Episode Seven: Maria

Maria is a part of a larger story about immigration and human rights. Each year workers in the US, those with documentation and those without, send their wages back to their home countries to the annual sum of $56 billion. It’s the largest, most effective foreign aid in human history and it’s all crowd sourced, one individual at a time.

Twenty years ago Maria’s family in Bolivia was poor and desperate. So Maria, to quote the musical Hamilton, the oldest and the wittiest, left her five year old daughter to be raised by her mother and traveled to New York City to work. She’s been living without documentation while sending every extra penny home to help her family for the last two decades.