Transcripts For CSPAN2 University Of Michigan Ford School - Border Crossings 20180212

Just a College Degree to get a job and i think that a lot of people dont have the Financial Aid to keep going to Doctoral School or a Higher Learning education or Something Like that. They dont have the money to get the Higher Education in the cant find a job just average College Degree. Weve been fighting common core for seveneight years now and we still have it here in alabama. We find that every single year with the new bill. We want to get rid of it. In the state of alabama i believe is racial inequality and justice form. I think that here in the state we still have frederick in our constitution that is representative of the time that has long passed and i think that having discriminatory language in the document that governs a Diverse Group of people is very outdated and limits peoples power, the disenfranchisement and the way that Law Enforcement interacts with the citizens across the state i think that those things need to be addressed so that we can have the gap within the disparities and inequalities within the Justice System here in alabama. Those can close and eventually not even exist. Important issue for me is the cost of college education. I feel that everyone should have equal opportunity to go to college under the same amount of money because some people may be be the first people in the family to go and the government should take all the possibility and give more money. Voices from the state on cspan. The u. S. Senate starting debate on immigration policy later today we thought we would show you recent event hosted by the university of michigan board school of Public Policy. The discussion on Us Immigration policy in the human toll of Border Crossings. Panelists included the director of the universitys undocumented migration project and awardwinning magazine writer and immigration scholar. This is one hour and 20 minutes. Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us here today. For those of you who are here in the room and for those who are joining us via lifestream. Thank you to our partners and our host here today, the Gerald R Ford school of International Policy and we also want to give a special thanks to cspan for the interest they are taken in this conversation today and for joining us here to capture the discussion. Im lynette, director of Wallace House which is home to the night wallace home for journalist and live in stena work. Its a livingston award for junk journalist that brings us here today. The livingston award is the prestigious prize often referred to as the pulitzers for the young. In towards excellence in journalism by journalists under the age of 35. The Brooke Jarvis, special guest today is sitting, one the livingston award Financial Reporting in 2017 for her story unclaimed and it is that story that brings us to the talk today with the title beyond the wall, the human toll of Border Crossings. Unclaimed tells a story of an anonymous undocumented man left in a vegetative state after a tragic truck accident during the Border Crossing. Unknown and unclaimed heat languished in a hospital bed for now nearly two decades the man came to be called 66 garage because there was no information on him and no one knew his name. Perhaps that name was a reference to the truck route on which the accident occurred but no one ever knew for sure. During the time when immigration stories are in the news every day sometimes on a repeating loop throughout the day so much so that we can become desensitized to them the stories are often tied to politicized policy debate and political factions. It is easy to just stop listening. Brooke jarvis unclaimed captures and achingly human story. It explores the hope, the drea dreams, the tragedies and the disappointments, not just to the unknown man at the center of the narrative but of the hundreds of families thought that his story might contain a missing long for peace of their own story. I will read just one paragraph from the story before we turn it over to the panel. Yet, as his story or really the newest of the lack of a story spread people began to contact the hospital to ask detailed questions about his mold or his cars and their own family histories also included a journey across the border interrupted by a mystery and each had a son or brother or a husband or a cousin or a friend who had headed northward and disappeared leaving no answers about what might have happened to him whether he was dead or incarcerated or suffering somewhere. Whether he had abandoned them. In the english of their uncertainty they looked to the man in the bed and soft. They. Into his empty past and saw the possibility of themselves. Acknowledging these human stories is what brings us here today. We at Wallace House believe the excellent journalism presents an opportunity for community. A process not to just think and absorb stories in solitude but also to talk, to explore, to debate and to try to understand the issues and the stories together. We have brought Brooke Jarvis here to join us on campus today for a conversation with two seem to scholars with experience in the issues that her work explores. We are pleased to have join us today jason, associate professor of an apology here at the university and director of the undocumented migration project. His research on latin american migration among other topics violence, death and mourning and is the author of the book the land of open grave, living and dying on the migrant trail. He was awarded a 2017 macarthur genius grant for his work that the Macarthur Foundation funded challenging audiences to confront the complexity of International Migration and american policy choices. And to moderate the discussion today we are pleased to have and lynn, associate professor of Public Policy here at the ford school where she teaches courses on Public Policy and implementation, Qualitative Research methods and a range of topics tied to immigration. I will turn things over to and to guide our conversation today before we do i want to remind you while it is our policy to employ our audience to participate in the conversation you will notice we have given question cards and if you dont have a card as the card is going on raise your hand and if you have a question please jot it down it will have people on the isles and they will collect the question cards and make sure they get down to the front. When we open it up for question and answer for those of us who dont want to write a question down but would rather join the conversation on twitter either from the room or from the lifestream you can submit your questions to twitter using the Wallace House. I will come back up at the end and will have a brief reception after our conversation for you to meet our panelist and hopefully talk to one another. I welcome you to stay in with that, i leave it in able hands of the inland. [applause] brooke, we are honoring your story today and we are wondering if you could tell us about it. It starts with a man in the bed and no one knows who he is. Tell us about how we got there in sure. As lynette began the long time got into the bed was all that was known about him. His story was this long and he was in an accident. The other people in the car were migrants and it was assumed that he also was but no one was. Sure. It is common for people to be advised not to carry their identification with the because for a variety of reasons but smugglers often encourage that. Is the microphone working right . Okay. There were very few clues about his past. He had in his pocket a calling card that have been purchased in mexico and some dollars in pesos and that was it. He became the mystery and even the mystery of his name that no one i talked to was able to clarify how such a strange name came about. The nurses who treated him would make up names for him and they needed something to call him but his story was so short. It was a shadow of the story. But what was so interesting and what drew me to write about him was how that lack of the story affected