The 199th body of 2007 has been found in the Sonoran Desert of the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona. According to Coalición de Derechos Humanos, this year’s body count will exceed the 205 total for 2006. There is no sight in end for the death toll of migrants as they are forced to cross the desert looking for work following the collapse of immigration reform in the United States congress.Marc Cooper has this to say:
The failure to enact sensible, pragmatic immigration reform, just like the war in Iraq, also racks it up its ongoing death toll. And once again, thanks to the Clinton-Bush border policy of funneling migrants through the most brutal terrain we're on our way once again to setting a new record for those who died while trying to cross the Sonoran desert.
The 199th body of this season was just recovered on the Arizona-Sonora border. 205 deaths were recorded in that sector last year -- a number that will now surely be surpassed.Of course you will remember, or maybe you won't, that the administration's surge of border patrol agents, national guard and virtual and physical fences were supposed to reduce the number of crossings, apprehensions and, yes, deaths.
Right.
A big part of the problem with attempts at closing the border is that it makes the problem worse. It forces immigrants from the south to attempt ever more dangerous entry into the United States over unfriendly terrain and it forces those who are here to never leave out of fear they will never be able to return. “Migration is a natural phenomenon that is part and parcel of the human experience. Creating strategies that result in unnatural death is something completely of our government’s making,” says Anna O’Leary of Derechos Humanos. A common sense immigration policy requires regulation but needs to be easy enough for people to come here to work and return home without fear not being able to return. When policy makers make it hard to comply with the law we end up with the unsatisfactory situtation we have today.
As if the failure at reform were not bad enough, the administration is now imposing new immigration enforcement policies that only exacerbate the situation. As the Washington Post puts it, “With fruit rotting in fields, unmilked cows suffering in barns and shuttered farmhouses, growers are painting a bleak picture of their industry under new federal immigration policie.” As too few Americans seem to appreciate, the very immigrants crossing the southern border they are so fearful about are the very people making American lifestyles affordable.
As if the failure at reform were not bad enough, the administration is now imposing new immigration enforcement policies that only exacerbate the situation. As the Washington Post puts it, “With fruit rotting in fields, unmilked cows suffering in barns and shuttered farmhouses, growers are painting a bleak picture of their industry under new federal immigration policie.” As too few Americans seem to appreciate, the very immigrants crossing the southern border they are so fearful about are the very people making American lifestyles affordable.
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