Ann arbor, michigan. Its an hour and 20 minutes. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us here today for th good afternoon thanks for joining us today if you are here in the room and those joining us through lifestream through our partners and through our host here today school for Public Policy International Policy center and also a special thanks to cspanan for the interest they have taken in this conversation to join us here to capture the discussion. I am the director of Wallace House home to the fellowship for journalists and the livingston award livingston award for young journalists that brings us here today. Od it is a prestigious prize referred to as the pulitzer for the young to award excellence in journalism by journalist under the age of 35. So our special guest today visiting one the livingston award for National Reporting in 2017 for her story unclaimed and that story that brings us to our talk today with the title beyond the wall , the human toll of Border Crossing. Unclaimed tells the story of an anonymous undocumented man left in a vegetative state after a tragic truck accident with the Border Crossing unknown and unclaimed has been in a hospital bed for no nearly two decades he is called number 66 because there is no information on him and nobody knew his name perhaps it was a reference to the route that the accident occurred nobody knows for sure. Ng during the time when immigration stories are the news every day on the repeating loop, so much we are desensitized, the stories are often terror solace solidified policy debate and it is easy to stop listening. Her unclaimed captures her human story for the health and the dreams and the tragedies and disappointments not just of the unknown man at the center of the narrative but hundreds of families who by hishito story might contain a missing loss for a piece of their own family story. Are we just one paragraph before we turn it to the panel that yet really the news or lack of the story spread as people began to contact the hospital their own Family History is included across the border each has a son or brother or a husband or cousin or a friend headed north then towe disappear leaving no answers about what could happen to him if he was dead or incarcerated or if he had abandoned them in the english of their uncertainty they look to the man in the bad and saw hope. They are into the empty past and saw the possibility of themselves. Technology these human stories brings us here today to believe journalism gives an opportunity not just those stories and solitude but to explore and debate to try to understand the issues together so we brought brooke here to join us today for a conversation with two esteemed scholars who have interest in her work we are pleased to have her joining us today associate professor of anthropology here at University Director of the undocumented migration project leaving migration violence, death author of the book the land of open graves and awarded a 2017 macarthur. For his work that was cited for challenging audiences to confront the complexity of internationall migration with american policy choices and to moderate the discussion we are pleased to have associate professor of Public Policy here at the ford School Teaching courses on Public Policy and implementation Qualitative Research methods tied to immigration. I will turn it over to and to guide the conversation but first it is our policy always to invite the audience to participate you will notice we have given question cards when youon entered major hand if you do not get one somebody will pass you one please jot your question down youll have people in the audience to collect those cards making sure they get to the front if we do not want to write it down but join the conversation on twitter from the room or the lifestream use Wallace House. We will have a brief reception afterwards you are welcome to stay and with that b17. We are really honoring yourt story today so it starts with the man in the bed. Tell us how he got there. So as lynette began the mystery of how he got into the he was in an accident near the border so it was assumed he n was but nobody is sure. It is common for people to be advised not to carry identification with them because that smugglers often encourage that. So there were very few clues about his past. A calling a card purchased in mexico with some dollars and pesos so he was a mystery. Even the mystery of his name for them to clarify how the strange name came about and the nurses who greeted him made up names because they needed something to call him but it was so short like a shadow of a story. But what is so interesting is how that lack of a story affected other people as they began to read, tens of thousands n who have someone they love who dont know what happened to them they went to cross the border then something happened it could be aa wide variety but that means a lot of people are left wondering. One of the people that i spoke to researching this story they were trying to make connections. Of mysterious remains she said the family that she worked with they turned to psychics and dreams and many of them were convinced they thought they had amnesia which is unlikelyd but they are eager to believe but then another had a very special torture of not knowing. So the point was to learn more about these families and their experiences s when i first started working on it i thought a lot about this novel that i love. And at the heart of the novel are these other characters who live in the same town whose life rotate around him he is the one person they can trust and he understands them. But if you read his perspective reading the man in the bed and he reflected back that is what i wanted to explore. But liliana currently lives in houston. She is missing her brother so how a does she come to know about the man in the bed . What does she do to find her brother . By the time i met her it had been 16 years and her family looked for them and the call the calling card cut