Brooke Jarvis & Jason De León - Beyond the Wall: The Human Toll of Border Crossings

0:00:08: Well, good afternoon. And 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 live stream. Thank you to our partners and our hosts here today, the Gerald R. Ford School for Public Policy and the International Policy Center. And we also want to give a special thanks to C-SPAN for the interest they've taken in this conversation today and for joining us here to capture the discussion.

0:00:39: I'm Lynette Clemetson, I'm Director of Wallace House, which is home to the Knight Wallace Fellowships for Journalists and the Livingston Awards. And it's the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, that brings us here today. The Livingston Awards is a prestigious prize, often referred to as the Pulitzer's for the young, that awards excellence in journalism by journalists under the age of 35. So Brooke Jarvis our special guest today visiting, won the Livingston Award for National Reporting in 2017, for her story "Unclaimed". And it is that story, that brings us to our talk today with the title Beyond the Wall: The Human Toll of Border Crossings. Unclaimed tells the story of an anonymous, undocumented man left in a vegetative state after a tragic truck accident during a border crossing. Unknown and unclaimed he 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. 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.

0:02:06: During a time when immigration stories are in the news everyday, 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 debates and political factions, and it's easy to just stop listening. Brooke Jarvis' Unclaimed, captures an achingly human story that explored the hopes, the dreams, the tragedies and the disappointments, not just of the unknown man at the center of the narrative but of the hundreds of families who thought that his story might contain a missing, longed-for piece of their own family story.

0:02:50: I'll read just one paragraph from the story before we turn it over to our panel. "And yet as his story, or really the news of the lack of a story spread, people began to contact the hospital to ask detailed questions about his moles or his scars. Their own family histories also included a journey across the border, interrupted by a mystery. Each had a son, or a brother, or a husband, or a cousin, or a friend who'd headed northward and then disappeared. Leaving no answers about what might have happened to him, whether he was dead or incarcerated or suffering somewhere, whether he'd abandon them. In the anguish of their uncertainty, they look to the man in the bed and saw hope. They peered into his empty past and saw the possibility of themselves."

0:03:57: Acknowledging these human stories is what brings us here today. We at Wallace House believe that excellent journalism presents an opportunity for communities. It prompts us not just to 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. And so we've brought Brooke Jarvis here to join us on campus today for a conversation with two esteemed scholars with deep experience and interest in the issues that her work explores. We're pleased to have joining us today, Jason De León, associate professor of Anthropology here at the University and Director of the Undocumented Migration Project. His research on Latin American migration explores among other topics: Violence, death and mourning. He's the author of the book, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. And he was awarded a 2017 MacArthur Genius Grant for his work, that the MacArthur Foundation cited for "Challenging audiences to confront, the complexity of International Migration and American policy choices."

0:05:12: And to moderate the discussion today, we're pleased to have Ann Lin, 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. So I'm gonna turn things over to Ann to guide our conversation today. But before we do, I want to remind you that it's our policy at Wallace House always to invite our audience to participate in our conversation. You'll notice that we've given question cards when you came in, if you don't have a card as the conversation's going on, raise your hand, someone will pass you a card. And if you have a question, please jot it down. We'll have people in the aisles, our Knight Wallace fellows are here and they'll be collecting those question cards and making sure they get down to the front for when we open it up for questions and answer. For those of us who don't want to write a question down but would rather join the conversation on Twitter, either from the room or from the live stream, you can submit your questions to Twitter using the hash tag Wallace House. I'll come back up at the end, we'll also have a brief reception after our conversation for you to meet our panelist and hopefully talk to one another. And so I welcome you to stay and with that I will leave it in the able hands of Ann Lin.

[applause]

0:06:36: Thank you so much.

[applause]

0:06:43: So Brooke, we're really honoring your story today, and I'm wondering if we can just... If you can just tell us a little bit about it, it starts with a man in a bed and nobody knows who he is. Tell us about how he got there and what then happened.

0:06:57: Sure, so as Lynette began, for a long time, the story of how he got into the bed was all that was known about him. His story was like this long. He was in an accident near the border. The other people in the car were migrants and so it was assumed that he also was, but no one was very sure. It's common for people to be advised not to carry their identification with them because... For a variety of reasons but smugglers often encouraged that...

[background conversation]

0:07:35: So there were very few clues about his past. He had in his pocket a calling card that had been purchased in Mexico and some dollars and pesos, and that was it. And so he became this mystery, even the mystery of his name that no one that I talked to was able to clarify how such a strange name came about. And the nurses who treated him would make up names for him 'cause they needed something to call him. But his story was so short, it was just like a shadow of a story. But what was so interesting and what drew me to write about him was how that lack of a story affected other people. As Lynette began to read, there are tens of thousands of people who have someone that they love, that they don't know what happened to them. They set out to cross the border and then something happened. And it could be a wide variety of things, but it means a lot of people left wondering.

0:08:44: One of the people that I spoke to when I was researching this story, who works with a lot of families like these trying to make the connections between mysterious remains and mysterious unfinished stories. She said that the family she worked with, they turned to psychics, they believed in dreams, many of them were convinced that their person was the one case where someone had amnesia, which is an unlikely thing but people were really eager for something to believe. And the way she put it was that it's a kind of torture that she wouldn't wish on anyone, a very special kind of torture of not knowing. So the point of the story was to learn more about all of these families and what their experience was like. When I first started working on it I thought a lot about this novel that I love, which is called, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter", has anybody ready that?

0:09:48: And at the heart of the novel is a deaf mute man and these other characters who live in the same town, whose lives all rotate around him, they all feel like he's the one person they can talk to, and the one person they can trust, and who really understands them. And they see themselves reflected back by this man who, when you read his perspective, he thinks they're all kind of nuts. [chuckle] And I kept thinking of Garage 66, the man in the bed, as kind of a similar person in these persons lives. Like he reflected back all of their fears and their hopes, and that was something I wanted to explore.

0:10:27: One of the people that you write a lot about is Liliana, and she's from Mexico originally, but she currently leaves in Houston. And she has a legal visa to be in the United States. She's missing her brother.

0:10:45: Mm-hmm.

0:10:46: How does she come to know about the man in the bed and what does she do to find her brother, and then how does she come to know about the man in the bed?