other people as lynette began to read there are tens of thousands of people who have someone they love that they dont know what happened to them. They set out to cross the border and then something happens. It could be a wide variety of things but it means a lot of people left wondering. One of the people i spoke to when i was researching the story who worked with families like these trying to make the connection between mysterious remains and on stories she said that the family she worked with turn to psychics and they believed in dreams and many of them were convinced their person was one case where someone had amnesia and is an unlikely thing but people were eager for something to believe in the way she put it was that its a picture that she wouldnt wish on anyone. A special chapter of not knowing. The point of the story was to learn more about all these families and what their experience was like. When i first started working on it i thought a lot about this novel that i loved which is called the heart of the lonely hunter desk has anyone read that . At the heart of the novel is a deaf mute man and these other characters who live in the same towns life a rotate around him. They all feel hes one person they can talk to and one person they can trust and really understand them and they see themselves what the black by this man. When you read his perspective thanks they are all nuts. I kept thinking of garage 66, the man in the bed, as a similar person in these lives. You have to back all of their fears and hopes and something i wanted to explore. One of the people you write about is liliana and she is from mexico originally but she currently lives in houston and she has a legal reason to be in the United States and she is missing her brother and how does she come to know about the man in the bed and what does she do to find her brother and how did she come to know about the man in the bed . By the time i met liliana she had heard from her brother was 1999 i believe and have been 16 years and when he first went missing her family look for him and they went to the last place where they heard from him and he had made a phone call and the call had cut out in his card had iran out and they never heard from him again and sometime past and they went to the last place they knew where he was and they list and visited hotels and look at hospitals and they looked in the mornings and Detention Centers and the people in the county they show them pictures of people who died in the desert and is the same and every time it wasnt him but is common in the story that there were these other people that were offered to them provided to patient. Then they didnt know what to do and how she heard of this man was in san diego by that time that the hospital was there are large Online Networks for people in this family and other family situations that have sprung up. Grassroots people just believe in the age of the internet if you put up a photo and it gets wide enough circulation may be the right person will see it and maybe someone will get an answer to their question and there is more than a dozen from what i found these for groups with followers ranging from 10000 to 200,000 people and its this whole world of people sharing stories and pictures either of someone they have lost or someone who has been found although usually not the way you want to eventually find your Family Member and people will share sometimes very disturbing photos of bodies found in the desert or a backpack and these little clues for people to follow up on and liliana came across one of those one of her cousins sought and forward it to her because they thought that the man looked like her brother. Jason, you have done a thinking and writing about and working with the crew that migraines leave behind in the deserts and im wondering if you could say a little bit about your own work and talk about groups like the one liliana used to find her brother. Yeah, first i want to say the story is amazing and if you havent read it i highly recommended that you read it. Dont give out copies of it later and i think for me one of the Amazing Things about the story is its not a story about immigration and i dont think we need more stories about immigration at this point. We are flooded with them. We need people to see statistics and the word migrant related with faces and names are real, the people live with on a daily basis. The work ive been doing since about 2008 ive been trying to piece together what happened along the border and what Border Crossings look like from an archaeological perspective and a forensic perspective and trying to piece together the stories that are fragmentary and oftentimes different difficult to document because theyre in the middle of nowhere. I spent time picking up that migrant leaves behind these backpacks and i spent time with migrants in shelters after they been deported or if there are going to attempt a desert crossing and we spent time focusing on the forensic aspect about what happens to people who die during a Border Crossing and unfortunately this is not an uncommon thing. Thousands of people, more people have died crossing the border since 2000 then 911 and Hurricane Katrina combined. Those are just recovered bodies. I have argued in the places that we drastically undercount the number of utilities that happen on a yearly basis and not only do people die out there but dont hear about them and see about them but that trauma continues to carry on to now and these families are looking for loved ones and its a terrific thing to talk to my Family Members about missing a loved one and some of the work we have done is focused around the story of a 15 yearold kid named joee who left ecuador in 2013 to reunite with his parents and he went missing in the desert and has not been heard from since. His family will tell you the stories that he comes to them in dreams and mysterious phone call in the middle of the night and maybe he has amnesia maybe hes been kidnapped and these families live with us, forever. Clinical psychologist colleen wrote about this and one of them was on the topic of 911 and the bodies who werent recovered from their name live with what we call ambiguous loss because it can never be resolved or have confirmation from the dead. These families the difficulty they have to go to facebook to start ordinate to look for people because there is minimal support for this kind of stuff in the federal government could care less about the bodies. There are some nonprofits who are struggling to there is not a lot of instruction for these things. The relative goes missing in the desert you call . You call the Mexican Consulate or do you customer in tucson and people just dont know. You call tucson and they may send you to tell different places in information is passed around willynilly and a handful of organizations that are working to coordinate this data but at the moment there are Something Like 800 identified bodies in arizona alone. Many more of those bodies are out there in decomposing or have completely disappeared now there is no one working at least at the federal level to help alleviate what i would consider to be this horrific humanitarian catastrophe that the us has had its hand in for a long time. Brooke, maybe you can tell us about how you got to know this story and how did you begin to write about it and the kind of work you did to research and write about it. Lets see, i think i was first considering there was a story that made National Headlines two years ago and migration routes shifted and happened to pass through this county in texas that was not directly of Porter County and there was a Border Patrol checkpoint to the people had to go around to not get caught. In doing so many of them died of exposure and ranchers would find them and some of them would leave out water and supplies but still many people were dying and the county with no medical examiner didnt know what to do and. A lot of the bodies in a mass grave which made a lot of headlines and i was considering writing about that. I thought