Maria Hinojosa: the veterana journalist shares experiences from 20 years of reporting on immigration and Latinos.

You reported with CNN for many years and produced a great documentary about immigration. You've anchored the program LatinoUSA on National Public Radio for years, and now you're doing investigative reporting for PBS's NOW with David Brancaccio. With all your years of covering immigration, how have your views changed about immigration and public policy? This is very, very controversial, but I'm going to say it because I always try to speak the truth. My post-traumatic shock really begins in the year 2001, in May, when I did a story on the Arizona-Mexico border about immigrants dying of thirst and dehydration. And the images that I saw were just so devastating to me, particularly the photographs of the people who died and meeting the immigrants we caught up with--one of whom was close to dehydration and had turned around and was making his way back to Mexico.

The group of men the Border Patrol eventually caught ... after running for 15 minutes in the desert, I finally caught up with them, and I'm completely out of breath, and I lean down next to one of the immigrants, and the first thing I said was, "Somos periodistas! Somos periodistas! No somos la migra! No somos el gobierno!" ["We're journalists! We're not immigration! We're not government!"] And then he just said to me, "Queires mi agua, senorita? Quieres mi agua?" [Lady, do you want my water? Do you want my water?"]

And I'm like, oh my God, this man has just been caught. He doesn't know what's going to happen. He has got one gallon of water. You know he is going to make the trip again, and yet he is offering me his water! I came back devastated. I really was in shock. I remember coming back to New York and just feeling like I had been through a war zone.

I remember getting so angry at both the U.S. and Mexican governments. I was just angered beyond words. And I said, you know what, put up that wall ... we should all be demanding that they build that wall.

I came back feeling like I'm tired of the mixed message. I'm tired of the fact that innocent people are dying every day. This is enough. Build a wall. And if every single person--the pro-immigrant activists and the anti-immigrant activists--if we all got together and said build a wall and forced them to answer why they won't, then the truth might come out--which is: "We kind of need those workers. We don't want to say it, but we really do depend on them."

What was your take on the mass immigrant protests that took place earlier this year? I thought it was very interesting that people were saying that immigrants were demanding things and I didn't really come away thinking they were saying, "You owe us." I felt it was very much: "We're everywhere, but please now see us. Realize that we are human beings, and our kids are American citizens."

I've gotten a lot of criticism from other Latino journalists when I give air time to "anti-illegal alien activists," but I have always felt that they were taking part in the essence of democracy. They're raising questions that they want answered by their government. So people may not like the questions they're raising, but the fact is that they're engaged, and I care about a citizenship that is engaged.

Is the debate on immigration more polarized now than in the past? I definitely feel like it's been growing and growing and growing, and it came to a head when Sensenbrenner did what he did-not realizing that there is a huge Latino community that is watching what is going on, even though many of them can't vote. They're watching it because this is what set it off--Sensenbrenner. I find it very interesting that I've heard people in progressive political circles say, "Oh, the Republicans created this as a wedge to try and divide." And I was like, "No. This was not a Republican conspiratorial creation of a wedge issue. This was really from the grassroots up."

And Republicans have found themselves in an awkward place. This is a real problem for the Republicans. Before the last presidential election, I was with the number two strategist from the Bush re-election campaign, and he said to me, "Not one day, not one hour, not one minute goes by when we do not think, plot and strategize about how we're going to get the Latino vote." And they did, and they worked for that vote, and everything that they worked for--those phenomenal numbers are teetering. So I absolutely do think this has put the Republicans in a huge quandary, and they don't know what to do about it.

And then this fervent nationalism is a real concern for me. I'm worried about where we go from here. I was in Houston--this was a week before the May Day rally--and I was watching the television, and they had commercials in Spanish for if you want to buy a house-en espanol, si tu quieres comprar una casa, no hay problemas por tu status economico ni por tu estatus legal.

Which I love. I was like, "Omigod!--Television is doing this!" But the next story they reported on was the assault on this young teenage Mexican American boy. He was at a party, and he asked a white girl if she wanted to dance. All hell breaks lose. He's stomped and assaulted by three other teenagers, who basically kick him in the body with steel-toed boots and then proceed to sodomize him with a two-inch plastic pipe that they had drenched in Clorox. And then they left him for 10 hours.

For me, it's like these moments. I'm watching a television in Houston, and they're announcing that if you're undocumented you can buy a house. But then you have this horrific story.

So I think that as a society we have a lot of thinking to do, and I don't think we're near resolving this. I do think that the anti-illegal activists raise legitimate questions about the rule of law. I absolutely think that these are questions that need to be answered.

What are the questions? When they say you've got 12 million people who have broken the laws--forget about whatever sympathies about how people got here or why they got here--and the government is turning an eye away from it, that raises a question for people who buy into this strictly legalistic interpretation--this "amnesty" raises issues. So if we had 12 million drunk drivers that would suddenly take to the streets, would we then expunge them of the fact that they were drunk drivers? I'm just saying it's an interesting legalistic question that the government needs to answer. You can't have it both ways.

The government would be pushed to admit that they need these workers. There are a million contradictions. I also went to Montana recently, where we did the story on the real guest workers. Everyone's talking about guest workers this and guest workers that, so we found the guest workers who, believe it or not, are reforesting the U.S. national forests.

Who are these guest workers? Mexicans. We got access to this one particular crew that even though they may have had problems, this was as good as it gets for guest workers. I had never been with forest workers--it's the most grueling kind of work you can ever imagine, and I've seen hard work. They go up and down very steep mountains, and they have these hoes that they plunge into the earth, and then they stick in seedlings--they do this eight hours a day.

How is the government explaining this? They get bids to reforest the land, and the best bids come from people who obviously bring in these guest workers. Again, another contradiction. [This is a] U.S. national forest, and yet even there you have guest workers.

The part about the guest worker conversation that people often glaze over is the fact that the guest worker plan, as it stands now, is actually the H2B visas, which are very different than the agricultural workers. It's a different kind of thing.

The workers are tied to one company. So you, Daisy Hernandez with ColorLines, contract me to come and guest work doing cleaning up at your offices. I as a guestworker, the only right I have is to work for you. So, the workers we spoke to said, "It's a little bit like indentured slavery, you know what I'm saying? If we complain, we lose our job, and we lose our visa, and we're never coming back." So, basically, they don't complain if they want their job and their visa.