0:10:56: By the time that I met Liliana, the last she had heard from her brother was in 1999 I believe, so it had been like 16 years. And when he first went missing, her family looked for him, they went to the last place where they had heard from him; he'd made a phone call and the call had cut out, his calling card had run out of juice. And then they never heard from him again. And some time passed and then they went to the last place that they knew where he was, and they looked in the hotel and then they looked in other hotels, and then they looked in hospitals, and then they looked in morgues and detention centers. And the people in the county, they showed them pictures of people who had died in the desert, "Is this him? Is this him?" And every time it wasn't him, but it was a common enough story that there were these other people that were offered to them for identification. And they didn't know what to do.

0:11:54: And how she heard of this man who was in San Diego by that time, that's where the hospital was, there are large online networks for people in their family situation that have sprung up, very grassroots. People just believe, in the age of the Internet, if you put a photo out, and it gets wide enough circulation, maybe the right person will see it, and maybe somebody will get an answer to their question. And so there are more than a dozen, from what I've found, possibly more of Facebook groups with followers ranging from 10,000 to 200,000 people. And it's this whole world of people sharing stories, and sharing pictures, either of someone they've lost or of someone who has been found, although usually not the way that you would want to eventually find your family member. People will share sometimes very disturbing photos of bodies found in the desert, or like a backpack, and just these little clues for people to follow up on. And Liliana came across one of those, one of her cousins saw it and forwarded it to her, because they thought that the the man looked like her brother.

0:13:14: Yeah. Jason, you've done a lot of thinking and writing about, and working with the clues that migrants leave behind in the desert and I'm wondering if you can say a little bit about your own work, and then talk a little bit about groups like the one that Liliana used to try to find her brother.

0:13:32: Yeah. First, I wanna say that the story is amazing, and so if you haven't read it, I would highly recommend that you read it. I think they're gonna give out copies of it later. And I think for me, one of the amazing things about the story, it's not a story about immigration, and I don't necessarily think that we need more stories about immigration at this point, we're flooded with them. We need people to see statistics and the word migrant associated with people, with faces, with stories, with names, with real trauma that people are living with on a daily basis.

0:14:00: And the work that I've been doing since about 2008, it's been trying to piece together what actually happens along the border. What do border-crossings look like, from an archaeological perspective, from an ethnographic perspective, a forensic perspective, so trying to piece together these stories that are fragmentary, often times difficult to document, because they happen in the middle of nowhere. And so I've spent a lot of time picking up the things that migrants leave behind in the desert, like these backpacks. I've spent a lot of time with migrants in shelters after they've been deported, or as they're getting ready to attempt a desert crossing. And then we spend a lot of time focusing on the the forensic aspects, so what happens to people who die during a border crossing. And unfortunately, like what Brooke writes about, this is not an uncommon thing. Thousands of people, more people have died crossing the border since 2000 than 9/11 and hurricane Katrina combined. Those are recovered bodies. I have argued in a lot of different places that we drastically undercount the number of fatalities that happen on a yearly basis.

0:14:57: So not only do people die out there, and we don't hear about them, we don't see about them, that trauma continues to carry on to now. So these families of the missing, who are looking for loved ones, it's a really horrific thing to talk to family members about missing a loved one. And some of the work that we've done is focused around the story of a 15-year-old kid named José Tacuri, who had left Ecuador in 2013, to try to reunite with parents in New York, and he went missing in the desert, has not been heard from since. And his family, they will tell you these stories about, he comes to them in dreams, the mysterious phone call in the middle of the night, maybe he's got amnesia, maybe he's been kidnapped. And these families live with this trauma forever. Clinical Psychologist Pauline Boss wrote about this... Has written about this in many different places, and one of them is the context of 9/11, with the bodies that weren't recovered there, and people who are living with, what we refer to as, ambiguous loss. So this loss that can never be resolved, because you'll never have confirmation that someone is alive or dead.

0:16:01: And for a lot of these families, the difficulty... They have to go to Facebook to start to coordinate, to look for people because there's minimal support for this kind of stuff. The federal government could care less about these bodies, there are some non-profits around who are struggling to raise money and awareness about the stuff, but there's not a lot of infrastructure for these things. So, if your relative goes missing in the desert, who do you call? Do you call the Mexican Consulate, do you call someone in Tucson? People just don't know. You called Tucson, they may send you to 12 different places. Information gets passed around, kind of willy-nilly, and there are just only a handful of organizations that are really working to collate all of this data. But at the moment, there are something like 800 or 900 unidentified bodies recovered in Southern Arizona alone. And we know that many more of those bodies are out in the Arizona desert decomposing, or have completely disappeared now, and there's nobody 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.

0:17:13: Brooke, maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you got to know about this story, how did you begin to write about it? And the kind of work you did to research and write about it.

0:17:24: I... Let's see. I think I was first considering... So, there was a story that made some national headlines a few years ago, migration routes shifted and happened to pass through this county in Texas that was not directly a border county. And there was a border patrol check point that people had to go around to not get caught, and in doing so many of them died of exposure, and ranchers would find them, some of them would leave out water and supplies, and... But still, many people were dying. And the county, with no medical examiner, didn't know what to do and ended up burying 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... There's an anthropologist who has an ongoing project to try to identify those people. They exhumed them and are following what clues they can to find out what their stories are. But it didn't feel like the right way in for a number of reasons.

0:18:31: One was that it was early. They had only, at that point, identified one person. And it felt, as I think you were saying, many times stories about immigration can feel like abstractions. And we hear a lot of numbers and statistics and I wanted to be able to find some people stories. And that wasn't yet available. And I was little leery. As a magazine writer, the sort of the story of the white detective who's gonna solve this is, it's a trope. And yeah, it just... But that's what made me aware of the scale of this problem. I talked to that anthropologist, who you probably know, Kate Spradley, and she put it in the same terms. "Like this is a Katrina and a 9/11 that is going unaddressed, how can that be?" So I had it as something I wanted to write about, but I hadn't found out how.

0:19:26: And then I was reading, somewhat randomly, because I also have written about physician-assisted suicide and sort of right-to-die movements, death and dying issues, and I was reading a story about the number of people who are kept alive at government expense in California. And there was a mention of this man who was 66 Garage, and it mentioned that families had come forward hoping he was their missing person. And when I'd been thinking about these massive numbers of missing people, I hadn't been thinking about their families. That was a whole part of the story that hadn't even occurred to me. And when I read just that mention, it just caught me of... It's not hard to imagine that emotional experience of having to live in doubt and fear because you don't know what happened to someone you loved. So then, I wanted to find some of those families to talk to, which was difficult, because there's a lot of privacy considerations, especially when it comes to things that are healthcare-involved. But eventually I found... I found some.