out they never heard from him again. I looked in the hotels and then hospitals and in the morgues and Visitor Centers and the people of the county showed that people who had died is this him . Every time it was not him. But they didnt know what to do. So she heard of this man in san diego by this time there are large Online Networks for family situations that have sprung up grassroots people just believe if you put out a photo with wide enough circulation may be the right person will see that and get an answer to the question. So more than a dozen facebook groups with followers ranging from 10000 down at 200,000 people. With someone that they have lost not the way to have those disturbing photos. And just those little for people to follow up on. And leon i came across one of those. Ke you talked about working with the crew the migrants leave behind. If you have not read it i would highly recommend it. One of the Amazing Things i dont think we need more stories of immigration at this point. And those with real trauma working on a daily basis and time trying to piece together from the ecological perspective with a forensic perspective to piece together that are fragmentary and difficult so and also spending time at the shelters after they were b deported and also looking at those who died during a Border Crossing thousands have died. So that we drastically undercut on that basis. So the trauma continues to carry on. So those who are looking for lovedng one is horrific and then to be focused those who left ecuador in 2013 and then went missing in the desert and has not heard of this since. Ll in that mysterious phone call in the middle of the night. And two with the trauma but in the context of 911 and then never have confirmation if they are alive or dead. But that difficulty they have to go to facebook. So the federal government could care less. There are some nonprofits so if your relative goes missing who do you call . Thes consulate . Somebody in tucson . You just dont know in tucson they could send you to the 12 different places to be passed around willynilly only with a handful of organizations but at the moment there are 800 unidentified bodies uncovered in arizona alone. N somehow have completely disappeared there is nobody working at the federal level to help alleviate this horrific humanitarian catastrophe that there have had their hand in for a long time. How did you know about this story or what you did to research it . I think i was first considering, Story Made National Headlines migration routes shifted and happened to pass through a county in texas that was not directly a border county and a Border Patrol checkpoint people had to go around to not get caught on doing so many died of exposure and ranchers would find them and many people were dying. So the medical examiner didnt too do so they buried the bodies in a mass grave so i was considering writing about that as an anthropologist who has an ongoing project for those that are following what they can to find out their story but it didnt feel like the right way to and one is it was early they had only identified one person and it felt like immigration can feel abstract and we hear a lot of numbers and statistics and i wanted their story and that wasnt available. Also i was a little weary of the detective will solve this. But it made me aware of the scale of the problem talking to anthropologist who said this is like katrina and 911. That is something i wanted to write about but i did not know how. But then i was reading randomly about physician assistedd suicide and the right to die movement reading a story about the number of people kept alive at government expense in california and a mention of this man 66 garage mentioning families had come forward hoping he was there missing person i had not been thinking of their families that is the whole part of the story that never occurred to me. So that just caught me at is not hard to imagine that Emotional Experience living in doubt and fear because you dont know l what happened to someone that you love so that i wanted to find those families because there is a lot of privacy considerations but i did find some. Where the heartbreaking parts of your story at the very end talking about a woman who adopted this man and visited him and spoke to him and s then at the end was identified she can no longer speak to him anymore. Yes. That really breaks her heart and it is a heartbreaking part of the story. J the timing just happened to work that way. If i had started reporting this, i did not know he was going to be identified he was a mystery over 16 years so that i people at the discretion of the family. So many people i talked to continue looking over decades he had a living sister after many years had given him up for lost. President trump talks about open borders prior to his administration they had allowed in all these drugs but can you s Say Something what the border looks like and how it isnt open . [laughter] so that whole question isnt based on any truth or fact. So if you think about people that are pushing for the wall people recognize the border isis very complex. We dont have an open border what is n said publicly is not a reflection on the ground numbers have been down obama deported more people than george w. Bush. H. Things are way more complicated than they are portrayed the policies we have in place the way of the Security Council started with a secured loan the Clinton Administration so this idea we are overrun by drugs and terrorist are false ideas and they are not true but we have done is completed the war on terrorism with southern Border Security as a way to generate fear and ending for things like a wall we know that will not p work and put money in certain peoples pockets. Unfortunately they pick up steam and from my experience in many hours that we are told publicly are not true. What people dont realize is how much border enforcement of course not only the difficulty to get across the border but the existed of the large