about theres an apologist has an ongoing project to identify those people and the exhibits them and following what clues they can. And find out what their stories are but it didnt feel the right way at the end. One was it was very early and at that point it identified only one person and it felt as i think youre saying many times you read about immigration and it can feel like obstruction and we hear a lot of numbers and statistics i wanted to be able to find peoples stories and that wasnt yet available. I was leery that as a magazine writer the story of the white detective whos going to solve this is just yeah, but thats what made me aware of the scale of this problem. I talked to that in the apologist who you probably know and she put it in the same terms like this is a katrina and a 911 that is going on unaddressed and how can that be so i had something i wanted to write about but hadnt found out how. Then i was reading somewhat randomly because i had written about physician assisted suicide and death and dying issues and i was reading a story about the number of people were kept alive at government expense in california and there was a mention of this man who was 66 garage and mentioned that families had come forward hoping he was there missing person and what ive been thinking about these massive numbers of missing people had been thinking about their families and that was a whole part of the story that hadnt even occurred to me and when i read that mention that it caught me that its not hard to imagine that Emotional Experience of having to live in doubt in fear because you dont know what happened to someone you loved. Then i wanted to find some of the families to talk to which is difficult because theres privacy considerations especially when it comes to things that are healthcare involved and eventually i found some. One of the heartbreaking parts of your story is at the very end where you talk about adopted this man and visited him and spoke to him and help to publicize him and at the end what hes identified she is no longer able to speak to him anymore. Yeah, that breaks her heart and it is a heartbreaking part of the story. The timing happened to work that way and like if i had started recording this i didnt know he would be identified for two years. He had not been identified and continued to be a mystery and that did allow people who were involved in his life to tell me things that if i had started reporting after he was identified would have been considered private or at the discretion of the family. And then surprise, which is a great outcome for that family which is one of the rare so many people i talked to today continue looking for years and decades and in this case he had a living sister who after many years of not hearing from him and given him up for lost and was surprised to find that he was life. President trump last night talked about open borders and how he felt that prior to his administration the borders which had america had this open border policy that allowed in these drugs in this prime and im wondering if you could Say Something about whether what the border looks like and how it is not open. The open border question is one that is not based on any kind of truth or fact. If you think about the people who are pushing for the wall that the wall will solve the something its not people with agents on the ground and dhs and they have people recognize the border is a complex take place and we dont have an open border. We dont have what is being said politically and publicly is not a reflection of what is happening on the ground. This whole notion of an open border you know, numbers have been done. Obama deported more people than george w. Bush. These are much more complicated than the way they are being trained now. The policy we have in place it started with the clinton administration. Yeah, this idea that were being overrun by ms 13 and drugs and terrorists are false hopes. It is not true. What weve done is weve completed the war on terrorism with the southern Border Security which is a very savvy sleightofhand and it generates fear and spending things like a wall that we know will not work and destroy the environment but will put money in certain peoples pockets. We throw these things out there and unfortunately they pick up steam. From my experience and from many hours on the ground these things have been told publicly are not true. One of the things i think people dont realize is how much of border enforcement contributes to not only the difficulty of getting across the border but also to the existence of a large undocumented population in the us because once people come across the dont want to risk going home. Because they had they fear they cant cross again. Crossing is not its not as easy as walking across the dotted line. A lot of the work talks about how it can be a weeklong, monthlong process and im wondering if you could say a little bit about that. It is not, its not the idea that the wall. This whole thing. I love the quote that i use from janet which is show me a 50foot wall and i will show you a dude on the other side is renting 1 foot ladder. People are constantly responding to enforcement and not necessarily in ways that are super obvious. Putting up a wall is an architectural impossibility that will cost us billions of dollars and will be totally ineffective. What we have done starting with obama and the way immigration is changed in the last three or four years in 2014 we were very afraid of the port brown children from Central America for flooding our Detention Centers and people got concerned about this humanitarian crisis but they recognized in a new york minute and then it went away. Obama comes out and says he turned up the border enforcement with boots on the ground and we didnt change anything at the border. We outsource Immigration Enforcement to mexico so we have encouraged mexico with the political pressure on them to stop Central Americans from coming. The deport equal numbers that we do as part of this plan that was initially called. [speaking in native tongue] and they deny it exists but we train agents in honduras to catch those leaving the country. The stuff that happens of the usmexico border much of that is a smokescreen. One of the things i think is often missed in this discussion is that its not very easy to come to the us legally. People often talk about waiting in line and how it is important for people to do the right thing and wait in line but the fact is that American Immigration policy is about who you know because it is centered around sponsorship. Either you have an immediate Family Member can sponsor you, a parent, child, and adult child, spouse, brother and sister can sponsor you or you have to have an employer sponsor you and sponsor you by name that is not just to say i need workers of this particular type but i need this person here and now and willing to make that application. If you go back to the issue of waiting in line for a lot of people it turns out there is no line for them to wait it. There is never a line that they can join the will get them to the United States. People develop all of these other ways of getting to the United States. One of the things youre talking about earlier is ms 13 and how it has become its become powerful in part because its one of people over the border and i wonder if you could Say Something about that. I didnt want the state of the union last night. We joked that i got [inaudible] from the onion and about how that went but the joke about the ms 13 that will destroy america is we made ms 13 in america. Its a homegrown problem. We been outsourced and we send people back to Central America with skills to become more organized around criminal activity but ms 13 is like the new kind of bogeyman. Its the scary thing that we can meet up with the swallow. Given that ms 13 is a transnational game starts in california and in la we start supporting people who were fleeing Central America because of us intervention policies are making those countries unlivable and they come to the us and