0:20:33: Yeah. One of the really heartbreaking parts of your story is at the very end, where you talk about a woman, Paula, who sort of adopted this man. And visited him, and spoke to him, and then helped to publicize him. And then at the end, when he's identified, she's no longer able to speak to him anymore.

0:20:54: Yeah, yeah, that really breaks her heart and it is a heartbreaking part of the story. The timing just happened to work that way. If I had started reporting this... I didn't know he was gonna be identified, for 16 years he had not been identified, he'd 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've been considered private or at least 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 talk to, they continued looking for years and decades. And in this case, he had a living sister who, after many years of not hearing from him, had given him up for lost and was surprised to find that he was alive.

0:21:50: Yeah. So, President Trump, last night, talked about open borders, and how he felt that prior to his administration, the borders between... America had this open border policy that allowed in all of these drugs and all of this crime. Jason, I'm wondering if you can say something about whether... What the border looks like and how it is not open?

[chuckle]

0:22:17: The open border question is just one that's not based on any kind of truth or facts. And if you think about who... The people that are pushing for the wall, "The wall's gonna solve this whole thing." It's not people high up the DHS, it's not agents that are on the ground. People recognize that the border is a very complex place, and it's not and we don't have an open border, we don't have... What's being said politically and publicly is not a reflection of what's happening on the ground. So this whole notion of an open border... Numbers have been down. Obama deported more people than George W. Bush. These things are much more complicated than the way they're being portrayed now. And the policies that we have that are in place, that the way that our security kinda works now, it started in the Clinton Administration. So yeah, this idea that we're being overrun by MS-13 and drugs and terrorists, these are falsehoods. These are not true.

0:23:24: And what we've done over the years, is we've conflated the war on terrorism with southern border security, which is a very savvy slight of hand, and it's a way to generate lots of fear, it's a way to generate lots of spending for things like a wall that we know will not work and will destroy the environment, but will put money in certain people's pockets. But we throw these things out there and unfortunately, they pick up steam. But from my experience, and from the many hours of conversations I've had with agents on the ground, these things that we're being told publicly are not true.

0:24:00: Yet one of the things that I think people often don't realize is how much border enforcement contributes to the... Not only of course 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, they don't want to risk going home, they can't... Because they can't... They fear they can't cross again. And crossing is not as easy as walking across a dotted line. It really, as a lot of your work talks about, can be a weeks long, months long process. And I'm wondering if you can just say a little bit about that.

0:24:41: It's not this idea that the wall's gonna stop this whole thing. I love the quote that I use from Janet Napolitano where she says, "Show me a 50-foot wall, I'll show you a dude on the other side who's renting a 51-foot ladder." That's where people are constantly responding to changes in enforcement, but not necessarily in ways that are super obvious. So, 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, I mean the way that immigration has changed in the last probably three or four years, in 2014 we were all very afraid of the poor brown children from Central America who were flooding our detention centers. And people got really concerned about this humanitarian crisis that they recognized for about a New York minute and then it went away. And Obama comes out and says, "Well, we've really toughened up border enforcement, put more boots on the ground." Kind of thing.

0:25:34: We didn't change anything at the border. What we've done is we've outsourced immigration enforcement to Mexico. So we have encouraged Mexico, we've put political pressure on them to stop Central Americans in country, and so they deport equal numbers of Central Americans that we do as part of this plan that was initially called Plan Frontera Sur. They don't have a name for it anymore and they deny it exists, but we train agents in Mexico and in Honduras to catch people leaving the country. That's where a lot of this border enforcement is happening. The stuff that happens at the US-Mexico border, much of that is a smokescreen.

0:26:09: One of the things I think is often missed in this discussion is that it's not very easy to come to the US legally. People often talk about waiting in line and how it's important for people to do the right thing and wait in line, but the fact is, that the American immigration policy is really about who you know, because it is centered around sponsorship. So either you have an immediate family member who can sponsor you, a parent, a child, an adult child, a spouse, a brother and sister who can sponsor you, or you have to have an employer sponsor you and sponsor you by name, that is not just say, "I need workers of this particular type." But "I need this person here now and I'm willing to make that application." And so if you go back to the issue of waiting in line, for a lot of people as it turns out, there is no line for them to wait in. There is never a line that they can join that will get them to the United States. And so people develop all of these other ways of getting to the United States. One of the things you were talking about earlier is MS-13 and how it's become powerful in part because it smuggles people over the border, and I wonder if you could say something about that, Jason?

0:27:24: I know that was... I didn't watch The State of the Union last night. I was joking that I just get my updates from The Onion about how that went.

[laughter]

0:27:33: But this trope of the MS-13 that's gonna destroy America, we made MS-13 in America. It's a homegrown problem. We then outsourced it, we sent it back... We sent people back to Central America with skills to become more organized around criminal activities. But MS-13 is the new kind of boogeyman. That's the very scary thing that we can throw out there and now we need to put this wall up. But keep in mind that MS-13, as a transnational gang starts in California, starts in LA. We started deporting people who were fleeing Central America because of US intervention policies that were making those countries unlivable. So they come to the US, they get marginalized in the US, start these gangs and then we send them back to Central America, get more organized there, make life even more miserable for everybody else in Central America. So it's this kind of back and forth but MS-13 is an American problem that we have had a hand in creating. And we have this historical amnesia about how they have come to be.

0:28:36: But increasingly, I work with a lot of guys from MS-13 who love Donald Trump. They think Donald Trump is amazing because every time he says, "I'm gonna build this big wall." They say to me, the smugglers I work with, they say "Well, that's just more money that I can make. I know this wall isn't gonna do anything but my people I smuggle, they don't know that. They think that this wall's gonna require more things from me so now I can jack up my prices." MS-13 now largely controls the movement of Central Americans across Mexico. So they control the train tracks and the routes. Cartels control particular geographic areas. But you can't cross Mexico now without paying MS-13 to smuggle you across. And those guys are making lots of money now. Things are slow after the election 'cause people were afraid to come. It's picking back up again. Prices have gone up but MS-13 now, they look at... Every time Trump says something about them, for them it's like, "Yeah, that's just more money in our back pocket." And so I have interesting conversations with those folks about their perceptions of what these things that are being said in the US, those impacts they're having on people in Central America and in Mexico.

