the senate bill very different than other sectors that didn't see at least they were not as active organized like there were that's a very good example of what we're afraid in the future in a very organized labor market between at least Mexico and the US and Central America. I'm afraid that's going to have to be our last question thank you very much for the questions for panel one and we'll continue in 15 minutes. We've got a great panel of community