The Fromson File

Victims of Indifference In the long and contentious controversy over undocumented or illegal aliens in the United States, its saddest aspect is the plight of children. Some of the nation's most serious newspapers have devoted hundreds, if not thousands, of column inches to the inherent problems of immigration. But the focus most often is on adults, the men and women, who annually cross the borders of Caifornia, Arizona and Texas in search of jobs; jobs that are unavailable south of the border. They are desperate to earn a living wage that would enable them to support themselves and their families. In a New York Times story (11/3/03), correspondent Ginger Thompson told the story of what the headline described as the "littlest immigrants." They are children as young as five who had been brought north under the most physically exhaustive circumstances by smugglers known as "coyotes." These handlers of human cargo oftentimes are paid $5,000 by anxious parents wanting nothing more than to be with their children again. Unfortunately, the bill of lading does not always come with a guarantee of safe delivery. Thompson, an award-winning journalist, has written sensitively about human problems in Mexico and Central America for more than a decade. Her description of the plight of Karen Tepas, aged five, Karla Tafolla, aged seven, and her brother Roberto, just a year older, almost brought me to tears. Miguel Escobar, the Mexican consul based in Douglas, Arizona, wrote Thompson, "has come to dread the sound of his mobile telephone. It rings to to summon him to gather up lost children-so many that their stories are hard to keep straight in his head. U.S. Border Patrol agents had picked up the pig-tailed Karen Tepas walking with six adults across a stretch of desert near Douglas. "When Escobar arrived, Karen was crying for her mother who was seven months pregnant and had fallen behind." This trafficking in human cargo goes on around the world, but none of it is as perverse as it is on the U.S. border with Mexico because of its persistence and the seeming inability to solve the problem. There is something obscene about a willingness to spend 87 billion dollars to help defend and re-build a country thousands of miles away while ignoring a problem right on our doorstep. I first covered this unending tragedy 50 years ago when illegals immigrants floated across the the Rio Grande in Texas and made their way into the United States to harvest our fruits and vegetables and earn more money than they had ever before imagined. The idea that they are taking jobs away from Americans is an absurd and insulting lie. U.S. citizens would not work for the salaries paid the undocumented work force. Solutions have been rendered to make their passage safe. But they often are stopgap measures and honest people from below the border who simply are trying to find ways to support their families are treated as criminals. Their youngsters are the ultimate victims and our national shame.