0:29:39: Yeah. I wanna 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, just raise your hand a little bit and somebody will come by to give you a card. And remember too that you can also Tweet your questions with [0:29:56] ____ with the hash tag WallaceHouse.

0:30:00: Brooke, I wanted to ask you about a story that you've been working on more recently. And this is about the citizen children of parents who now fear deportation and as Jason was saying earlier, first in the great ramp up... Ramping up of deportation policies under President Obama and then with President Bush's... Excuse me. President Trump's change in directive to ISIS to... Excuse me, change in directive ICE, to Immigration Customs Enforcement, that allows... Encourages ICE to pick up any undocumented immigrant even if they do not have a criminal background or criminal record. The fear of deportation for families has really gone up tremendously and I'm wondering if you can tell us about what some of those families are doing to deal with it.

0:30:56: Sure. Well, as you mentioned earlier, clarifying that adult children are able to sponsor their parents for citizenship, children children are not. So if you are the American-born child of someone who is at risk of deportation, you really don't have a right to have that person in your life in America. It's a very interesting situation where... So the best interests of the child is the legal standard that is used in international law, it's entrained in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which we did not ratify but we did sign. The only country not to ratify. And it's also used like if there's a custody decision. This is the main criteria that judges are considering. But there's not a mechanism for looking at that when it comes to immigration law and when it comes to deportation of parents.

0:32:02: So there are lots of people who are deported leaving behind American children, which opens a question of what's best for these children whose lives are bound up in the future of our country even if they do leave. The choice is generally you can leave with your parent to go to a country that you don't know, maybe you don't speak the language, maybe you don't even... People are planning better for this now but for a while kids were showing up in Mexico and they didn't have any kind of paperwork there. So how are they gonna get enrolled in schools? We hear a lot about, "Oh, immigrants over-running American schools." But Mexican schools are really having a hard time right now because they're overrun with American kids who don't speak Spanish.

0:32:50: So families are very afraid. From what I have seen in my reporting, many of them are planning for the eventuality of what happens if you have a small child and one day your parent doesn't come home from work or doesn't pick them up at school because they have been detained. And there are non-profits that work with families to make a whole plan for this. Who are they gonna call? Who has the bank account information? Who has the documents? The story that I recently worked on was specifically about a woman in Miami who... So something that many people do is sign a power of attorney letter to allow someone to step-in in a legal sense and either take care of their children or at least see them through this transition. They're a person who can sign the school paperwork or sign the doctor paperwork. It's all of this little stuff that you wouldn't necessarily imagine to be a problem. And there's a woman in Miami where, parents have signed that paperwork for more than a thousand children for her and it's gone up a lot since the election.

0:34:01: She's reported that she sees people being much, much more afraid. And the affect that that has on the whole family. There's a psychologist named Louie Sias, who refers to these children as "invisible citizens" whose rights are not being remembered or respected, is the way that he looks at it. And having interviewed and analyzed many of them, he found clinical levels of separation anxiety and low self esteem in so many of these kids that... They live in fear that they're gonna be the one to mess up. They have their parents' fate in their hands, and what if they do something wrong and it's their fault that their family falls apart. It's a really terrifying prospect for kids. They would report dreams where they're hiding from ICE in the middle of the night. This was one dream that a girl reported that just stuck with me and all of her friends had on black sweatshirts, but she had a pink hoodie and she couldn't hide. Or dreams about having to sacrifice themselves for their parents. It's just... I met children who have either had parents deported or are afraid of having parents deported, and the effect is pretty heartbreaking.

0:35:21: How do 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 then lead to a deportation. So in circumstances like these, why do people trust you to... Trust you enough to speak to you?

0:35:46: It's a good question. I definitely... I'm very cautious about things like that. I think that my first responsibility is to readers, but... It would be different if I were writing about public figures. But these are ordinary people who would not be in the spotlight if I didn't put them there, and that creates a responsibility to not mess up their lives. It helps to be introduced by someone that they already know and trust. It's not like you're gonna just knock on doors in an immigrant neighborhood and be like, "Hey," [chuckle] "who wants to talk about your legal status?" [chuckle] It's important to be slow and cautious, and to work networks, and to explain to people what your... What the goals of your reporting are. And then, when the circumstances require it, to anonymize their details.

0:36:50: Jason, you work with a lot of people too, who you wouldn't think have much reason to trust you. Whether these are young men who are coming across the border, whether they're families. And for that matter, you've done a lot of work with border patrol agents, who probably don't see "professor from the University of Michigan" as somebody who's going to be very sympathetic to my beliefs. So, how do you create trust? How do you get sources?

0:37:20: Well, it's funny Brooke mentions that I'm not gonna knock on their doors. I actually worked on a project once where, it was a sociology survey that I was a part of, where we knocked on doors in this immigrant neighborhood asking people about immigration status. [chuckle] And of course, it totally fell flat. It was the worst research design that I'd ever... [laughter] It was a very good learning moment for me as a graduate student. I'd be like, "Yeah, this is not really working." [laughter] But for me, the anthropologist, it's... I think it's a couple of things. It's one, we're super annoying, 'cause we don't go away. So the communities that I work with and the people I work with, I have the luxury of spending years with them working on one thing. And so, it takes a long time to develop that trust.

0:38:03: And with that length of time there's this kind of dual commitment. I'm committed to them and they become committed to me. So part of that is just when you tell someone, "Okay, I'm interested in your story. I'm gonna be back tomorrow." And then you come back the next day and they're like, "Oh, you weren't kidding." And you say, "I'm gonna come back the next week. And then I'll be back next year." And then eventually they realize that you're not gonna go away 'till they help you figure some things out. So the part of that is a methodological thing. But I think another part of it too is, do people wanna talk to you. Do you give off this vibe of, "I'm interested in these issues, and I'm here to do the best job I can and also to be fair to the people that are trusting me." And so, I've had great working relationships with law enforcement, border patrol, smugglers, migrants. And I come to all of it with this openness of, "I wanna tell these stories." And I can't do it if I'm here with this kind of agenda, other than to tell a story.