undocumented population because they dont want tois risk going home for fear they cannot come back again it is like walking across the dotted line talking about the weeks or months long process so can you Say Something about that . I love the quotation then i will show you somebody renting a 51foot ladder with a 50foot wall. [laughter] but not necessarily in ways that are super obvious so to put up a wall is the architectural impossibility that will cost millions of dollars totally ineffective. The way immigration is change the last four years we were afraid of those children flooding the Detention Centers in the humanitarian crisis but then it went away. Obama says we put more boots on the ground we didnt change anything for the border but we outsourced mexico to stop them in country so they report as much as we do as part of the plan but now they deny it exist but we trained agents and mexico to catch them leaving the country that is where border enforcement is happening. One of the things that is missed in the discussion it isnt very easy to come to the United States legally. People talk it is important to do the right thing but immigration policy is really who you know centered around the sponsorship so you have an immediate Family Member who can sponsorn you like an adult child or spouse or brother or sister or you have to have an employer and sponsor you by name not just to say i need workers but i need this person herehe and i am willing to make that application. So it turns out there is no line there isnt one that would get them to the United States so they develop all of the other ways. One of the things you were talking about earlier was ms 13 and it is powerful because they smuggle people over the border. I didnt watch the state of the union last night but the trouble with ms 13 to destroy america we made them as a homegrown problem we outsourced and sent them back to Central America with skills to become more organized around criminal activity but they are the new bogeyman that the scary thing to throw out there but keep in mind as a transnational gang starts in california and los angeles supporting people fleeing centralve america because of immigration policies they come to the United States and get marginalized then we send them back they get more organized even life more miserable so it is a backandforth but ms 13 is an american problem we have historical amnesia but increasingly a work with a lot of guys who know donald trump because every time he says i will build a big wall they say that is more money than i can make the wall will do anything but they think the wall requires more out of me so i can jack up my prices now in this 13 controls the movement they controlte the routes cartels cover the geographic areasrere you cannot cross mexio without ms 13 because people were afraid to come but now ms13 every time trump says something for them that is just more money. So having that perception. I want to remind everybody we are looking forward to your questions so please write them on your question card major hand if you need one. You can also tweet your question so broke a story you are working on more recently about citizen children of. With the ramping up of those deportation policies but then with President Trump change directive to i. C. E. That encourages i. C. E. To pick up any undocumented immigrant even if they do not have criminal records so that fear of deportation has gone up tremendously. Can you tell us what those families are doing . You clarified Adult Children could sponsor their parents for citizenship. Children children are not if you arent american born child of someone for deportation, you really dont have the right to have that person in your life in america. It is very interesting situation where the best interest ofsi the child is the Legal Standard used International Law shows the rights of the child he sighed signed but not ratified so if there is a custody decision , that is the criteria that judges are considering but not a mechanism for looking at that with Immigration Law coming too deportation. So there are lots of people who are deported leaving behind American Children which opens the question then what is best for these children in the future of our country even if they leave maybe you dont know or speak the language people are planning better now but they were leaving mexico and hadn no paperwork so we hear a lot about immigrants overrunning those schools that mexican schools are having a hards time overrun with kids who dont speak spanish. So the families are very afraid s from what i have seen in my reporting they are planning for what happens if you have a small child and your parent doesnt come home from work or pick you up at school and then a whole plan for this. Who has Bank Account Information . The story i recently worked on was about a woman in a miami to step in the legal sense through the transition to sign the School Paperwork with all the stuff you wouldnt necessarily imagine to be a problem. There is a woman in miami for more than a thousand children and it has gone up a lot in the election and the effect on the whole family. The psychologist refers to these children whose rights are not being remembered or respected. Having interviewed and analyzed many i of them with more selfesteem and that they are the ones to mess up . They have their parents fate in their i hands . What if they do something wrong and the family falls apart . So they are hiding from i. C. E. In the middle of the night everybody had black sweatshirts or she has a happy committee and could not hide. I met children who had parents deported or or afraid of that and the effect is pretty heartbreakingre. How do you get people to trust you in situations like that . So they are terrified something that they say ory do will bring them to the attention of i. C. E. To the deportation so why do people trust you to speak to yo you . Thats a good question. I am very cautious about things like that. My first responsibility is to the