Solving illegal immigration for real | Sonia Nazario | TEDxPennsylvaniaAvenue

Pulitzer Prize winning writer Sonia Nazario takes you on a personal, powerful, emotional journey to show why three solutions pushed for decades by U.S. politicians--both on the left and the right—to stem illegal immigration have failed. The author of Enrique’s Journey, possibly the most read book about immigrants to the U.S., asks: What if we did something radically new, something that works?

For more by Sonia Nazario visit http://www.enriquesjourney.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/opinion/sunday/how-the-most-dangerous-place-on-earth-got-a-little-bit-safer.html?_r=1
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-refugees-at-our-door.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/opinion/sunday/a-refugee-crisis-not-an-immigration-crisis.html?src=twr&_r=1

Sonia Nazario is an award‐winning journalist whose stories have tackled some of this country’s most intractable problems -- hunger, drug addiction, immigration -­ and have won some of the most prestigious journalism and book awards.

She is best known for "Enrique's Journey," her story of a Honduran boy’s struggle to find his mother in the U.S. Published as a series in the Los Angeles Times, "Enrique's Journey" won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2003. It was turned into a book by Random House and became a national bestseller.

She is a graduate of Williams College and has a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She has honorary doctorates from Mount St. Mary’s College and Whittier College. She began her career at the Wall Street Journal, and later joined the Los Angeles Times. She is now at work on her second book.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

People have always
called me a rabble rouser.

When I was three years old,

my nickname was "la granuja,"
Spanish for "troublemaker."

That year, in my very first drawing,
I was clutching two glasses of whiskey.

When I drank the first, I told my mom,
well, then, I'd drink the second one.

As a Jew, my mother fled Poland
before World War II to go to Argentina.

My father was born in Argentina,

right after his Christian family
fled persecution in Syria.

Seeking opportunity, my parents came
as newlyweds to the U.S. where I was born.

When I was 13 years old,
my father died suddenly,

and my mom took us
back to live in Argentina.

Her timing was terrible;
the military was taking power.

I lived in fear every single day.

Officers would roam
the streets in unmarked cars,

picking people up who disappeared,
tens of thousands of people.

One day, walking down the street,
I saw a puddle of blood on the sidewalk.

The military had killed two journalists.

"Why?" I asked my mom.

"Because they're trying to tell the truth
about what's going on here."

I decided that very instant

- some of you would have made a different
career choice staring at blood -

to become a journalist.

In the U.S. as a reporter,
I became known

for throwing myself right in the middle
of the action on the front lines

so I could take my readers there
and they could see, smell, feel

the big social issues
that I wrote about up close.

The ride of my life started
two decades ago in my kitchen

when I asked my house cleaner:

"Carmen, are you thinking about
having any more childen?"

It was an innocent question;
I thought she just had one young boy.

Sobbing, Carmen told me about
four children she had left behind

in Guatemala.

She could only feed them once a day.

And at night when they cried out
with hunger, she would tell them:

"Sleep face down so your stomach
doesn't growl so much."

I could not fathom the desperation
that it took to leave your children

and go to a strange land 2,000 miles away.

Carmen hadn't seen
her children in 12 years.

I soon discovered that there were millions
of single mothers who had come to the U.S.

in recent years, unlawfully,
from Mexico, from Central America,

and they had left children behind.

These separations,
they often stretched to a decade.

And each year tens of thousands
of these kids would despair

and set off on their own
to come and find these mothers.

Most of them are teenagers like this boy
I met traveling north through Mexico,

but I learned of kids as young
as seven years old

crossing four countries alone.

They were hitchhiking,
walking hundreds of miles,

and they were gripping on mostly
to the tops and sides of freight trains

that go through Mexico, that go north.

Often these children
are robbed, raped, beaten.

Many times they are killed

by bandits along the rails,
by corrupt cops in Mexico,

and by gangsters who control
the tops of these trains.

And they hurl them off,
and children lose legs, arms, fingers.

I met Enrique when he had made it
all the way north to northern Mexico.

He told me he was just five years old -
this is his kindergarten mug shot -

when his mama left him in Honduras
to go to the United States.

11 years later,
this is what he looked like.

He set off to go and find her, and all
he had on him was this tiny scrap of paper

with his mother's
telephone number inked on it.

He was on his eighth
attempt to get through Mexico;

seven times Mexico had deported him.

I wanted to truly grasp the hell
he told me he had already been through.

So, I went back to his starting line
in Honduras, and I did this journey

step by step, the exact route,
just as he had done it a few weeks before.

I would travel on top
of seven freight trains.