0:39:06: And people are not always open to this in the beginning. And so it takes... With the agents that I've worked with, it's taken some time to develop trust. And we disagree about certain things, but they recognize at the end of the day that, if I'm gonna write about them, I wanna write about them as this kind of complete person that I've come to know. And maybe we disagree about certain things. Same thing with smugglers. I work with people who do a lot of horrible stuff, but I wanna understand how does someone come to that position. And what is life like for them as a person. And I think you have these sort of... This thing that you just bring and people pick up on that. And they go, "Okay, you seem like an okay person. And maybe I don't quite know what you're doing, but I can trust you to do a job that I think will reflect the relationship that we're having." It's kind of one of those things, but people will have a pretty good detector for... If you're not being forthcoming about stuff, I think. That's my sense.

0:40:06: Brooke, I'm wondering if you can say something about the kind of journalism that you try to do. So, you write for magazines but my sense is that you write for different magazines, right? And you freelance. You place, you pitch stories to a lot of different places. What do you look for in a good story?

0:40:26: That's a really hard question. The best answer is a story. It needs to be the kind of story that would stick with you and that you would tell your friends in a bar. Something that... Like rather... What everybody always says in journalism is, you pitch a story and not a topic. And when it comes to something like this, about immigration, I don't have any kind of policy, agenda or thoughts. I wanna tell the stories of the people involved, so that we understand them better. So that they're not abstractions. And when you can do that, in particular in a way that cuts through what people expect and what they think they already know, that's the most effective.

0:41:19: I think the largest barrier, to all of us, to learning something is feeling like you already know the answer even if we don't, or something's familiar. I know that can be frustrating when you're selling stories to editors. Because they always think that they've heard that story before. And you have to find a new way in. But yeah, I've never been very good about talking about what I do. But, the goal... [chuckle] The goal is to tell good stories about... I'm always drawn to topics that are messy and mushy and morally unclear. And I wanna know people's motivations and what they were thinking and why they did what they did. And anything that's gonna make me see the world that I thought I knew in a different way and show me that maybe I didn't know it, maybe I didn't know as much as I thought. And I think that's a valuable experience for us all to have all the time.

0:42:21: Yeah. Jason, I have a somewhat related question for you but it's a little different. You work with people, as you say, over years and years and years. You have tons of material. How do you select from that material? Many more quotes, and many more artifacts, many more events are in your research than actually ever get published and so how do you make a selection?

0:42:46: I think about the work that I do as... Can I tell a compelling story with the data that I have? Can I use theory to help you understand the data in an interesting and kind of different way? But at the end of the day, I would consider myself to be... I'm an anthropologist in the field, but I don't think I'm necessarily an anthropologist or a social scientist when I start to put words to paper. I think now I'm much more interested in being a writer. I'm much more interested in being, I don't know, like a fake journalist [chuckle] or being some other thing that values words and that values storytelling and is thinking about the reader. I saw my colleague, Ruth Behar, who's back... She told me once... I had been accused of being a journalist and she told me once, "It's okay they think you are a journalist, that's totally fine. That's not a bad thing. That means that you're putting interesting things on paper and people wanna follow along."

0:43:42: And with the social science stuff, it's really... It's you have all of this information and you have to figure out then what to include and what to leave out in terms of; what can the reader handle, what is the overarching story and how do you do that in a kind of concise way? And so I've had to, over the years, figure out what to... To be more honest about the editing process and to think about, if I lose you with the narrative, it doesn't matter how much data I put in there, it's indecipherable. And so for me I've had to not be wedded to certain data sets or wedded to certain things that I've written if it's going to be distracting. But it's hard, you're always editing something, whether it's a journal article or a public piece, or a book. And I just now wanna think about the editing process, I just have a lot to work with. But I'm thinking about it much more in a sort of journalistic or kinda novelistic way.

0:44:41: I think it's probably time to invite everyone else into the conversation, and so I see people collecting cards. I know the cards are coming down here. And then some of the Wallace House Fellows will be asking the questions. So...

0:44:57: This is a question from our audience. Would a physical wall that truly ran the length of the border prevent deaths?

0:45:08: No. It's not the wall. The wall's not... 'Cause the wall won't stop movement. We have walls. We got giant walls in Nogales, San Diego. They redirect people toward the deserts because you have to walk five, six days to get across. That's... Our border enforcement right now is about the natural environment. Whether it's walking through Brooks County or through the southern desert of Arizona, that is the wall. That is the physical barrier to movement. The actual wall that we put up, it's not gonna stop the flow of people because they can go underneath it, they can jump over it, they can go around it via water. And at the end of the day, it doesn't get at the core reasons for why people are coming, why they're leaving or what's pulling them here. And so this wall... If we wanted to stop immigrants from coming here, migrants from coming, we would just police the workforce in a real way. We don't do that. That will crash our economy, that'll make a lot of people who make money off undocumented people upset, we don't do that. That would be much cheaper than building this wall. And it would actually... It would slow...

0:46:15: In 2008 when Obama came out and said that border enforcement that they had put down at the border had slowed things down. That they were being really tough on immigration. That's not what slowed immigration down in 2008. It was our economy being in the toilet. That's what slowed things down, and that's how it's always been. Our economy and the push and pull factors whether it's the fact that we employ people in the US who are undocumented because we like cheap labor, or there are things happening around the globe that are forcing them to leave. Whether that's global climate change, political instability in places like Central America, the drug war in Mexico, the US has a big hand in a lot of those things. And so this wall thing it's just... I keep thinking that we're gonna stop having this conversation because I don't know how many times people can say that this wall is not... We're not talking about a physical wall, we're talking about these other anxieties. It's the perfect smoke screen to get us not thinking about these other issues.

0:47:12: I would add... So that question is not my area of expertise, if I have an area of expertise, but something that brings to mind is that 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're very, very small borders to protect, it's basically two cities with elaborate series of fences around them, heavily guarded. And not only do people get over those walls, they also are injured and killed in the process frequently, like nearly on a weekly basis. So that is a microcosm of what we're trying to accomplish and it has not been successful.

0:48:00: Yeah. The only thing I would add is that as Jason was talking about earlier, when you make a place... When you make it difficult to get into the US, then you create a market for people who tell you that they can help you conquer those difficulties. There are undocumented immigrants from Asia who come in through smuggling. They're smuggled in. If we make it hard for people to cross but there's still an economic incentive for them to be in the United States, there's still family reasons for them to come to the US and there's no legal way to do it, then what we will see is people paying smugglers and being in debt to those smugglers for years and years in order to get across, get through the checkpoints that are between them and their life in the US.