they get marginalized in us start these gains in the race on the back to Central America or organize there and make life more horrible there and its this back and forth but ms 13 is an american problem that we have had a hand in creating and we had this historical amnesia about how they have come to be but its increasingly i worked with guys from ms 13 above donald trump anything donald trump is amazing because every time he says im going to build this big wall they say that is more money that i can make and i know this wall will not do anything but my people that smuggled dont know that. They think that this wall will require more things for me and now i can jacket my prices and ms 13 now largely controls the movement of Central Americans across mexico so they control the train tracks and cartels control specific geographic areas but you cant cross mexico now without pain ms 13 to smuggle your cross and those guys make a lot of money and things are slow after the election because people were afraid to come but it is picking up and prices have gone up in ms 13 now they look every time tom says something about them for them it is yeah, thats more money in our back pocket so i have interesting conversations with those folks about the perceptions of what these are being set in the us and that impact in people in Central America and mexico. I want to remind everybody that we are looking forward to your questions later on and so please write your questions on your question cards. If you need a card raise your hands a little bit and someone will come by to give you a card. Remember that you can also treat your questions with the Wallace House. Brooke, i wanted to ask you about a story that you been working on more recently and this is about citizen children of parents who now feel deportation and as jason said earlier in the great rampup of the petition policy under president obama and then with president bushs excuse me, president trumps change in directive to isis excuse me, directive to ice, enforcement that allows i encourages ice to pick up undocumented immigrants even if they do not have criminal background or criminal record and the fear of deportation family has gone up tremendously and im wondering if you could tell us about what some of those families are doing to deal with it. Sure. As mentioned earlier and clarifying the Adult Children are able to sponsor their parents for citizenship children children are not. If you are the american born child of someone who is at risk of deportation you really dont have a right to have that person in your life in america and its a very interesting situation where the best interest of the child is the Legal Standard that is used in International Law and its and trained in the rights of the child which we did not ratify but we did sign and the only country not to ratify. It is also used if theres a custody decision that this has been the main criteria that judges are considering but there is not a mechanism for looking at that when it comes to Immigration Law and when it comes to deportation appearance. There are lots of people who are deported leaving behind American Children which opens a question of what is best for these children whose lives are bound up in the future of our country even if they do leave the and the choice is generally easily with your parents to go to country you dont know and maybe you dont speak the language and maybe you dont even people are planning better for this but for a while growing up in mexico they didnt have any paperwork there so how would they get enrolled in schools and we hear a lot about people overrunning american schools but mexican schools are having a time with American Kids who dont speak spanish. Families are very afraid from what i have seen in my reporting in many of them are planning for the eventuality of what happens if you have a small child and one day your parent doesnt come home from work doesnt pick them up at school because they been detained and their nonprofits work with families to make a plan for this. Who will they call it was the Bank Account Information and who is the document and the story i recently worked on was specifically about women in miami and something sign a power of attorney letter to allow someone to step in an illegal sense so they can take your other children or at least take care of their School Transition and find a doctor work or the paperwork that you wouldnt imagine would be a problem. There is a woman in miami where parents have signed the paperwork for more than 1000 children for her and it has gone up a lot since the election. She is reported that she sees people much more and the effect that has on the whole family theres a psychologist named luis who refers to his children as invisible citizens whose rights are not being remembered or respected and is the way he looks at it and having interviewed hes on a clinical levels separation anxiety, low self esteem and so many of these kids that live in fear they will be the one to mess up and they have their parents being in their hands and what if they do something wrong and it is their fault that their family falls apart. Its a terrifying prospect for kids and they would report dreams where they are hiding from ice in the middle of the night and this is one can dream a girl reported that stuck with me that she had a pink hoodie and she couldnt hide and her friends had black sweatshirts on or dreams or they have to sacrifice themselves for their families and parents. I said met children who have had parents deported or are afraid of their parents being ported and the effect is heart breaking. How did you get people to trust you in situations like that . As you say these families are terrified that something they Say Something they do will bring them to the attention of ice and lead to a deportation so in circumstances like these why do people trust you enough to speak to you . Its a good question. I definitely am cautious about things like that. I think my first responsibility is to readers but it would be different as far as writing about public figures but these are ordinary people would not be in the spotlight if i didnt put them there and that creates a responsibility to not mess up their lives. It helps to be introduced by someone they already know and trust in its not like you will just knock on doors and an immigrant neighborhood to be like hey, who wants to talk about your legal status. [laughter] it is important to be slow and cautious into Work Networks and to explain to people what the goal of your reporting is and when circumstances require it to anonymize their details. Case, you work with people to who you wouldnt think have much reason or to trust you whether these are young men who are coming across the border and whether they are families and for that matter youve done a lot of work with Border Patrol agents who probably dont see professor from the university of michigan as someone who will be sympathetic. How do you create trust to get services . Brooke mentioned that i will not knock on the doors but i was worked on the project once where a sociology survey that we knocked on doors in immigrant neighborhood asking about the status and it fell flat. It was the First Research design but very good learning. [laughter] , that was not working. For me the in the apologist i think its a couple of things. We are one super annoying please dont go away so the communities i work with i have the luxury of spending years of them working on one thing and it takes a long time to develop that trust and that length of time i blow commitment and they become committed to me so part of that is when you tell someone youre interested in their story and ill be back tomorrow and you werent kidding and ill come back the next week will be back next year and eventually they realize you not to go until they help you figure some things out. Part of that is up the one thing but another part is to people want to talk to you and do you give up this five of im interested in these issues and appear to do the best job i can and to