Border Deaths Persist Even as Crossings Slow

Border Deaths Persist Even as Crossings Slow
AP Photo/Christian Torres, File

While the number of captured unauthorized border-crossers fell by 70 percent in the Southwest between 1998 and 2016, yearly immigrant deaths have risen some 20 percent. A 2016 analysis by a Princeton professor suggests that Border Patrol efforts have prompted migrants to cross barren, isolated and more dangerous terrain. When the climate isn't lethal, sometimes smugglers are.

From ProPublica:

If somebody had been trying to slip across the border through Texas in the early '90s, he might have just forded a narrow canal or hopped a chain-link fence from Juarez into El Paso. Back then, the vast majority of unauthorized crossings followed easy routes into big cities like El Paso or San Diego, where illegal immigrants could, to the frustration of authorities, quickly blend into the local population. Border deaths were relatively rare, said Daniel Martinez, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and a researcher on a project called the Migrant Border Crossing Study.

Things began to change when the Clinton administration, seeking to burnish its tough-on-illegal-immigrant credentials, swelled the Border Patrol's ranks and adopted a strategy known as Prevention Through Deterrence. The initiative, adopted in 1994, clamped down on popular crossing routes through San Diego and El Paso.

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