Just a College Degree to get a job and i think that a lot of people dont have the Financial Aid to keep going to Doctoral School or a Higher Learning education or Something Like that. They dont have the money to get the Higher Education in the cant find a job just average College Degree. Weve been fighting common core for seveneight years now and we still have it here in alabama. We find that every single year with the new bill. We want to get rid of it. In the state of alabama i believe is racial inequality and justice form. I think that here in the state we still have frederick in our constitution that is representative of the time that has long passed and i think that having discriminatory language in the document that governs a Diverse Group of people is very outdated and limits peoples power, the disenfranchisement and the way that Law Enforcement interacts with the citizens across the state i think that those things need to be addressed so that we can have the gap within the disparities and inequalities within the Justice System here in alabama. Those can close and eventually not even exist. Important issue for me is the cost of college education. I feel that everyone should have equal opportunity to go to college under the same amount of money because some people may be be the first people in the family to go and the government should take all the possibility and give more money. Voices from the state on cspan. The u. S. Senate starting debate on immigration policy later today we thought we would show you recent event hosted by the university of michigan board school of Public Policy. The discussion on Us Immigration policy in the human toll of Border Crossings. Panelists included the director of the universitys undocumented migration project and awardwinning magazine writer and immigration scholar. This is one hour and 20 minutes. Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us here today. For those of you who are here in the room and for those who are joining us via lifestream. Thank you to our partners and our host here today, the Gerald R Ford school of International Policy and we also want to give a special thanks to cspan for the interest they are taken in this conversation today and for joining us here to capture the discussion. Im lynette, director of Wallace House which is home to the night wallace home for journalist and live in stena work. Its a livingston award for junk journalist that brings us here today. The livingston award is the prestigious prize often referred to as the pulitzers for the young. In towards excellence in journalism by journalists under the age of 35. The Brooke Jarvis, special guest today is sitting, one the livingston award Financial Reporting in 2017 for her story unclaimed and it is that story that brings us to the talk today with the title beyond the wall, the human toll of Border Crossings. Unclaimed tells a story of an anonymous undocumented man left in a vegetative state after a tragic truck accident during the Border Crossing. Unknown and unclaimed heat languished in a hospital bed for now nearly two decades the man came to be called 66 garage because there was no information on him and no one knew his name. Perhaps that name was a reference to the truck route on which the accident occurred but no one ever knew for sure. During the time when immigration stories are in the news every day sometimes on a repeating loop throughout the day so much so that we can become desensitized to them the stories are often tied to politicized policy debate and political factions. It is easy to just stop listening. Brooke jarvis unclaimed captures and achingly human story. It explores the hope, the drea dreams, the tragedies and the disappointments, not just to the unknown man at the center of the narrative but of the hundreds of families thought that his story might contain a missing long for peace of their own story. I will read just one paragraph from the story before we turn it over to the panel. Yet, as his story or really the newest of the lack of a story spread people began to contact the hospital to ask detailed questions about his mold or his cars and their own family histories also included a journey across the border interrupted by a mystery and each had a son or brother or a husband or a cousin or a friend who had headed northward and disappeared leaving no answers about what might have happened to him whether he was dead or incarcerated or suffering somewhere. Whether he had abandoned them. In the english of their uncertainty they looked to the man in the bed and soft. They. Into his empty past and saw the possibility of themselves. Acknowledging these human stories is what brings us here today. We at Wallace House believe the excellent journalism presents an opportunity for community. A process not to just think and absorb stories in solitude but also to talk, to explore, to debate and to try to understand the issues and the stories together. We have brought Brooke Jarvis here to join us on campus today for a conversation with two seem to scholars with experience in the issues that her work explores. We are pleased to have join us today jason, associate professor of an apology here at the university and director of the undocumented migration project. His research on latin american migration among other topics violence, death and mourning and is the author of the book the land of open grave, living and dying on the migrant trail. He was awarded a 2017 macarthur genius grant for his work that the Macarthur Foundation funded challenging audiences to confront the complexity of International Migration and american policy choices. And to moderate the discussion today we are pleased to have and lynn, associate professor of Public Policy here at the ford school where she teaches courses on Public Policy and