For those of you who’ve been reading Andrea McCarren’s blog you probably know that we’ll be hitting the road this week. We pitched our boss the idea of going to the source to take an in-depth and more nuanced look at the immigration issues that have raised tempers and fears in our region, BUT doing it from perspectives not usually represented. 

Perhaps Bill was off his meds that day, but he agreed to let us go to Central America for a week to see what we could come up with. When we considered that there were more Salvadorans here in the DC area than there are anywhere in the world outside of San Salvador, the capital, we knew we had to go to El Salvador. We put a couple pf story ideas in the hopper from here in our region, but we’re hitting the road to get more angles. We’ll be looking for reasons anyone there would try to come here, and reasons why some Salvadorans in DC now say they were happier there than they are here. We’ll see how societies (here and there) are affected by the mass migration of working age males for long stretches, and maybe learn something about the sacrifices made by so many to survive and to protect others. 

Hopefully, we’ll come back with a fresher sense of what we should be talking about and new looks at less-examined facets of a very complicated issue that somehow always gets boiled down to emotion-spiking sound bites.

I have a feeling you’re going to be surprised by what we bring back with us (No, that doesn’t mean cigars for you, Tim!).