be fair and ive had people great working relationships with Law Enforcement, smugglers, migrants and they come to all of it with this openness to tell the stories and i cant do that if i have this agenda other than to tell a story and people are not always open to this in the beginning. The agents i have worked with taken time to develop trust and we disagree about certain things but they recognize at the end of the day that if i write about them i should write about them is a complete person. People who do horrible stuff but i want to understand how does someone come to that position and what is lifelike for them as a person. You have this thing you bring people pick up on that and they say okay and you seem like an okay person and maybe i dont quite know what youre doing but i can trust you to do a job that i think will affect the relationship we have. Its one of those things but people have a pretty good detector for you not being forthcoming. That is my sense. Brooke, wondering if you can Say Something about the journalism you try to do. He writes for magazines but my senses you write for different magazines and you freelance and place and pick stories from different places and what do you look for in a good story. That is a hard question. The best answer is a story needs to be the kind of story that would stick with you and that you would tell your friends in a bar. Something that rather i mean what everyone says and journalism is you pitch a story, not a topic. When it comes to Something Like this about immigration i dont have any policy agenda or thoughts that i want to tell the story of the people involved so we understand them better so that they are not abstraction. When you can do that in particular in a way that cuts through what people expect and what they think they already know that is the most effective and i think the largest barrier to all of us to learn something is feeling like you already know the answer even if we dont or something familiar and that can be frustrating when youre telling. Stories to editors because they think theyve heard that story before and you have to find a new way in and ive never been very good at talking about what i do but the goal the goal is to tell good stories and im drawn to the topics that are messy and mushy and morally unclear and i want to know people that they did what they did and anything that will make we see the world that i thought i knew in a different way and show me that maybe i didnt know and i didnt know as much of a thought and thats a valuable experience for us all to have all the time. Jason, im a somewhat related question but its a little different and you work with people over the years and you have tons of material and how you select from that material and how many more quotes and many more artifacts and many more events are in your research that ever get published and so how do you make a selection . I think the work i do about as i tell a compelling story with the data i have and i use theory to help me understand the data in an interesting and different way but at the end of the day i would consider myself to be a minute apologist in the field but i dont think unnecessarily and in the apologist or social scientists and i put it toward the paper. Im much more interested in being a writer and in being a journalist or being something some other thing that values words and that values the storytelling and is thinking about the reader. I told my colleague ruth and she told me once that ive been accused of being a journalist and she told me once that its okay to think your journalist and its totally fine and not a bad thing and that means youre putting interesting things on paper people want to follow along. With the social science stuff you have all this information you have to figure out what to include and what to leave out in terms of what can the reader handle and what is the overarching story and how do you do that in a precise way. Over the years to figure out what to be more honest about the editing process and think about if i lose you with the narrative it doesnt matter how much data i put in there its indecipherable and for me i had to not be wedded to certain data sets or things ive written. It could be distracting. But it is hard. You are always editing something whether its a journal article or a public piece or a book and i just now think about the editing process and have a lot to work with but im thinking about it much more in the journalistic or novelistic way. I think it is time to invite everyone else into the conversation. I see people collecting cards and i know the cards are coming down here and some of the Wallace House fellows will be asking the questions so let me give you something to start. [laughter] this is a question from our audience. For the physical wall that truly iran the length of the border prevent death . No. Is not the wall. The wall. Movement. We have giant walls in san diego and they redirect people for the desert because you have to walk five or six days to get across and the border enforcement is about the Natural Environment whether its walking through bucks county or through the southern desert of arizona that is the wall. That is the physical barrier to movement. The actual wall we put up, you know, it wont stop the flow of people because they can go underneath it or jump over it or around it and at the end of the day it doesnt get at the core reason why people are coming. Why they leave or what is pulling the here. Want to stop immigrants coming here and migrants coming to just police the workforce in a real way. We dont do that. That will crash our economy that will make people who make money off of a duck minute in because upset. That would be much cheaper than building a wall and it would district in 2008 when obama came out and said that border enforcement it put up the border slow things down they were being tough on immigration that is not was slowed immigration down and estimate. Sorry, weve been in the. That is what slow things down and that is what it is always been. Our economy factor is whether the fact we have employed people in the us were undocumented because we like cheap labor or their things happening around the globe that are forcing them to leave whether global change, political instability is like america in mexico and the us has a big hands and a lot of those things. I keep thinking that will stop have his conversation because they dont know how many times people can say this in the wall is not talking about a physical wall but the other anxiety and this is the perfect smokescreen to get us not thinking about these other issues. That question is not my area of expertise. If i have an area of expertise. [laughter] but something that brings to mind is spain has two outposts in morocco that are considered spanish territory and those are the only land border between africa and the European Union and they are very small borders to protect its basically two cities with elaborate series of sensors around them, heavily guarded and not only do people get over those walls but they also are injured and killed in the process frequently. Like nearly on a weekly basis. That is a microcosm of what were trying to accomplish and it has not been successful. The only thing i would add is as decent as the earlier would you make it difficult to get into the us and you create a market for people who tell you that they can help you conquer those difficulties and there are undocumented immigrants from asia who come in smuggling. They are smuggled in. If we make it hard for people to cross but there still an economic incentive for them to be in the United States and they are still family reasons for them to come to the us and there is no legal way to do it then will we will see is people paying smugglers and being in debt to those smugglers for years and years in order to get through and get across get through the checkpoints that are between them and life in the us. I would add one thing. The federal government thought in the early 90s that if they started use the desert as a