0:48:55: I wanna quick add to that too. The federal government thought in the early 90s that if they started to use the desert as this natural barrier, they said, "Well, people will die, 'cause it'll be too hard to get across. They'll die of dehydration, exposure." But the thinking was if enough people die, they'll stop coming. And you can look this up on the internet, this is like GOV... I think the DHS websites are still currently online, so you can see these policy documents where people say, "Yeah, people are gonna die in the desert, but then that'll stop 'em." Once some people learn that it's really dangerous and you can die doing it, they will stop coming. If hundreds of deaths a year don't stop you from coming, I don't know what this wall is gonna do. So the most extreme thing that we can do is kill people at the border, which we have been doing and that is still is not stopping people from coming.

0:49:40: I just wanted to say before the next question that the question cards are being collected and collated and read by the amazing Wallace House Fellows, and I hope that you will introduce yourself before you ask the next question and that others will too as well.

0:49:57: Thank you. I'm Robert Yun from Washington DC. I'm one of the Knight Wallace Fellows. This question is also from the audience. Does country of origin effect specific routes taken through 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?

0:50:27: [0:50:27] ____ more about routes.

0:50:31: Routes are segregated by country of origin. So if you look at who shows up in Tijuana, you have Haitians show up in Tijuana, you've got people from African countries who are coming up through that route. These are the sort of unexpected foreign nationals in Mexico. Hondurans, who I largely work with, sort of come through two routes. If you are a black Honduran, a Garifuna, you tend to come through Tamaulipas, you're trying to get to Houston, Texas or New Orleans. White Mestizo-Hondurans tend to come through other sorts of routes, they're trying to get to maybe to New York City. But you will see these routes in Mexico, people will differentially come. So there are segregated routes that happen there. At the border, the breakdown right now, it's 98% or something... So people from Mexico or Central America, and they tend to split pretty evenly these days between Mexico and Central American countries. But you have people coming from all other places who are coming now through Mexico from much farther away that you would be unexpected, like China, for example.

0:51:40: Can one of you... This is also from our in-house audience, can one of you talk about the sanctuary movement? Are churches the only places that can provide sanctuary? What does that mean? Do you know about the church in Detroit that's supposedly a test case for this movement?

0:52:01: Well, I'll just start that by saying that there is actually no legal prohibition against ICE or anyone else, any other law enforcement officer going into a house of worship or anywhere else. So the sanctuary movement is built on a particular belief. And the belief is that if law enforcement agents have to force their way into a church to pick up a particular family, that that will create a public relations storm for them that that agency cannot tolerate. That's all it is. There's nothing else that keeps law enforcement from going in to a church, a synagogue, a mosque, any other house of worship.

0:53:00: Having said that, so I think there are two issues to go on here. The sanctuary movement, I think, is a really important way for congregations, for Americans to think about whether they approve of the policies of a 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." It's a way for Americans to look at themselves and see what they're willing to accept. And in that sense, I think it's been tremendously useful in teaching people about the issues of immigration in general, and documented migration in particular. It's been a great way of teaching people about the millions of people in the United States that are under... That are protected against deportation, their deportation has been deferred, but they have no legal status and no way of getting legal status, which means at any time, that protection from deportation can be lifted. And that's the situation of people who are under Temporary Protected Status or TPS, that is the situation of people who have received 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's important, I think it's great that people are concerned and care about it. But as an actual policy to prevent deportation, it's not very helpful.

0:54:56: This question is also from our in-house audience. Migration across the border, like many other issues, has aspects of intersectionality and identities of race and gender. Could you speak to how issues at the border are also feminist issues, particularly in these times of the MeToo movement.

[chuckle]

0:55:20: Do you want?

0:55:22: I don't have... They're... I guess, I have a wide definition of what a feminist issue is. And these are people's families and lives. One of the trends is that a majority of people who were deported from the US interior are men. And so, that leaves a lot of families with just a mother. And that's a major impact on a lot of people's families.

0:55:58: Yeah, I would also... I think that's really important. I think the image of the undocumented migrant is usually a young man who's coming to the US, and maybe he's going to stand in the Home Depot parking lot and work, or maybe he's going to commit a crime. And it really sort of closes our eyes to the fact that families come over, families come over in steps where one person comes first, and then they are able to send money back to bring other people over; or families come together. And I think one of the... Another way of thinking about what goes on at the border as a feminist issue is... It's two things, I would say. First, whether formally, through smuggling, or informally, one of the fears that women face, that men face less, is the fear of sexual violence. And that is certainly a feature of the... It is often a feature of the experience, particularly when women are trusting smugglers to get them across the border.

0:57:11: And then the other thing that I would say that I think is also important is we... The US created a set of legal protections of... Ways to get legal status for women who were battered or abused, and where one of the elements of that abuse is that the husband controlled the immigration visa. That is, the women, he was a citizen, he's a citizen, and if they divorced, she will no longer have the ability to stay in the US. Or he is the principal applicant for a visa, and if he, again, if he divorces her, if he disowns her, she will not have the ability to apply for that visa on her own. And so a visa was created for women in this situation, these are women that are already in the US. And the extent to which those visas are actually granted, the kinds of proof people need in order to get those visas is a really... It's sort of an invisible part of the immigration system because it's very discretionary. It really depends on decisions that USCIS makes, Citizenship and Immigration Services make when they look at an application.

0:58:39: And I would just say in general, you're absolutely right. Our idea of the migrant is young, Mexican, and male; and that is definitely not the case. And all of these, the things that make us individuals, our identity, our gender, our sexuality, all of these things complicate people's migration experiences in all kinds of ways that I think we just still aren't paying enough attention to. And the ways in which families have been fragmented by transnational migration impact family structure, puts certain pressures on different members of the household that oftentimes, fall along gender lines. And I think that we are seeing... There's so many things happening right now, especially Mexico, in relationship to women fleeing Honduras with kids. They're fleeing violence from...

0:59:25: I'll give you an example of this. I work with a smuggler who... A female smuggler who left Honduras with her kids. Her boyfriend had been killed and so, there was no paperwork of him really other than this obituary. She couldn't leave the country because it's illegal to leave Honduras as a single parent with your kids without all kinds of paperwork. And so, she had to sneak out of her own country to get into Mexico, which then... There's a whole new set of complicated issues being a migrant, now turned smuggler, who's working to feed your kids through human smuggling, dealing with corrupt law enforcement who deferentially exploit men and women who are migrating. So it's not just at the border, it's throughout the entire route, but gender and issues of sexuality come up constantly. And I think that we're just only now scratching the surface in terms of understanding those dynamics.

