Looking Back at 'Enrique's Journey — The Boy Left Behind'

A fascinating piece at yesterday's Los Angeles Times.

Of course, the subplot is the open-borders advocacy of the Times' correspondents. This is nothing new. What's interesting is that "Enrique's Journey — The Boy Left Behind" ran 12 years ago at the paper, and I still remember it. Reporter Sonia Nazario won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2003 for the series. Photographer Don Bartletti won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Enrique's Journey was also published as a book.

So here comes Barletti with a look back, "LOOKING BACK ON A CHILD MIGRANT'S JOURNEY NORTH ON 'THE BEAST'."

"Enrique's Journey" was the trek --- atop the "beast" freight trains of Mexico --- from Honduras to the U.S. Back in 2000, when Barletti was first covering the story, we didn't have the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Action Act, the 2008 anti-trafficking legislation signed into law by President George W. Bush. It's interesting, though, that the more the story changes, the more it stays the same. Illegal immigrants will continue to flow over our southern border until that time when there's no more political gain to be made from it, for both parties, as it turns out. Either that, or enough terrorists slip into the country to conduct a wave of attacks on the homeland so that we finally militarize the border, completing the "fence" everyone dreams about, although by that time the United States will be even more unrecognizable than it is now. When I'm out and about during the day, especially while running routine errands like shopping, or dropping my son off at the mall, I hear languages other than English spoken more often than not. It doesn't bother me. English remains the language of everyday American life --- you're not going to break out of your ethnic enclave, moving into the national mainstream, without it. But then, as more and more of America is increasingly Balkanized, I suspect our underground illegals don't even care. Indeed, I was nearly attacked by a gang of non-English speaking Mexicans when I was working at a gas station in Santa Barbara in 1992. They act like they own the place --- and that was more than 20 years ago. We're long gone now. Probably the best thing we could do would to be to impose a moratorium on immigration for about a decade or so, allowing the massive wave of new immigrants to assimilate into the country. Democrats don't care about that, of course. They know that they're creating a Democrat Party dependency class with all the undocumented criminals and diseased walking-zombies. Strange, frankly. Democrats don't care about the security of the lives of regular Americans. President Obama epitomizes the base corruption that is the core of the Democrat Party-left. And "Enrique's Journey" is the kind of "good" journalism that wins all kinds of awards for glorifying the criminal activity of illegal aliens who make a mockery of the notion of America as a nation of laws. This is what we've come to as a nation.

Let's just hope there's a decent America left by the time our children have families. There's always hope.

[Speaking of hope, Barletti's subject is Denis Contreras, the boy he'd interviewed in 2000 for the original story. It turns out that Denis was deported from San Diego this year after living nearly 14 years in the U.S. He left behind a wife and child in the states. Illegal immigrant family values, I guess. Maybe they thought the Obama-Dems would be handing out "permisos." Not this time though. Bummer for the dude.]