The Pulitzer Prize winner, Sonia Nazario, the author of Enrique’s Journey, makes the case for a much more efficient and economical means of addressing the immigration to the United States.

Poverty, political instability, and poverty in Central American countries of origin drive citizens to make a perilous journey and attempt to immigrate to the United States, even at the risk of death. To write this book, Nazario personally followed Enrique’s journey, allowing her to write a first hand account of the immense hardships and danger a young boy faced to reunite with his mother. Previously, Enrique’s mother, like so many other immigrant parents, did not want to leave him behind, but she was forced to choose between a life of extreme poverty and crime at home, and the need to support her children. Enrique’s Journey is representative of thousands of similar stories, and connects Enrique’s immigration to the universal human desire to live in a safe society, where family members can be together.

Therefore, Nazario advocates for an approach to immigration that grants aid to Central American countries, helping them to stabilize the governments and reduce crime, expand their social services and develop aid that will reduce the need for immigrants to leave their own countries.

Nazario’s point makes sense. Rather than investing billions of dollars in detainment centers here, American tax money could be far more effective if that money was directed to the source of the problem; this money could be much more effective in reducing immigration, if it were directed to support social infrastructure aid in Central America.

In public forums, when Central American aid is suggested, some Americans resist, asking why the United States should have the burden of aiding foreign countries at all.

As a starting point, to more fully understand the pressure on American borders, it is important to see how America’s disproportionate control of the world’s wealth has played a key role in drawing the world’s poor and desperate to our borders. The video on global wealth inequity posted by The Rules illustrates how American “aid” packages are a fraction of the trillions of dollars developed nations suck from the world’s poor each year. Effective global aid is the least America can do.

Because an immigrant has to leave everything behind, and undertake a perilous journey to survive, most would far prefer to stay home. The decision to leave one’s family comes when survival is at stake.

Ask yourself where you would go if you were starving and desperate for an opportunity to earn your daily bread.

Wouldn’t you “follow the money”?

How to Help, a page on Sonia Nazario’s website, gives you resources to advocate for the families that most urgently need your help. Please consider writing to congress today.