U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported an estimated 350,000 people in 2008, a record high at that time, and budgeted 1.4 billion Congress-appropriated dollars to do the same in the year 2009. For those whose solution to the immigration dilemma is to deport, deport, deport, this may look like a move in the right direction. But good solutions require a good understanding of their consequences.

You can start by asking yourself why so many people travel thousands of miles from their homes and families, in boxcars, buses and truck beds, bartering with drug cartels and half-starved along the way, just to get here. It is a difficult and even traumatic road, leaves these people heavily in debt. The 16-minute documentary "Guatemala: In the Shadow of a Raid" follows several hundred deportees home after a meatpacking plant raid that left the town of Postville, Iowa, almost as devastated as the twin villages of El Rosario and San Jose Calderas in Guatemala. After seeing this, you have to ask yourself: is human suffering our problem or isn't it?

Bear in mind that this is not even the worst case scenario: some come to America to escape towns overrun by gangs, and return to a death sentence.