Project Vision 21

Francisco Miraval

Last week I became aware of two opposite approaches to solve the immigration crisis in the United States. One approach proposes to humanize the situation to understand why immigrants leave their native countries to come to America. The other approach prefers to use technology to avoid any personal contact with immigrants. Which approach will eventually win?

The first approach was proposed by writer and journalist Sonia Nazario during her visit to Denver. The Metropolitan State College of Denver invited Nazario for a series of conferences, and I attended one of those presentations. Nazario, born in Kansas of Argentinean parents, won a Pulitzer Prize for her book Enrique’s Journey, the story of a young Honduran boy traveling alone on top of cargo trains from Honduras to the United States to look for her mother.

During her speech in Denver, Nazario insisted several times about the need to “humanize” the immigration problem, of “putting a face” to the immigration debate, as a requisite to understand both the positive and negative effects of legal and illegal immigration.

Nazario did not just write a book about the issue. She traveled twice the same route Enrique took and, as Enrique, she face many dangers, the same dangers that 100,000 Central American children face each year when they travel alone trying to come to the United States.

Nazario said those trips and related interviews led her to see the most depraved aspects of humanity, including corrupt police officers, brutal drug trafficker, and merciless robbers. But she also saw the noblest aspects of humanity when she met a very old lady carrying food for the young travelers, a mother opening her home to total strangers so they could a place to sleep, and a women caring for those children and teenagers severely hurt by the train or by other people.

Also last week, a report was published indicating that the federal program Secure Communities helped the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) to deport a record number of almost 400,000 people.

Leaving aside the debate about the well-documented problems of Secure Communities, what caught my attention was a statement attributed to Sheriff Terry Maketa, of El Paso County in Colorado, during an interview with The Denver Post. According to Maketa, Secure Communities should continue because is bases in modern technology, and “technology removes individual officers' discretion and possible bias.”

In the same story, published on October 20, 2011, Sgt. Mike Schaller, of the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, is quoting as saying, “The computers don't know race. They don't know gender. They don't know ethnic origins. They just know fingerprints.”

In other words, the use of computers in dealing with immigrants should be preferred because computers eliminate any direct contact with immigrants, transforming the immigrant into images, numbers, and information on a database. Therefore, he or she is no longer a father or a mother desperate to provide for their children.

So, at the end, we ask yet again - Humanization vs. Dehumanizing: Which one will win?