natural barrier they said people will die because will be too hard to get across and will die of dehydration and exposure but the thinking was and if enough people died they will stop coming in eucalyptus on the internet and it was i think the dhs website are still currently online and you can see these policy documents where people say people will die in the desert but that will stop them. Once they learned dangerous they will stop coming. If hundreds of deaths a year dont stop them from coming i dont know what this law will do. The most extreme thing we can do is kill people at the border which we have still done and its still not stop people from coming. I wanted to say before the next question that the question cards are being collected and collated and read by the amazing wall of house fellows i hope you will introduce yourself before you the next question. Thinking. Im robert from washington dc, one of the wallace fellows. This question is from the audience and does country of origin affect specific routes taken to mexico or do they take the same route and then a related question of those crossing the us border do you know the breakdown between those from mexico and Central America . Roots are segregated by country of origin so if you look at shows up in tijuana and your patients from tijuana and african countries to come through that route and its an unexpected for nationals in mexico. Hondurans who i largely work with come through to routes and if you are a black hunter and you come through [inaudible] and you try to get through houston, texas or new orleans. You will see these routes in mexico people will differentially come and there are segregated routes that happen there. At the border the breakdown right now is 98 or something so people from mexico or Central America and depends its books evenly between mexico and Central American countries but you have people coming from much farther way than it would be unexpected. Like china for example. This is also from our inhouse audience. Can one of you talk about the Sanctuary Movements, our churches the only people and places that comprise sanctuary and what does that mean . Do you know about the church in detroit that supposedly is a test case for this moment . Well, i will just start that by saying there is no legal prohibition against ice or any any other Law Enforcement officer going into the house of worship or anyone else. 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 the Sanctuary Movement is an important way to think about whether they approve of the policies that the government, which is inhi their name sayinge cannot survive as a country if these people who did not come through Legal Immigration means stayhr here. It is a way for americans to look at themselves and be what they are willing to accept. And in that sense, it is a tremendously useful in teaching people about the issues of immigration in general and documented a grecian in particular. A great way of teaching people about the millions of people in the United States that arehe protected against deportation that has been deferred, but they have no legalas data is in no wy of getting legal status, which means that any time that protection from deportation can be listed and people wonder temporary protected status, and that is the situation of people who ever needs daca, deferred action for childhood arrivals as well as people who are undocumented and do not have any program or court decree protecting them. So, i think it is important. I think it is great people are concerned, care about it, but as an actual policy to prevent deportation, it is not very helpful. Ul this question is also from our inhouse audience. Migration across the border like manyer other issues has aspects that intersection analogy and identities of race and gender. Could you speak to how issues at the border are also feminist issues particularly in times of the me to movement. I mean i guess i have kind of a wide definition of what a feminist issue is and you know, these are peoples families and lives, one of the trends as the majority of people deported from the u. S. Interior are men and so leaves a lot of families with just a mother and that is a major impact on a lot of peoples families. Yeah, i think thats really important. The image of the undocumented migrants at usually a young man who is coming to the u. S. And maybe hes going to stand in the home depot parking lot and work or maybe hes going to commit a crime and it really sort of closes her eyes to the fact that families come over in steps where one person comes first and they are able to sender money bk to bring other people over or families come over together. I think another way of thinking about what goes on at the border is a feminist issue is two things i would say. First, whether formally through smuggling or informally, one of the fears that women face, dead men face less is the fear of violence and that is certainly a feature, often a feature of the experience particularly when women are trusting smugglers to get them across the border. The other thing that i would say that i think is also important is the u. S. Created a set of legal protections, ways to get legal status for women who were battered or abused where one of the elements of that abuses that the husband controlled the immigrationn visa status to women, he is a citizen and if they divorce, she will no longer have the ability to stay in the u. S. Or he is the principal applicant for a visa and if he divorces her or disowned her, she will not have the ability to apply for the visa on her own. So these was created for women in this situation. Women already in the u. S. The extent to which those visas are actually granted, the proof people need in order to get those visas is sort of an invisible part of the immigration system because its very discretionary. It really depends on citizens that citizenship and immigration click patent application. I would say in general youre absolutely right rad at the migrants as beyond mexican and male and that is definitely not the case in all of these things that make us individuals, our gender, sexuality, all of these complicate people in ways that i think we are paying enough attention to in the ways in which families have been fragmented by family structure, put certain pressure on different members of the household on gender lines and we are seeing there something happening right now in mexico in relationship to women fleeing honduras with kid. They are fleeing violence, i work with a smuggler, a female slugger who left honduras with her kid. Her boyfriend had been killed so there was no paperwork of him really other than his obituary. She could lead the country because its illegal to leave honduras as a single parent without all kinds of paperwork. She had to sneak out of her own country to get into mexico, which then is a whole new set of complicated issues of being a migrant now turned smuggler whos working to feed your kids through human smuggling coming dealing with corrupt Law Enforcement who differentially exploit men and women who are migrating. Its not just at the border. Through issues of sexuality coming up constantly and we are only now scratching the surface understanding those dynamics. This question is for you, jason. What are some of the artifacts and stories he found in the desert and are they on display anywhere . Those of you who dont know, for 10 years i been trying to use archaeology is one method to understand the prospects that we have gone and collected and treated like an archaeological assemblage. Weve done about seven dozen objects here are the smithsonian has about 120 now. We have four pieces currently on display at an exhibition called many voices, one nation. It took a lot of fighting to get those artifacts to be in the same conversation with things from alice island. We hope that those things can be used to show these historical connections thinking about what it was like to be an immigrant in the early 20th century. Shockingly, not well. It took a long time for us to realize that was an