The prologue and epilogue of Enrique’s Journey deplore the dangerous poverty in immigrants’ home countries, and the breakdown in family relationships when parents leave children to find jobs in the United States. What isn’t in the book, and what Hoover High School students who listened to the author at a school assembly this past week also didn’t get a chance to find out, is the author’s stand on illegal immigration. Her nuanced epilogue leaves us all feeling bad, but what, exactly, are any of us to do?
Why should our community’s high school students be asked to dwell on this problem? Solutions should be coming from countries south of our border who are responsible for the livelihood and welfare of their own citizens. With this thought in mind, I was reading the Wall Street Journal weekend edition and came across an ad promoting the business climate in Honduras:
Just 48 hours from the U.S., Honduras is quickly becoming the new destination of choice for U.S. Businesses looking to expand operations and improve productivity. With its young, bi-lingual labor force, location in the heart of the Americas, and secure Caribbean megaport, Honduras can package high-performance solutions for U.S. companies in a range of sectors, including light manufacturing, agribusiness, tourism, and services for export.
The photo accompanying this ad shows four open doors, each labeled “MADE IN HONDURAS.” There’s one undesirable solution: more outsourcing and subsequent job losses for United States citizens.
The global economy is coming and perhaps no one can stop it.
I found it very odd that this book should have been required reading, and in my daughter’s English class no less. It has no claim to being a classic, and it isn’t even fiction. Its author has a self-evident political agenda. So perhaps one might accept it as part of a set of (hopefully balanced) readings on immigration, perhaps in a civics or government class; but why for English? How many great (as in top 100) novels are being left off the curriculum in order to sensitize children to the plight of illegal immigrants? I hadn’t heard about the assembly, that only makes it worse.
If you hadn’t heard about the assembly, you probably also didn’t hear that this book was featured throughout the city as the second “One Book, One Glendale” citywide reading selection. Copies of the book were for sale in several branch libraries; and the author herself appeared at the Central Library the same week of the school assembly.
My own opinion is that the people of Honduras, and those of other countries on the sending end of this crisis, should be encouraged by their own civic institutions to become sensitized to this issue and should demand that their governments do something constructive about it within their own borders.