implementation, Qualitative Research methods and a range of topics tied to immigration. I will turn things over to and to guide our conversation today before we do i want to remind you while it is our policy to employ our audience to participate in the conversation you will notice we have given question cards and if you dont have a card as the card is going on raise your hand and if you have a question please jot it down it will have people on the isles and they will collect the question cards and make sure they get down to the front. When we open it up for question and answer for those of us who dont want to write a question down but would rather join the conversation on twitter either from the room or from the lifestream you can submit your questions to twitter using the Wallace House. I will come back up at the end and will have a brief reception after our conversation for you to meet our panelist and hopefully talk to one another. I welcome you to stay in with that, i leave it in able hands of the inland. [applause] brooke, we are honoring your story today and we are wondering if you could tell us about it. It starts with a man in the bed and no one knows who he is. Tell us about how we got there in sure. As lynette began the long time got into the bed was all that was known about him. His story was this long and he was in an accident. The other people in the car were migrants and it was assumed that he also was but no one was. Sure. It is common for people to be advised not to carry their identification with the because for a variety of reasons but smugglers often encourage that. Is the microphone working right . Okay. There were very few clues about his past. He had in his pocket a calling card that have been purchased in mexico and some dollars in pesos and that was it. He became the mystery and even the mystery of his name that no one i talked to was able to clarify how such a strange name came about. The nurses who treated him would make up names for him and they needed something to call him but his story was so short. It was a shadow of the story. But what was so interesting and what drew me to write about him was how that lack of the story affected other people as lynette began to read there are tens of thousands of people who have someone they love that they dont know what happened to them. They set out to cross the border and then something happens. It could be a wide variety of things but it means a lot of people left wondering. One of the people i spoke to when i was researching the story who worked with families like these trying to make the connection between mysterious remains and on stories she said that the family she worked with turn to psychics and they believed in dreams and many of them were convinced their person was one case where someone had amnesia and is an unlikely thing but people were eager for something to believe in the way she put it was that its a picture that she wouldnt wish on anyone. A special chapter of not knowing. The point of the story was to learn more about all these families and what their experience was like. When i first started working on it i thought a lot about this novel that i loved which is called the heart of the lonely hunter desk has anyone read that . At the heart of the novel is a deaf mute man and these other characters who live in the same towns life a rotate around him. They all feel hes one person they can talk to and one person they can trust and really understand them and they see themselves what the black by this man. When you read his perspective thanks they are all nuts. I kept thinking of garage 66, the man in the bed, as a similar person in these lives. You have to back all of their fears and hopes and something i wanted to explore. One of the people you write about is liliana and she is from mexico originally but she currently lives in houston and she has a legal reason to be in the United States and she is missing her brother and how does she come to know about the man in the bed and what does she do to find her brother and how did she come to know about the man in the bed . By the time i met liliana she had heard from her brother was 1999 i believe and have been 16 years and when he first went missing her family look for him and they went to the last place where they heard from him and he had made a phone call and the call had cut out in his card had iran out and they never heard from him again and sometime past and they went to the last place they knew where he was and they list and visited hotels and look at hospitals and they looked in the mornings and Detention Centers and the people in the county they show them pictures of people who died in the desert and is the same and every time it wasnt him but is common in the story that there were these other people that were offered to them provided to patient. Then they didnt know what to do and how she heard of this man was in san diego by that time that the hospital was there are large Online Networks for people in this family and other family situations that have sprung up. Grassroots people just believe in the age of the internet if you put up a photo and it gets wide enough circulation may be the right person will see it and maybe someone will get an answer to their question and there is more than a dozen from what i found these for groups with followers ranging from 10000 to 200,000 people and its this whole world of people sharing stories and pictures either of someone they have lost or someone who has been found although usually not the way you want to eventually find your Family Member and people will share sometimes very disturbing photos of bodies found in the desert or a backpack and these little clues for people to follow up on and liliana came across one of those one of her cousins sought and forward it to her because they thought that the