import archaeological assemblage. But now with the material we collected, i worry about this stuff because theres always thisis focus on the archaeologys really interesting, but for me archaeology is the way to think about people who left them behind so they certainly speak to the Human Experience and whats happened in the middle of nowhere with a lot of people around to see this staff. Theres lots of interesting objects we have found. Food and ripped up shoes and i started staff, but those things for me are just one other way to get you to think about what it is to be a migrant. It is so archaeological story. I think archaeology is really versatile about the American Experience in the global kind of connection. But i hesitate to tell you a woman whose body was found in 2012 in the struggle her family went to find her and the difficulties involved in identifying her body and the trauma of repatriating this badly decomposing body sitting in storage for six weeks because they wanted to see the Family Member. Those are the stories that im more interested in because they are more comfortable in a speech of his little reality that has a name and a face to it as opposed to the artifacts themselves they get boston remained affecting them and losing sight of the actual people who leave stuff behind. This relates to your answer. What would a trauma informed policy need to look like in order to support immigrants in the United States . Im not a policy person. You know, so the uss refugee policy now. Press the refugee act in 1980 that recognized our Countries Program that would screen refugees abroad, but with two minutes to take refugees from all around the world. I think this is an improvement in our refugee policy, which prior to this is very haphazard and dependent upon Political Support for a particular group in a certain longstanding infrastructure that would allow refugees in different places to be treated equally. But having said that, one thing that is really important about her refugee policy was bad because it was so haphazard and dependent from people of a particular national origin, it also kept us very much in touch with the u. S. Waged a war in vietnam. We have an obligation and were destroyed by that. In the mom, and the hill dwelling peep old who, you know, dont speak any english fought fiercely on our side during the wars in indochina. We should protect them. We have an obligation to protect them. We have the same policy towards cuba and cuban refugees was very similar. We thought that this was a country, this outpost of communism in north america and we wanted to make sure that we stood for people who could escape from cuba, who could escape from communism. I could go on about c this. We currently dont have a policy that recognizes our historical obligations, economic ties and there is no than our policy for people from countries where we are large part of the reason they are migrating. One thing i would pay about, a policy would also be a policy that was more than into it and recognition of particular circumstances, where they have an obligation to the place is in the world. Thinking about, policies, we recognize that our federal immigration policies literally kill people, hundreds of them a year. Thats not making this up did we do this, knowingly do this and is recognized by policymakers. With burke story, if we are going to kill people in the knowledge we are killing people, the least we could do is to spend some time and energy in the nose back to repatriate the people arent sitting in some care center for 15 years because nobody knows who they are because theres not Energy Investment in identifying these people. There is no money we kill them at the border and let them continue to create these different balances that are longlasting. For me, a more sensitive policy would be at least two minimally invested in a dna sample in the repatriation of hotties in helping these nonprofits like the center for human rights in tucson, helping folks to work that needs to be done. I think that is the minimal amount of work we can do that would just do murder that happened and then we cannot let this thing continue becausele ts tory sort of shows, this trauma continues forever. For me, thats one of the coolest parts of this whole thing going on right now. The Mexican Government addresses the people in conflict whose job it is to try to solve these ministries, but they dont have a lot of cases. One told me they have a backlog of 30,000 cases. But it is something they have a dna lab on retainer. As part of what they consider their governmental duty to their citizens. One of the things that was amazing to me, broke, and the end of your story you talk about how the mans fingerprints were identified and existed in american database all along. Yeah, i mean, it had just never been thoroughly checked out. Finally, came to the attention of somebody who is wellconnected title at politically and brought it to the attention of the head of dhs cannot have to check that, who would make this a priority to the san diego guys, get on this. They went to the hospital and ran the prints in one database and there is no hint that they ran them in another database and there was his name after all that time. Related question for you, broke. Did you develop your relationship with 66 garage. How did you do the story without getting emotionally involved or is that impossible . Youre always a little anytime youre interviewing somebody, its amazing what people will tell to a relative stranger. People have this intense stories to tell them they are very eager to talk about them and they will tell you stuff that is just really haunting and emotionally vulnerable. Of course that is going to have an effect on you. I dont think that if they compromise journalistic integrity for the people youre talking to. I did not meet him. It wasnt possible given the privacy laws. So i met and talked to a number of people who didnt meet him but i never met him personally. This also relates to bat. In an era of alternative facts, is there a role for journalism and academia in fighting for humane immigration policy is . Yeah. You know, as a journalist, people have different ways that they draw the line of what is journalism and advocacy. I dont advocate for policies or politicians, but there are certain things i just dont see is a bias. I will gladly claim the bias, but i think a livable planet is a handy thing to have, but i dont think i should be considered a bias that disqualifies me from reporting on environmental issues. There are different ways we can protect it. Theres all kinds of gray area and difficult questions, but i am a person and i am not going i dont need to be devils advocate and like what if we just cut down all of the rain forests. And i think this is, you know, when it comes to immigration, i am very happy to claim the bias that the people involved are real people whose humanity is should be perfect to it and understood and if i can write stories that help keep that in mind when it comes to writing policies that affect these people, that is what i can do. I think kind of after the election last year, there was a moment at least in the discipline of anthropology where people started looking around and go and what is that i do . How do i contribute to dialogue about these Different Things . I have Brilliant College to write about super important topics. Ones of global interests, but who for a long time either havent thought about the Public Outreach component or we are in the systems where i wont get tenure if im a public intellectual. I have to jump through a lot of a lot of hoops and then i can become nothing after it passed muster in other places. I still write to highprofile journal of the six people are going to read. You have to do this others. Would have been recently i see a lot of my colleagues look at people who before would say im public anthropology started adjustable, readable, understandable to laymen. Previously, people would say that is what so is what soandso does, public anthropology or public anthropology