Mothers Want Hope for Their Children

It started as an off-the-cuff question to María del Carmen Ferrez, who came to clean my house twice a month. Did she plan to have more children? Carmen, always chatty, suddenly went silent. She started sobbing. She told me about four children she had left behind in Guatemala. Her husband had left her, and Carmen simply couldn't feed them more than once or twice a day. So she left them in Guatemala with their grandmother and came to work in El Norte. She hadn't seen them in 12 years.

How could a mother leave her children and travel 2,000 miles away, not knowing when or if she would see them again? After nearly two years of research, I found some answers -- and many more Carmens. Regardless of the law, the danger and pain, millions of women, often single mothers, come to the United States and send dollars to the children they leave behind. After years apart, their children often make their own harrowing journeys to find their mothers.

Backbreaking jobs

These mothers and children offer up proof that the legislative ''solutions'' that Congress is debating -- and that brought thousands out into the streets in protest -- can't and won't make a difference in the nation's illegal immigration problem.

First, some facts. Clearly, illegal immigration is out of control. The United States is experiencing the largest wave of immigration in its history. Today, there are an estimated 12 million illegals here. In addition, nearly one million people come to this country legally or become residents each year -- more than twice the number who did so in the 1970s.

Certainly there are undeniable benefits to all this. Most people agree that U.S.-born workers won't do at least some of the backbreaking jobs that illegal immigrants take, especially for rock-bottom wages. Picking lettuce. Cutting sugar cane.

Immigrants' low wages keep some businesses from closing or going abroad to compete. A 1997 study by the National Research Council, still considered the most objective and authoritative on the effects of immigration, found that immigrant labor lowered the cost of food and clothing for all of us, and it put such things as child-care services within reach of far more Americans than before.

Many years apart

Yet the downside is real, too. Because they have lower incomes, immigrants and their U.S.-born children qualify for and use more government services than the native-born. They have more children, and therefore more youngsters in public schools. Compared with native households, the NRC found that immigrants and their native-born children paid one-third less in taxes per capita than others in the United States.

The cost-benefit calculation is just as troubling when it comes to the immigrants themselves. The mothers I talked to were able to send money to their children in their home countries so the kids could eat better and go to school past the third grade. But after spending years apart from their mothers, these children often felt abandoned, and they resented -- even hated -- their mothers for leaving them. Many mothers ultimately lose what is most important to them: the love of their children. Many children who found their way here later sought the love they hoped to find with their mothers elsewhere -- in gangs, for example.

Costly reentry

Will the proposals roiling Congress end the problems of illegal immigration? It's not likely.

''Get tough'' sums up one side in the debate, but it's a policy that has had little success to date. Since 1993, the number of agents patrolling the border and the amount of money spent on enforcement has tripled, according to a 2002 Public Policy Institute of California study. Yet the number of illegal immigrants in the United States only grew more quickly. Why? More immigrants came and more stayed for good, knowing that entry and reentry would be more difficult and costly in the future.

The other, less draconian approach is to ''control'' immigration via temporary guest-worker programs and promises of future green cards -- perhaps even U.S. citizenship.

So what should the United States do? If you travel the routes that feed Latin Americans into the United States, you'll realize that there is only one way to stem illegal immigration -- at its source, in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and wherever people are desperately poor. That's because desperate people find ways around obstacles such as walls and temporary guest-worker rules.

I met a Honduran teenager who had been assaulted by bandits, held at knifepoint, stripped and robbed. He had made 27 attempts to get through Mexico. Mexican authorities were about to deport him again. He vowed to make attempt No. 28, until he reached his mother in the United States.

A better future

What I found out is that most immigrants would rather stay in their home countries with their extended families, with everything they know, than take the enormous risks required to cross the border and to make a new life here. Many women say it wouldn't take radical changes in their countries to keep them at home. They say that if they had food and clothes for their children, if they could send them to school, or even if they had just the hope of doing so, they would never walk away, leaving behind their homes, their lives, the children.