reader but it would be different writing about public figures or ordinary people not in the spotlight if i did not put them there and that creates the responsibility not to mess up their lives. It helps to be introduced by somebody that they already know and trust. Its not like he will knock on the door it is important to be slow and cautious and explained the goals of your reporting and when the circumstances require and then anonymize their detail. You also work with people jason you would not think have much reason to trust you but these are young men coming across the border and for that matter doing work with Border Patrol agents and somebody was thought not to be. Sympathetic so how do youow get sources . I was on the project once the sociology survey we knocked on doors asking people the immigration status. [laughter] that fell flat it was a good learning moment for me this isnt really working. But for me, it is a couple of things. So those communities that i work with it takes a long time to develop that trust so at the time mis committed to them as they are to me . I am interested in your story. I will be back tomorrow. Then you are not kidding. So then i wil be back next week then next year so part of that is ideological but another part is do you give off the vibe i am interested in these issues to do the best job that i t can and also to be fair to those who are trusting me ive had great working relationships with Border Patrol and migrants and i come with all of it with an openness i want to tell the stories i cannot do it if i am here with this agenda and people are not always open to this in theayen beginning it dos take time to develop trust and they recognize i want to write about the complete person that i have come to know. And some people do horrible stuff but how does somebody come to that decision . They were like that as a person so people pick up on that when i use the brain at up to what you are doing but i can trust you to do the job that i think will affect the relationship we are having so they are pretty good detector. I think. Can you Say Something about the kind of journalism . You write for magazines that you freelance and pitch the kids stories to different places what do you look for in a good story . Thats a hard question. The best answer is the story needs to be the kind of story that stickse with you and you would tellll your friends whatever betty always says in journalism you get your story not the topic when it comes to Something Like this i dont have any kind of policy agenda i want to tell the story so we understand them better and the do that that cuts through of what they expect or what they think they already know is the most effective largest barrier for all of us feeling that you already know the answer even if youg dont. That can be frustrating just like people who think they have already heard that story before. The goal is to tell stories im always drawn to topics that are messy and not clear i want to know their motivation or anything that will make me see the world that i thought i knew in a different way maybe i didnt know is much as i thought t that is a valuable experience for us to have. Many more quotes and ars and more are in your research that never get published so how do you make a selection . I think about the work i do as when i tell a compelling story and the data that i have but at the end of the day, i would consider myself to be an anthropologist in the field but not necessarily anthropologist or social scientist when i said words to paper. Im more interested in being a writer and state journalist or some other thing that values the storytelling. My colleague told me once ive been accused of being a journalist and she said thats okay thats not a bad thing, that means youre putting interesting things on paper and people want to follow along. With the social science stuff, you have all this information and have to figure out what to include and what to leave out in terms of what can the reader handle and how do you do that in a concise way so over the years i had to figure out had to be more often to be honest about the process and if i lose you with the narrative it doesnt matter how much i put in there it is indecipherable. So for medo not be wedded to certain data sets or things written. If it is going to be distracting. But its hard. You are always editing something whether it is a journal article or piece of paper or a book. I just have a lot to work with, but im thinking about it in a much more journalistic or novelistic way. I think it is time to invite everybody else to the conversation so i see people collecting cards. I know the cards are coming down here and will be asking the questions. This is a question from our audience what the walls that ran the length of the border [inaudible] no. Its not the law. The wall. Fullstop movement. This giant walls in san diego and the redirect people towards the desert just have to walk five or six days to get across. Its about the Natural Environment walking through bucks county or the southern deserts of arizona, that is the wall, that is the physical barrier to movement. The actual ball that we put up isnt going to stop the flow of people because they can go under it, jump over it, go around it in water. At the end of the day it doesnt get at the core reason for why people are coming, why they are leaving the worl world is pullim here. Itit slowed things down that hasnt slowed it down in 2008 it was the economy being in the toilet, thats what slowed things down. Thats how its always been. The push and pull factor is the fact we have people in the u. S. That are undocumented because we like cheap labor or there are things happening around the globe forcing them to leave as Global Climate change, political stability, the drug war in mexico. A big thing. I keep thinking way. Fullstop having this conversation because i dont have many times. That is end our area of expertise. Something that brings to mind is spain has two outposts considered spanish