The first of our planned 10 pieces on immigration issues linking El Salvador to the DC region aired this week. I must say I was not surprised by the reactions we’ve gotten from the viewers who were inspired to call or e-mail us – disappointed to a degree, but not surprised. I remember something my colleague Andrea McCarren said in the van as we wearily made our way back out of the wild countryside. Before we’d even put one line of script down she said,”You know we’re going to get some ‘don’t cry me a Rio Grande over these people’ phone calls and e-mails”. Sure enough, the first piece had hardly gone off the air before I got wind of the caller who railed at our switchboard operator about us taking the side of lawbreakers in even telling the story.

In case you missed it, the story was about an illegal immigrant day laborer here who’d been chosen to leave his family behind to come here to earn some money to help out the family. We took video of our talk with him on an 11-plus hour drive across El Salvador before finding his people who were living in a dirt-floor “structure” most of us wouldn’t park our cars in. They broke into tears when we showed them their son/brother on video – they hadn’t seen him since 4am, November 6, 2005 and didn’t know for sure if he was alive. The father ekes out a living digging up shellfish and turned down a chance to come here illegally because of his age, but he thought, “If only my son had a chance to have a life...” It was a moving, and instructive moment in the darkened, mosquito-infested woods for each of us who are parents. We could all see the pain, desperation and hope involved in making such a decision. What was more shocking, after seeing their hovel, was recalling that the day laborer had told us that life was better for him there and he couldn’t wait to get back!

Now, I do believe it matters that laws are being broken, and that something must be done about it. But I also think we owe to ourselves and our national sense of morality to see more than one side to the issue. I don’t think many of us would heartily patronize doctors who don’t believe in looking at more than one X-Ray photo per case! To identify the right course of treatment or action, more information is always better than less. I was intrigued by how different the arguments looked and sounded after finding out that many immigrants DON’T want to stay here, and how wide and mostly positive the impact of the dollars they send back are. There’s actually a lot more riding on getting to a Solomonic solution all of us can (eventually) buy into.

That’s why I can’t wait to get to the next story on this issue.