means are not very theoreticaleo. I think that weve gotten to a point now where we have to take stock and go okay, what is it that i do . Why can i in good conscience sort of keep doing what im doing and not think about the Dumpster Fire of the world is happening right now. Home i going to contribute to the conversation. There has been a shift in my colleagues were this the public scholarship, but its a real commitment to the information about the work in a comfortable way. Now more than ever to be louder in terms of contributing to this counter to the alternative facts. [applause] we have time for one last question. How doess the current antiimmigrant wave compared to otherig historical. Inds this or any discernible connection with the economy and on employment rate over time russian mark so, as you say, we currently have in antiimmigrant waves made it a sentiment in the United States is not a known entity existed in the early 1800s and was directed against catholics in the late 1800s, mid1800s and was directed against chinese and was direct it against southern europeans. So, nativism is a constituent as part of our country. I think it is also an important part of verse dory because whenever you confront nativism, the right response is not to say gosh, these people are racist, i dont want to talk to them. The right response is to say you care very much about what this countryut is, what this country stands for and i do, too and can we have a conversation about what your values and my values are, others can and we are both part of the country that we want to protect him that we respect. You know, to bring this conversation back to the alternative facts, in many ways, the facts about immigration are actually not particularlyy complicated. What is complicated about immigration is that we have a bunch ofen different values whih often run against each other. And so, we have to have this conversation about values that we dont have the conversation about the values and we just yell at each other, we end up with policy that doesnt serve our country well in policy that doesnt serve people who want to come to our country very well. I think it is important to understand and to come to the other part of your question that nativism is not really related to Economic Conditions or two wars around the world. It can exist in good times and it can exist in bad i times. One of the things that indicate it is a good time is that many immigrants are coming in because theres many jobs than people react to the new population of immigrants. So its not really a discussion about americans who are suffering and is the time to love them more than it is time to love people from another country. Its about what they think this country stands for and how we think its going to grow and flourish. [applause] the Senate Returns today to begin work on immigration policy, focusing on Border Security and deferred action for childhood arrivals or daca. Majority leader mike, will introduce a bill which will allow amendment as long as they receive at least 60 votes. About to begin debate on the bill is scheduled for today at 5 30 eastern. Debate and votes are expected to continue all week. The houses back tomorrow for a threeday workweek but for the president s day holiday. On their agenda this week on a measure to step up investigation and recovery of u. S. Personnel that are missing in action. Sanctions against hamas in a number of financial bills with mortgage lending, market trading in Interest Rates for consumers. Watch the house live on cspan and the senate live on cspan2. Earlier today, we should elect coverage of Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer who traveled to kentucky and give remarks at the university of louisville mcconnell center. He discussed the Senate Agenda and prospects for agreement on immigration policy. We will show the entire event tonight at 8 00 eastern over on cspan. More like program coming your way today in the cspan networks. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders will be briefing reporters this afternoon. Its expected shall touch on the immigration debate in the senate as well as the president s Budget Proposal and infrastructure plan. Watch that live at 2 00 p. M. Eastern also one sees in. Speaking of the Budget Proposal, the Budget Committee stands tomorrow to discuss the president s 2019 budget request to mick mulvaney. Over on cspan. More on wednesday when treasury secretary Stephen Minich and testifies before the Senate Finance committee. Watch that last one they at 10 30 a. M. Eastern over on cspan 3. The president s budget made its way to capitol hill wednesday. Thats what it looks like. [inaudible conversations] train time [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] using Artificial Intelligence in something as simple as your music playlist, they are all using technology that does Machine Learning to figure out what movies you want to watch and what music you like to listen to. It can be in your internet email system and filtering out spam. That automated is not a person marking things as spam or not, but a computer algorithm using technology to do that. On the other end you can have Artificial Intelligence power and self driving cars. Using vision and Machine Learning to help the car navigate busy streets. Being here in the birthplace of the modern civil rights space, the most important issues to make our equality, freedom and equal justice for all people. We cant just talk about this every february in black history month, but we have delivered every day of the year. So we have to do more to build privilege bridges. Booker t. Washington one throat there are two ways to exert ones power. One is pushing down one is probably not. But start pulling people out. One issue is the lack of jobs here especially montgomery. People are graduated from different how to do this whether it be in montgomery or around areas and they are coming home looking for a job and then moving those jobs here. You need more than just a College Degree to get a job and its hindering people because they dont have the Financial Aid to keep going for a Higher Learning education or Something Like that. They dont have the money to get the Higher Education and they cant find a job with a College Degree. Weve been in common core for seven, eight years now and we find that every single year with the new bill ever want to get rid of it. It is racial inequality, justice reform, if youre in the we still have rhetoric and our constitution is representative of a time that is long past and i think having discriminatory language that governs a Diverse Group of people is very outdated and that limits peoples powers, the disenfranchisement, and the way that Law Enforcement interacts with the citizens across the state. I think that those things need to be addressed so bad. We can have a gap within the disparities and inequalities within the Justice System here in alabama. Those can kind of close and eventually not even exist. An important issue for me is the cost of college education. Everyone turned equal opportunity to go to college and get the same amount of money to support themselves because some people may go to college and the government should really take on responsibility and the lack of money for years. Cspans history series landmark cases returned this month with a look at 12 and a Supreme Court cases. To strengthen experts join us to discuss the constitutional issues and personal story behind a Supreme Court decision beginning monday, figure 265 at 9 00 p. M. Eastern and to help you follow all 12 cases, we have a companion guide written by tony amaro, landmark cases volume two. The book costs 8. 95 for shipping and handling. To get your copy, go to cspan. Org landmark cases. Now, discussion of the role congress is in the ongoing renegotiation process of the north american retreat agreement or nafta. The next round of talks is scheduled to take place in mexico city february 26 to march 62018. The Johns Hopkins school of advanced International Studies posted this 90 minute panel