I almost got swept off
the top of one train;

that branch that hit me swiped off
a boy on the car behind mine.

He probably died.

A gangster, he tried
to rape me on the train.

Every day for three months,
I felt filthy, thirsty, hungry;

I feared the worst, and yet I knew
because of the advantages I had

I wasn't going through, facing, 1%
of what these children endure.

I chronicled this odyssey children make
in a newspaper series and later a book,

called "Enrique's Journey."

Back in 2002, 6,800 children were arriving
alone on our southern border

and being apprehended.

But by 2014 that number had risen tenfold:

68,000 Enriques.

Honduras had the number one homicide rate
in the world of countries not at war.

And together with
El Salvador and Guatemala,

these had become among the most
dangerous countries in the world.

Children understood that the danger
of dying traveling north,

it was less than the danger
of dying if they stayed.

Honduras's Rivera Hernandes
neighborhood was the most lethal place

in the city of San Pedro Sula,
which itself for four years running

was dubbed "the murder capital"
of the world.

I mean parents, they didn't let their kids
go outside during broad daylight.

Six gangs controlled this neighborhood,
and they enforced a six P.M. curfew.

Bodies would litter
the streets in the morning.

One day these gangsters
were casually playing soccer

out in the street with the decapitated
head of someone they had just executed.

1,000 families had fled this neighborhood.

Gangsters took over their homes,
stripped them, sold anything they could,

leaving whole blocks in rubble.

Children, refugees,
were fleeing for their very lives.

Last summer in Rivera Hernandes,
I met Kevin Rodriguez.

When he was seven years old,
Kevin started collecting cans

in the neighborhood to reycle.

When he was eight,
the gangsters started pressuring him:

"You must join."

They wanted him to use his bag
to deliver drugs and guns

throughout the neighborhood for the gang.

They pressured Kevin every day.
He always answered, "No."

When he was 10 years old,
three gangsters barged into his hut

when his mom was out working.

They held him down,
the three gangsters,

and they took turns raping this boy.

When he was 11 years old,
he was at a soccer game

in the neighborhood
when gangsters showed up,

and they massacred 15 spectators
and referees in front of him.

And when he was walking
to middle school one day,

he had to sidestep
a body hacked to bits

that had been stuffed
in a black, plastic bag.

Kids like Kevin, they get the dicey odds
of making it in one piece through Mexico.

The bloodthirsty narco
cartels and gangsters,

they are kidnapping 18,000
Central Americans every single year.

These are the faces of the disappeared,
migrating through Mexico.

They enslave children; they put
girls to work as prostitutes.

They will kill you
and harvest your organs.

Recently, the last two-three years,
the U.S. has made matters much worse.

We gave Mexico tens of millions of dollars

to fund a ferocious crackdown aimed
at keeping these children from arriving

at our border and begging
for asylum, which, by the way,

they are legally entitled to do.

Despite all these mounting obstacles,
today, just as many children

are fleeing these countries
than ever before.

In the U.S., the largest wave
of immigration in our nation's history,

it produced winners and losers.

Businesses, well they got cheap,
compliant workers,

and this fueled our economy.

But the losers are the folks
who can least afford it in this country:

the one in 14 Americans
who do not have a high school degree.

They were forced to compete
with migrants in certain industries

and that drove down their wages.

Migration hurts migrants, too:
something we don't talk about very much.

Children feel abandoned
by the very person

who's supposed to love them
the most in this world, their mothers.

There's no happy ending.

The truth?

Most migrants, they don't want
to actually be here.

Imagine if you had to leave
everything that you know and love;

your family, friends, culture, language,

to fling yourself out into an unknown,
often hostile environment.

I want to be very clear:
I am not an open borders gal.

I want a policy that actually works.

Our politicians, both
on the left and on the right,

have been promoting, pushing,
three immigration solutions

for the last 40 years:

border enforcement;

guest worker programs;

legalization.

All three have failed to permanently
stem the flow of migrants

coming here unlawfully,

and keep more children and families
safe back in their home countries.

We build walls, and we're probably
going to do more of this.

We spend $18 billion a year
at this, at last count.

And yet, studies show 97%
of those who try repeatedly get in.

In 1986, we legalized millions of people.

But then they sent, often illegally,

for friends and family
to come from back home.

We need to rip up this playbook
and try something new.

The good news, and there is good news,

the U.S. is helping bring a new strategy
that cuts violence in Central America.

In Latin America cities, four
out of every five homicides,

they happen in fewer than
2% of all street addresses.

Usually, it's just a few people, a handful
that are doing most of the killing.

