I hope you all made it to Sonja Nazario’s talk last night. I thought it was great. She was so passionate and I appreciated the fact that she had taken the trouble to find out some things about Minnesota’s experience with immigration issues even though she’s from California and is speaking at schools all over the country.

The last question and her response has really left me thinking. The issue of having to step back and observe things as a journalist so that you are telling the real story, unadulterated, not a story that you personally got involved in and altered, is an ethical dilemma for that profession that is pretty profound. While Nazario observed Enrique struggling to raise money to buy a phone card so he could call relatives and get his mother’s number – she had a cell phone in her pocket. She could have loaned it to him, and realized all that time how she could have made his life easier. Of course, had she given it to him, we wouldn’t realize through her recounting of his story how difficult it is for kids like Enrique to tackle even the simplest of needs when they have no money. It’s quite a gripping and thought-provoking ethical issue. What do you think?