Journalist tracks migrants on journey from 'tip to top'

GRANGER, Wash. -- Kadir van Lohuizen knows what it's like to be migrant. He's been one for 11-plus months.

The internationally known Dutch photojournalist has been following the migrant trail for more than 20,000 miles, crossing multiple borders, hitching rides, sharing food with strangers, communicating across multiple languages, sleeping on buses.

By train, car, bus and boat, he's exploring why people migrate. He calls it "covering the uncovered."

This week Van Lohuizen traveled to the Yakima Valley in his quest to chronicle the flow of migrants. His project, called Via PanAm, launched last March in Patagonia, at the southern tip of South America, and will end sometime next month in Deadhorse, in northern Alaska.

"I'm going from tip to top," he says.

In the end, his visual investigation of why people move will encompass 15 countries along the Pan-American Highway.

Van Lohuizen, 48, is looking at the causes of emigration: poverty, natural disasters, politics; and its effects: additional poverty, discrimination, broken families, loss of identity.

Along the way, he's trying to give a voice to the people.

"All the stories I've done before have somehow been related to people moving," he explains. "In Europe and the U.S., we have the tendency to be negative toward migration. I wanted to do something that was not just negative. After all, migration is as old as mankind."

In his travels, Van Lohuizen stopped in Honduras to visit people whose roots are in Palestine; in Panama to talk with Chinese workers; in Colombia to tell the story of thousands left homeless by landslides.

During his four days in the Yakima Valley this week, he's visiting dairies to talk to families who have followed the migrant trail for agricultural work. What he's finding will end up in his photos, videos, radio broadcasts, blog, and in an iPad application and other publications.

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Author of four books of photographs, Van Lohuizen is filing stories about his journey for the Sunday Times of London, GEO magazine in France, National Geographic and newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands, China and Russia.

In the past, his profession has taken him to remote areas of Africa, Russia, the Middle East, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, North Korea and Mongolia.

Funding for Via PanAm has come from grants from Dutch foundations for the arts and journalism, donations and a crowdfunding website, where projects are matched with investors. Van Lohuizen declined to give the cost of the project.

Earlier this week, Van Lohuizen visited Pride and Joy Dairy in Granger to listen to, and photograph, several workers telling their stories of emigrating from Mexico.

"I came here for one reason -- to make a better life," one person told him.

It's not the first time the photographer -- who speaks Dutch, German, English, French and Spanish -- has heard that sentiment. Realizing that diverse causes are at the core of migration, he says he set out to create a better understanding of how the occurrence has changed people and cultures.

Some stories have been tragic, some inspirational, all affecting.

He was particularly touched by the plight of Peruvian women who have left their homes to work as domestics in Costa Rica. The women give up their homes, and more painfully, their children, so they can earn higher wages to send back home, often to pay tuition for the children to attend school.

"It's heartbreaking," Van Lohuizen notes. "I came to understand that people often do it (move) for the next generation."

One surprise was discovering that not nearly as many people want to migrate to the United States as he had presumed.

"I went from south to north assuming that was the way people were moving."

Not so, at least as he found.

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People from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador still hold the United States as their goal, Van Lohuizen says, but residents of other Latin American countries are moving more to neighboring states or within their own borders.

"It wasn't until Costa Rica that I found a person who wanted to go to the U.S. There's a real change going on."

Van Lohuizen attributes that to how expensive the trip can be, fear of deportation and difficulty finding work in this country.

"I wasn't aware of sacrifices people make to come here. They don't come just because they want a new car."

Another factor is the burgeoning economic growth in many Latin America countries.

"Latin America economies are growing, people are moving in all directions," he says. "Nobody is paying attention to it, but I find it the most intriguing continent right now."

In Mexico, however, he discovered many people still see the United States as a panacea. In one town, he joined scores of people on their journey, hopping on top of a freight train traveling north toward the border.

"I climb on the roof and tie myself with a rope to a steel bar," he wrote on his blog. "People look scared and cold but hopeful ... "

People have a right to be scared, Van Lohuizen reports. Kidnappings, robberies and injuries from falls off the train are not uncommon.

He rode the train for two days. "The experience was quite amazing. Tricky."

As Van Lohuizen winds up his investigation in the Yakima Valley, he'll be heading to Vancouver, British Columbia, to look at the effects of indigenous peoples' migration into cities.

Just as on his entire trip, he could end up with just as many questions as answers. "What do people find when they move? Is it worth the risk and the money?"

He'll put a human face to what he learns, with photos, words, tweets and video. Eventually, it may all come together in a book.

He knows that change can bring its own new problems, or it can edify life. He's continuing to look for the answers.

"Every time I talk to someone, it's new and surprising and moving," he says.

See his work ...

Kadir van Lohuizen's past work, and much of his current project in the Americas, as well as information about the iPad application, can be accessed on the Noor website, a collective of independent documentary photographers:

* www.noorimages.com/photographers/kadirvanlohuizen.

* Or follow his blog at www.viapanam.org/blog