territory and those are the only ones between africa and the European Union and they are very much to protect basically. It is heavily guarded and not only do people get over those walls they are also injured and killed in the process frequently on a weekly basis so that is like a microcosm of what we are trying to accomplish and it has not been successful. The only thing i would add, when you make it difficult to get into the u. S. , you create a market for people who tell you to cover those difficulties so there are undocumented immigrants from asia who come in through smuggling and if they make it harder for people to cross but ther theres still an economic incentive for them to be in the United States, still reasons for them to come to the u. S. But there is no legal way to do it, then what we will see is people paying smugglers in being in debt to them for years in order to get across and get through the checkpoints that are between them and the u. S. The federal government fought in the early 90s if they used the desert as a natural barrier they said people thought i because it will be too hard to get across, but the thinking was enough people die they will stop coming. You can look this up on the internet, the dhs online you can see these policy documents people say they will die in the desert but that wont stop them once people learn that they are dangerous and stop doing it they will stop coming. Hundreds of deaths a year dont stop you from coming i dont know what this wall is going to do. The most extreme people to be a good thing we can do is kill people at the border. I wanted to say before the next question a cards are being collected and read by the amazing Wallace House fellows and i hope that he will introduce yourself before you ask the next question and others will as well. Thank you. I am robert from washington, d. C. , one of the Knight Wallace fellows. This question is also from the audience. This country of origi origin aft specific routes taken through mexico where do they take the same and then in the related question those crossing the border do you know the breakdown between those of mexico and Central America . They are segregated by the country of origin. So youve got people from african countries coming up to that route the sort of unexpected. The hondurans come through the two routes. Try to get to Houston Texas or new orleans they tend to come through other sorts of routes to new york city but you will see these routes in mexico like people will eventually come so there are segregated routes have come. At the border to breakdown right now is 98 or something for people from mexico or Central America and then they tend to split pretty evenly between mexico and Central American countries you have people coming from all over the place, mexico and much farther away like unexpected china for example. This is also from our inhouse audience can limit you talk about this movement our church is the only place to provide sanctuary. What does that mean, do you know about the church and he tried posting a case test for this movement . I will start by saying there is no legal prohibition against any other officer going into a house of worship or anywhere else, so the Sanctuary Movement is built on a particular belief that if Law Enforcement agents have to force their way into a church to pick up a particular family that will create a Public Relations for them at that agency cannot tolerate. Theres nothing that keeps Law Enforcement from going into church, synagogues, mosques and any other house of worship. Having said that, there are two issues to go on. The Sanctuary Movement is a really important way for congregations to, for americans to think about whether they approve of the policies our government which is in their name saying we cannot survive as a country if these people who did not come through Legal Immigration means stay here. Its a way for americans to look at themselves to see what they are willing to accept. And in that sense it has been tremendously useful in teaching people about the issues, immigration in general. Its been a great way of teaching people about the millions of people in the United States that are protected against deportation that has been detoured but they have no legal status or way of getting legal status which means any kind of protection can be listed in is the situation of people under temporary protective status, that is the situation of people who have received the deeper action for childhood arrival as well as people who are undocumented and do not have any program or court decree protecting them. So i think its important and great that people are concerned and care about it. But as an actual policy to prevent deportation, its not very helpful. This question is from our inhouse audience. Migration across the border like many other issues has aspects of intersection out o audi and ides of race and gender. Can you speak to how issues at the border are also feminist issues particularly in the spines of the need to movement . Me too movement . I guess i have a wide definition of what a feminist issue is. These are peoples families and lives. One of the trend is trends is y of people deported our men so that leaves a lot of families with just a mother and thats a major impact on a lot of peoples families. I think that is important. Our image of an undocumented migrant is surely a young man coming to the u. S. And maybe hes going to stand in the home depot parking lot at work or commit a crime. It really closes our eyes to the fact families come over in steps where one person comes first and they are able to send money back to bring other people over or families come together. And i think another way of thinking about what goes on at the border as a sensitive issue is two things. First, whether formerly through smuggling o or informally, one f the fears women facing the men faced last is the fear of Sexual Violence and that is certainly a feature of the experience particularly when women are trusting