1:00:25: All right, this question is for you, Jason. What are some of the artifacts and stories you've found in the desert? And are they on display anywhere?

1:00:39: So for those of you who don't know, for about 10... The last almost 10 years, I've been trying to use archaeology as one method to understand this process. And so, migrants leave a lot of stuff in the desert that we have gone and collected and treated like an archaeological assemblage. And we've got about 7,000 objects here at University of Michigan. The Smithsonian has about 120 objects now. I think we have four pieces that are currently on display in 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 Ellis Island. And so, we hope that those things can be used to show these kind of historical connections, get people to be thinking about, "What was it like to be an immigrant in the early 20th century? How were you treated at Ellis Island?" Shockingly, not well. And it took a long time for us to realize that that was an important archaeological assemblage.

1:01:34: But now, with the materials that we've collected, I worry about the stuff because there's always this focus on... The archaeology is really interesting. But for me, the archaeology is just a way to think about the people who left them behind. And so, they sort of... They both speak to the human experience, and they're also a historical record of this thing that happened in the middle of nowhere where there weren't a lot of people sort of around to see this stuff. But you... There's lots of interesting objects that we have found. And I could talk ad nauseam about food, and ripped-up shoes, and bloody shirts, and baby bottles, and that sort of stuff. But those things, for me, are just one other way to get you to think about what it is to be a migrant. And so, it's like I'm not trying to... I'm not using archaeology to tell an archaeological story. I'm not even using archaeology, I think, to tell an immigration story. I think archaeology is being used to tell a story about humanity, and about the American experience, and about these global kind of connections.

1:02:32: But I hesitate to tell you like, "I found this baby bottle and it was this important thing." I'd rather talk about Maricela ZhagüI Puyas. She was a woman whose body we found in 2012. And the struggles that her family went to find her, and the difficulties that were involved in identifying her body. And then the trauma of repatriating this poorly, this badly decomposing body that had been sitting in cold storage for six weeks unembalmbed, and people opening the casket 'cause they wanted to see, the family, the family member. Those are the stories that I'm more interested in because I think that they're more uncomfortable and they speak to this brutal reality that has a name and a face to it, as opposed to the artifacts themselves. I think sometimes, we can get lost in romanticizing them and losing sight of the actual people who left the stuff behind.

1:03:24: This relates to your answer. What would a trauma-informed policy need to look like in order to support immigrants in the United States?

1:03:38: I'm not a policy person. [laughter]

1:03:45: In the... So the US has a refugee policy now that after... The US passed the Refugee Act in 1980 that recognised our country's obligations to refugees, created a program that would screen refugees abroad, but would commit us to take refugees from all around the world. And I think this is an improvement in our refugee policy, which prior to this, was very haphazard. It was very dependent upon political support for a particular group, and it did not create any sort of long-standing infrastructure that would be... That would allow refugees from different places to be treated equally. But having said that, one thing that I think was really important about our previous refugee policy was that because it was so haphazard and so dependent on political support for people of a particular national origin, it also kept us very much in touch with... The US waged a war in Vietnam; we have an obligation to those people whose lives were destroyed by that. The Hmong this hill-dwelling people who don't speak any English, fought fiercely on our side during the wars in Indochina, we should protect them. We have an obligation to protect them.

1:05:33: We have the same policy towards Cuba and Cuban refugees, was very similar. We felt that this was a country, the 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. Soviet refugees... So I could go on about this. We currently don't have a policy like that, a policy that recognizes our historical obligations, our economic ties. And because of... And so, there's no give in our policies for people from countries where we are a large part of the reason they're migrating. And so, one thing I would say about trauma-induced... A policy that recognized trauma migration would also be a policy that was... Had more give in it, more recognition of particular circumstances where the US, I think, has an obligation to the places in the world that have depended upon us.

1:06:50: And I would add... Just thinking about trauma policies, we recognize that our federal immigration policies literally kill people, hundreds of them, a year. We know that. That's not my liberal bias, that's not, "I'm making this up." We do this, we knowingly do this, and it's recognized by policy makers, they made the policy that's happened. But I think, like in Brooke's story, if we're gonna kill people and acknowledge that we're killing people, maybe the least we could do is to spend some time and energy to send those bodies back, to repatriate these bodies so that people aren't sitting in some hospice care center for 15 years because nobody knows who they are, because there's no energy invested in identifying these people. There's no money for the DNA samples, there's no money to... We kill them at the border, and then we let them continue to create these different forms of violence that are long-lasting.

1:07:47: And I think that, for me, a form of more sensitive policy would be at least to minimally invest in the DNA samples in the repatriation of bodies, and helping these non-profits like the Colibri Center for Human Rights in Tucson, helping those folks to do work that needs to be done. I think that that's the minimal amount of work that we could do that would just, at least... There's the murder that happens, and then we should at... We cannot let the thing continue 'cause I think that as a story, sort of shows, and as many people are experiencing... This trauma just continues forever. And for me, that's one of the cruelest parts of this whole thing that's going on right now.

1:08:31: And that is something that the Mexican government addresses at a governmental level. There are people in consulates whose job it is to try to solve some of these mysteries, but they don't solve a lot of cases. One person told me that they have a backlog of 30,000 cases, and they solve about 80 a year. But it is something that they have a DNA lab on retainer. It's part of what they consider their governmental duty to their citizens.

1:08:55: One of the things that was amazing to me, Brooke, in the end of your story, you talk about how the man's fingerprints were finally identified, and they, in fact, had existed in the American database all along.

1:09:08: Yes. [chuckle]

1:09:10: Yeah. [chuckle]

1:09:11: Spoiler. Yeah, it was... It had just never been thoroughly checked out. And finally, somebody... It came to the attention of somebody who was well-connected politically, and he brought it to the attention of, I guess, the head of DHS, I'd have to check that, who was like, "Make this a priority to the San Diego guys. Get on this." And they just went to the hospital and they ran the prints in one database and there was no hit. But then, they ran them in an older database, and there was his name after all that time.

1:09:44: A related question for you, Brooke: Did you develop your own relationship with 66 Garage? How did you do the story without getting emotionally involved, or is that impossible?

