A very long walk

At one of the lowest moments of my life, when I felt like crying nearly all the time, I happened to be in one of Earth's most beautiful places. Sitting in the moonlight on the bank of a high alpine lake, with craggy peaks soaring into the stars, I felt lost and alone, and then I looked down behind a rock and found a box of Marlboro Reds with one cigarette and a lighter inside. I smoked it, and I didn't like it. That day I had walked 12 miles, and I felt like that was a very long walk.
My friend Patrick has the outline of all the continents tatooed across his hip, and it looks great. He is a wonderful person, a global citizen, and he's lived in Europe and South America and speaks four or five languages. He remained curious at why his parents loved Colorado so much, so this summer he walked for forty days across the state, along mountain trails, climbing fourteeners eating only cactus spines and wearing just his grasshopper-pelt loincloth. Even for a galactic champion triathlete, that was a very long walk.
My friend Will is a wordsmith, and as such he can create entire realities by mixing christmas lights and a re-renovated Dell with Hot Tamales and a Birth Scream. He also does 100 pushups sometimes, and walks 7 to 10 miles a day in great-fitting jeans. He bought a pedometer, and started tallying exactly how far he walked each day, and through the magic of wordsmithsmanship, he walked across the United States, from California to New York. That is objectively a long walk, and it was recorded subjectively at averylongwalk.blogspot.com.

So, apparently my friends and I are accomplished walkers. When we are sad or curious or stylish, we can really strut. But today I met Pedro, and when I asked him how he got to the US from his native Honduras, he told me, "It was a very long walk."

"What???" I said. "You really came in walking? How?"

"We came in through Arizona. We couldn't walk during the day, because they patrol with helicopters. So we had to walk at night. And we had to keep out eyes down, because they said that if you look up, even though it's night, they can see you from the whites of your eyes. It was such a long trip. So much walking... My dad left Honduras when I was five, left my whole family. But now I am here, and so are my two brothers. My mom though, she's alone back home. They won't give her a visa, and there is no way she could survive the walk... But I can't go back home. There is nothing there: no work, no life. People just sit around and wait for dollars to arrive. I will stay here, and try to get my mom here."

We are in desperate need of a change in our immigration policy. This kind of arduous and dangerous journey is inhumane, but the current system, which demands workers but doesn't provide legal pathways for immigration, forces people to make the march. Our immigration policy must provide safe and fair avenues for immigration, and more importantly work with places such as Honduras, to foster more productivity and positivity in those places. We share so many people with Mexico and Central America, people who are from there, work here, and will likely maintain social and financial ties to their homeland, so we should view these countries as our partners.