man looked like her brother. Jason, you have done a thinking and writing about and working with the crew that migraines leave behind in the deserts and im wondering if you could say a little bit about your own work and talk about groups like the one liliana used to find her brother. Yeah, first i want to say the story is amazing and if you havent read it i highly recommended that you read it. Dont give out copies of it later and i think for me one of the Amazing Things about the story is its not a story about immigration and i dont think we need more stories about immigration at this point. We are flooded with them. We need people to see statistics and the word migrant related with faces and names are real, the people live with on a daily basis. The work ive been doing since about 2008 ive been trying to piece together what happened along the border and what Border Crossings look like from an archaeological perspective and a forensic perspective and trying to piece together the stories that are fragmentary and oftentimes different difficult to document because theyre in the middle of nowhere. I spent time picking up that migrant leaves behind these backpacks and i spent time with migrants in shelters after they been deported or if there are going to attempt a desert crossing and we spent time focusing on the forensic aspect about what happens to people who die during a Border Crossing and unfortunately this is not an uncommon thing. Thousands of people, more people have died crossing the border since 2000 then 911 and Hurricane Katrina combined. Those are just recovered bodies. I have argued in the places that we drastically undercount the number of utilities that happen on a yearly basis and not only do people die out there but dont hear about them and see about them but that trauma continues to carry on to now and these families are looking for loved ones and its a terrific thing to talk to my Family Members about missing a loved one and some of the work we have done is focused around the story of a 15 yearold kid named joee who left ecuador in 2013 to reunite with his parents and he went missing in the desert and has not been heard from since. His family will tell you the stories that he comes to them in dreams and mysterious phone call in the middle of the night and maybe he has amnesia maybe hes been kidnapped and these families live with us, forever. Clinical psychologist colleen wrote about this and one of them was on the topic of 911 and the bodies who werent recovered from their name live with what we call ambiguous loss because it can never be resolved or have confirmation from the dead. These families the difficulty they have to go to facebook to start ordinate to look for people because there is minimal support for this kind of stuff in the federal government could care less about the bodies. There are some nonprofits who are struggling to there is not a lot of instruction for these things. The relative goes missing in the desert you call . You call the Mexican Consulate or do you customer in tucson and people just dont know. You call tucson and they may send you to tell different places in information is passed around willynilly and a handful of organizations that are working to coordinate this data but at the moment there are Something Like 800 identified bodies in arizona alone. Many more of those bodies are out there in decomposing or have completely disappeared now there is no one working at least at the federal level to help alleviate what i would consider to be this horrific humanitarian catastrophe that the us has had its hand in for a long time. Brooke, maybe you can tell us about how you got to know this story and how did you begin to write about it and the kind of work you did to research and write about it. Lets see, i think i was first considering there was a story that made National Headlines two years ago and migration routes shifted and happened to pass through this county in texas that was not directly of Porter County and there was a Border Patrol checkpoint to the people had to go around to not get caught. In doing so many of them died of exposure and ranchers would find them and some of them would leave out water and supplies but still many people were dying and the county with no medical examiner didnt know what to do and. A lot of the bodies in a mass grave which made a lot of headlines and i was considering writing about that. I thought about theres an apologist has an ongoing project to identify those people and the exhibits them and following what clues they can. And find out what their stories are but it didnt feel the right way at the end. One was it was very early and at that point it identified only one person and it felt as i think youre saying many times you read about immigration and it can feel like obstruction and we hear a lot of numbers and statistics i wanted to be able to find peoples stories and that wasnt yet available. I was leery that as a magazine writer the story of the white detective whos going to solve this is just yeah, but thats what made me aware of the scale of this problem. I talked to that in the apologist who you probably know and she put it in the same terms like this is a katrina and a 911 that is going on unaddressed and how can that be so i had something i wanted to write about but hadnt found out how. Then i was reading somewhat randomly because i had written about physician assisted suicide and death and dying issues and i was reading a story about the number of people were kept alive at government expense in california and there was a mention of this man who was 66 garage and mentioned that families had come forward hoping he was there missing person and what ive been thinking about these massive numbers of missing people had been thinking about their families and that was a whole part of th