1:09:56: Anytime you're interviewing somebody in there, it's amazing what people will tell to a relative stranger. People have these intense stories to tell, and they are very eager to talk about them, and they will tell you stuff that is just really haunting and emotionally vulnerable, so it's... Of course, that's gonna have an effect on you. And I don't think that that is a compromise of journalistic integrity to be able to empathize with the people that you're talking to. Everybody has a story that is worth listening to. I did not meet him. It wasn't possible given the privacy laws. So I met and talked to a number of people who did meet him, but I never met him in person.

1:10:45: This also relates to that. In an era of alternative facts, is there a role for journalism and academia in fighting for humane immigration policies?

1:11:00: Yeah.

[laughter]

1:11:02: And as a journalist, that's a... People have different ways that they draw the line of what is journalism and what is advocacy. And I don't advocate for specific policies or politicians or... But there are certain things that I just don't see as a bias. I will gladly claim the bias that I think a livable planet is a handy thing to have. I don't think that should be considered like a bias that disqualifies me from reporting on environmental issues. There are different ways that we can protect it. There's all kinds of gray area and difficult questions, but I am a person [chuckle] and I'm not gonna... I don't need to be the devil's advocate. That's like, "Well, what if we just cut down all of the rainforests?" And I think that this is... When it comes to immigration, I am very happy to claim the bias that I think that the people involved are real people who's humanity should be respected and understood. And if I can write stories that help keep that in mind when it comes to writing policies that affect these people, I think that that's what I can do.

1:12:32: I think after the election last year, there was a moment, at least in the discipline of anthropology, where people started looking around and going, "Well, what is it that I do? How do I contribute to this, to dialogues about these different things?" And I have a lot of very brilliant colleagues who write about super important topics, ones that are of global interest, but who I think for a long time, either haven't thought about the public outreach component, or... We're in these systems where I won't get tenure if I'm a public intellectual. I have to go through... I have to jump through a lot of hoops, and then I can become that thing after I pass muster in other places. But I have to write the journal article in the high-profile journal that six people are gonna read. That's what gets me tenure, and then you're able to do this other stuff. I think what's happened recently is I'm seeing a lot of my colleagues look at people who, before, they would say, "Well, I'm a... " They do public anthropology. So they do anthropology that's sort of digestible, readable, understandable to the layman.

1:13:39: And previously, people would say, "Well, that's what so and so does, public anthropology." Or public anthropology just means that you're not very theoretical, and it's kinda pop science, sort of thing. And I think that we've gotten to a point now where we have to take stock and go, "Okay, well, what is it that I do? And why... Can I, in good conscience, sort of just keep doing what I'm doing, and not think about the dumpster fire of the world that's happening right now? How am I gonna contribute to that conversation?" And I think there has been a shift that I've seen, at least from my colleagues, where they're now seeing public scholarship as not this distinction from what they do, but as a real commitment to the world, and to sharing information about the work that we do in an accessible way. And so, I think that now, more than ever, do we need social scientists to be working to be understandable, to be readable, and to be louder in terms of contributing to this counter to the alternative facts.

[applause]

1:14:42: We have time for one last question. How does the current anti-immigrant wave compare to other historical periods? And is there any discernible connection with the economy and unemployment rates over time?

1:15:00: So we, as you say, we currently have an anti-immigrant wave. Nativist sentiment in the United States is not unknown. [chuckle] And it existed in the early 1800s and was directed against Catholics. And it existed in the late 1800, mid 1800s, and was directed against Chinese. And it existed in the late 1800s and was directed against Southern Europeans. So nativism is a part of our... Is a constituent of part of our country. I think it's also an... It's an important part of our story because whenever you confront nativism, I think the right response is not to say, "Gosh! These people are racists! I don't wanna talk to them." The right response is to say, "You care very much about what this country is, what this country stands for, and I do too. And can we have a conversation about what your values and my values are, understanding that we are both part of a country that we want to protect and that we respect?"

1:16:19: To bring this conversation back a bit to the alternative facts, in many ways, the facts about immigration are actually not particularly complicated. What's complicated about immigration is that we have a bunch of different values, which often run against each other. And so, we have to have that conversation about the values. And if we don't have that conversation about the values and we just yell at each other, then we end up with policy that doesn't serve our country well, and policy that doesn't serve people who wanna come to our country very well. So I think it's important to understand first, and to come to the other part of your question, that nativism is not really related to economic conditions or to wars around the world. It can exist in good times and it can exist in bad times. One of the things that indicate it's a good time is that many immigrants are coming in because there are many jobs, and then people react to the new population of immigrants. So it's not really a discussion about Americans who are suffering and, "Isn't it time to love them more than it is to love people from another country?" It's really about what we think this country stands for and how we think it's going to grow and flourish.

[applause]

1:17:53: That was a perfect place to end. Thank you for that question to round things up. And Ann, for pulling it all together in such a beautiful way. Thank you to Brooke Jarvis, for writing a story that prompted this conversation, and to Jason De León, and Ann Lin for their work and the depth of knowledge and research that they bring to the topic. And personally, I loved this cross-disciplinary conversation, and seeing the connections between journalism and scholarly work, and the questions that you all brought for us to hopefully continue to discuss out at the reception. Jason mentioned at the beginning that you should read Brooke's story, and we would like you to. We have some copies, not enough for everyone in the room, but we do have some copies. We print these booklets every year for the Livingston Awards. And the winners this year all happen to be print winners, and their stories are here for you to read; Brooke's story is included. And so, we hope that those of you who can have an interest in reading it will be able to do so. You can also find the story on our website if you go to Wallace House and look under the Livingston Awards tab, Winners, and you'll find the link to the story there. And you can simply Google 'Unclaimed Brooke Jarvis,' and you will find the story that way. So anyone who really wants to read it can find it.

1:19:28: We invite you to join us for other events; we have some coming up very soon. These cards are available and just the right size for you to put on your refrigerator, even a very small refrigerator. Here, on February 15th, we are having an event at Rackham Auditorium. For those of you who are public radio listeners, the show, 1A, that airs here everyday on Michigan Radio is coming for a live show called 'Speak Freely: Debating the First Amendment in a Changing America.' The show will have guests from the university community. That is our next event, and you can find the other events here. We hope to see you again. Thank you so much for coming, Ann Lin, Brooke Jarvis, Jason De León. Thank you so much.

[applause]