I’ve been a long-time New Yorker subscriber but it surely’s been a very long time since I’ve sat down with the print version to learn a narrative. Today, I sat nonetheless lengthy sufficient to complete Sarah Stillman’s stunningly well-reported piece, Where are the Children? within the April 27, 2015 version.
The article is brimming with examples of the dire influence of unintended penalties, essentially the most macro of which is how U.S. efforts to safe the border have led to a brand new economic system for individuals who prey on the smuggling of migrants:
“It’s precisely like Prohibition—precisely like bootlegging,†Terry Goddard informed me not too long ago. As the mayor of Phoenix in the course of the nineteen-eighties and Arizona’s lawyer basic from 2003 to 2011, Goddard had presided over the explosion in border-security measures, aggressively looking for to remove stash homes the place migrants had been held for ransom. But he found that the supply of the issue went a lot deeper than particular person smugglers. Arizona’s harsh anti-immigrant legal guidelines made undocumented victims afraid to coöperate with legislation enforcement on prosecutions, and, so long as the nation continued to depend on immigrant labor whereas giving employees few avenues for authorized entry, extortionists would have entry to a constant provide of prey. “You can push down the observe in Arizona,†he mentioned, of stash-house extortions, “and it would pop up elsewhere.†In latest years, “elsewhere†has come to imply the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas—the Godoy boys’ deliberate level of entry into the nation.
Even as prolonged as Stillman’s article is, there are passages that themselves might be feature-length articles:
A yr and a half earlier than Brayan and Robinson Godoy travelled north, I arrived at Mexico’s border with Guatemala, within the state of Tabasco, to affix a bunch of almost forty Central American girls on a bus journey to seek for their youngsters, spouses, and family, lots of whom had vanished en path to the U.S. During the subsequent three weeks, we travelled three thousand miles alongside Mexico’s migrant path, tracing the identical path north to Texas that awaited the Godoys, earlier than we looped again south, by means of the country’s inside kidnapping hubs. At morgues, hospitals, shelters, and mass graves, we appeared for clues to the whereabouts of the lacking.
Today, NPR revealed an interview with Stillman, and a commenter eloquently summed up the inverse relationship between the significance of Stillman’s work and the general public curiosity:
Judging by the dearth of feedback right here, one would conclude {that a}) this isn’t an important difficulty for many NPR readers/listeners, and b) those that have paid consideration, have little or no compassion for the human situation, and a gross misunderstanding about undocumented aliens.