smugglers to get them across the border. And then the other thing i would say thats also important is the u. S. Created a set of Legal Protections of a way to get legal status for women who were battered with abused and where one of the elements is that the husband controlled the immigration visa and if they were divorced in no longer have the ability to stay in the u. S. Or she is the principal applicant for a visa. They wouldnt have the ability to play on her own. Is it the case. And today the face families han fragmented. There was no paperwork of him in the obituary. She couldnt leave the country because it is illegal without all kinds of paperwork. It differentiates those that are migrating. It comes up constantly. Those that dont know about ten years ive been trying to use this as one method to understand this process b we treated it lie an assemblage. We hope those things can be used to show the connection to get people thinking about what its like to be an immigrant and how to its shockingly not allow but it took a long time to realize that. I worry about this stuff because theres always this focus its really interesting its just a way to think about the people that left them behind. They both speak to the Human Experience that happened in the middle of nowhere where there were not a lot of people around to see this stuff, but there is a lot of interesting objects we have found and i can talk ad nauseam about food and ripped up shoes and things. There was this important things i would rather talk about whose body they found in 2012. This body had been sitting in cold storage for six weeks. What would h. , informed policy need to look like in order to support immigrants in the United States. The u. S. Has a refugee policy. They created a program that would screen refugees abroad. Having said that that was important about our previous refugee policy. The u. S. Waged a war in vietnam. Fiercely on our side during the wars. We dont have the same policy with cuba. I could go on about this. We are a large part of the region so one thing i would say about the policy that recognizes migration. There would be no particular circumstances where. We knowingly do this. Maybe the least we could do is to spend some time and energy to send it back to him. I think that for me the form of sensitive policy would be at least two minimally invest the samples. The work that needs to be done is a minimal amount that we could do that would at least theres the murder that happens and then we cannot let this continue because as this story shows. And its the people in conflict to try to solve some of these but they dont solve a lot of cases. The fingerprints are finally wey identified and have existed. It had never been thoroughly checked out a. Of then they ran them in an old database to develop your own relationship. Its very easy to talk about them and they will tell you stuff that is really haunting. I talked with a number of peop people. In the era of alternative facts is there a role for journalism and academia for the policies . Yes. Of different ways they draw the line for what it is advocacy. There are just certain things i dont see as a bias. I think it is a handy thing to have but i dont think that should be considered what disqualifies me from reporting on environmental issues. Im very happy to claim the bias that i think the people involved are real people whose humanities should be respected and understood and if i cant write stories that help keep that in mind. At least in the discipline of anthropology people start looking around and say what do i do and how do i contribute to the dialogue about these Different Things to. I dont get tenure if im an intellectual. That is what gets me tenure and then theres all this other stuff so what happened i see a lot of my colleagues its just digestible, readable, understandable. That is what so and so does its theoretical and why do i keep doing what im doing and not think about the Dumpster Fire of the little happening right now. There is a real commitment to the world and to share information about the work we do in an accessible way so now more than ever to be working to be understandable and comfort to these facts. [applause] we have time for one last question how does the immigrant wave compared to other historical periods and is there any connection with the economy and unemployment rates over time . As you say we have an antiimmigrant wave and the sentiment in the United States is not a no and it existed in the early 18 hundreds and was directed against catholics and existed in the late 18 hundreds into the mid18 hundreds against chinese and existed in the late 18 hundreds and was directed against southern europeans, so nativism is a part of our country. Its an important part of our story because whenever you confront nativism, that response isnt to say gosh these people are racist i dont want to talk to them, the is you care about what this country is and stands for and i do, too. We have a conversation about what your values and my values are, understanding we are both part of the country that we want to protect and respect. To bring this conversation back a bit to the alternative facts, and in many ways the facts about immigration are not particularly complicated. Whats complicated about immigration is that we have a bunch of different values that also run against each other and so we have to have that conversation about the values and if we dont and we just yell at each other, then we end up with a policy that doesnt serve our country well and doesnt serve people that want to very well, so i think that its important to understand first and come to the other part of your question that nativism isnt really related to economic traditions or war around the world it can exist in good times and bad times. One of the things that indicate as many immigrants are coming in because of their jobs it. Its what we think this country stands for and how we think it is g
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