The Crackdown Along the US-Mexico Border Is Causing More Migrants to Die Nora Caplan-Bricker - The New Republic
go to original April 1, 2014

Would Jesus be at the border? Arizona Republic columnist EJ Montini and digital opinions editor Joanna Allhands discuss a Roman Catholic cardinal and 10 bishops from across the country visiting Arizona' s border with Mexico to call for passage of immigration reform. (azcentral)

A group of American bishops held Mass at an unusual location on Tuesday afternoon: the U.S.-Mexico border, where they commemorated the many migrants who have died trying to cross it. The display called attention to the need for immigration reform, which is currently mired in the House of Representatives. While many aspects of the U.S. immigration system have stayed static in recent years, border security has tightened, contributing to a growing number of deaths. As a 2013 report from the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute explained, “segmented border militarization has resulted in the funnel effect, or the redistribution of migratory flows into remote and dangerous areas such as southern Arizona.”

Deaths at the border have reached crisis levels: The graph below, from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), shows that fatalities nearly doubled between 1998 and 2012. The only year with more deaths than 2012 was 2005. WOLA researchers Adam Isacson and Maureen Meyer explained in April 2013: “In that year, Border Patrol captured more than three times as many migrants as it did in 2012. The migrant population was far larger, but the number of deaths was similar. A much larger fraction of the migrant population is dying today.” The most recent data from the U.S. Border Patrol puts fatalities in 2013 slightly below the 2012 figure - 445 deaths compared to the previous year's 477 - but that still puts 2013 ahead of every other year but 2005 and 2006.

Read the rest at The New Republic

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