Are Butterfiles Illegal Intruders?

If a butterfly's fluttering wings in Africa can cause a

hurricane in Louisiana, why is it hard to understand that when making a living ends in one place, people migrate to earn a living some place else?

David Bacon's book, Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration, makes the connection. His book shows how calamity in one place leads to consequences in another.

Furthermore, what happens when Bacon wants you, the reader, to grasp the protagonists' messages? Then he lets them tell their own story in their own words.

He has done all that also in his book, published by ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press.

In it, invisible people, instead of the anonymous digits in pompous studies, spring to life. The individuals in Bacon's book are members of communities and they are mostly involved in significant activities. When you hear their words, an improved perspective arises about where the public debate on immigration misses the point.

Take Fausto López, for instance. He grew up speaking Triqui in the highlands of the Mexican state of Oaxaca and received Spanish instruction in school. Two decades ago, he left, as did half the village, for Mexico City, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California.

In Ensenada, B.C., he was joined by his family. With other Triquis they organized a new community to provide shelter and food to others who arrived. And because of low pay, he decided to enter the United States.

Mr. López sent his family back to Copala in Oaxaca, where his children could get proper instruction in their native language. “I want my children to learn Spanish but also keep our traditions,” he says.

He traveled to fertile northern California and settled where reeds grow along the Russian River. He joined other native people who had built huts, as their great grandfathers had in Mexico. They live like that to save money to send home from their work in the vineyards.

Through a fellow Triqui, Mr. López joined the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB, by its Spanish acronym). “I am doing this for my family,” he says.

There's a photo of FIOB members voting, in their age-old tradition, on a particularly sensitive matter when a leader ...