In taking what's worked
in L.A. and in Boston,

the U.S.-trained Honduran police
are using data to increasingly target

where are those violent hot spots,
the neighborhoods,

and even the very corners within
neighborhoods where murders take place.

Like in Rivera Hernandes,
where Kevin lives,

where the U.S. is helping
courageous residents

who are putting their lives on the line

to try to jumpstart change
in this neighborhood.

We organize community leaders, the U.S.

And we funded partly outreach centers
where kids can go and get mentors,

vocational training, help get jobs
so we can dry up the lifeblood of gangs,

new recruits.

We have another program that zeroes in
on kids in schools in this neighborhood

who have some of the nine risk factors
of going into gangs,

and we get them a year
of family counseling,

making them 77% less likely
to commit crimes

or abuse drugs or alcohol.

And in a country where 96% of all
homicides in Honduras get no conviction

- you can shoot someone in broad daylight
and totally get away with it -

we are helping bring criminals to justice.

Witnesses understand that if you
step forward in Honduras to testify today,

you're going to be dead tomorrow.

But the U.S. is funding
a Honduran nonprofit

that goes into the most
violent neighborhoods

and resolves to investigate
all homicides in that neighborhood.

And they are also coaxing
reluctant witnesses to step forward,

anonymously, covered
in a black burqa like you see here.

Now, more than half
of homicides in this neighborhood

and in seven pilot
neighborhoods in Honduras,

they are getting guilty verdicts.

In two years in Rivera Hernandes,
a 62% drop in homicides.

They have cut the number of kids
fleeing this neighborhood in half.

Kevin who was determined that
other children not face what he faced

at the hands of the gangs,

he's volunteering in one
of these outreach centers,

and just last month at the age of 17,
he started U.S.-sponsored studies

to become a stronger community organizer

to try to reweave the tattered
fabric of his neighborhood.

Just to be clear, Rivera Hernandes
is still crazy violent.

And the U.S. approach, it has huge flaws.

The State Department doesn't even do
what most studies show works best:

work with active gangsters.

They're the ones doing the shooting.

We need to leverage community
leaders with sway over these guys.

We need clergy or ex-cons gone straight
to drive home a message

delivered by the police:

If one person in your gang
shoots someone,

we will immediately come down
on your whole gang like a ton of bricks.

We must scrap Treasury Department rules
that don't even allow us to work with

one of the two main gangs
in the region, MS-13.

Still, something incredibly
promising is happening here.

Honduras is the country where the U.S.
has most aggressively pushed

these violence prevention programs.

Three years ago, 18,000 Honduran kids
showed up at our southern border alone.

Last year, that number
was cut almost in half.

Meanwhile, kids leaving El Salvador,
Guatemala, the numbers keep going up.

If a politician swears to you
they can solve illegal immigration

by driving down on the same
three policies of the past,

don't buy it.

Let's invest in violence prevention
programs that actually work.

Let's replicate these in other countries.

And let's get corrupt
governments, like Honduras,

to put some skin in the game as well;
after all it's their country, right?

I know many Americans do not want to spend
one red cent in foreign lands. I get that.

But this is smart policy.

It is a rare win-win for us.

We can keep spending billions of dollars

once these children
arrive at our doorstep.

And by the way, that doesn't even include
the fact that we don't give these kids

government lawyers when
they arrive in our country

to go before immigration court.

Half of these kids are going before judges
alone to argue their asylum cases.

I witnessed a seven-year-old boy.

He was shaking with fear
standing before that court.

Toddlers pee their pants.

They clutch teddy bears because
anything they tell that judge

can send them hurtling back to danger.

This is a sham that we are doing
in our courts, and we should remedy it.

But we can spend billions here,

or we can spend $100 million in Honduras,

which is what we're spending on
these violence prevention programs

each year there, and we can cut migration.

The solutions are there;
they are not here.

Mexico, for years,
promoted family planning,

and the average Mexican family

went from seven kids per family,
nearly, to just over two.

Today, more Mexicans,
they're leaving the United States

than actually coming here illegally.

In one decade experts believe
that in Latin America

- it has a tenth of the world's population
but a third of all of its homicides -

with the right programs,
we can cut this carnage in half.

And we can see more children
happily playing out in the streets,

like they're doing here
in Rivera Hernandes.

We can keep screaming
across the political divide.

Or we can do something that actually
works on the immigration issue.

We can do the right thing.

If a vulnerable child
is running from danger

and that child knocks at our door,

a nation like ours,
we should always open that door.

We should also help ensure that child
never has to run north in the first place.

Thank you.

(Applause)