Virtually ignored by the national media, the new “season of death” on the U.S.-Mexican border got off to a grim start this past weekend as temperatures in southern Arizona suddenly spiked into triple digits. The resulting toll: a dozen dead from heat exposure and more than 75 rescues just between last Friday and this past Monday.
Border Patrol agents admitted that this past weekend was, indeed, the busiest three days on record when it came to trying to save the lives of stranded crossers.
Bodies of border crossers were found scattered throughout the state, though a majority were found in the desolate western half toward Yuma.
For the last decade, U.S, border policy has squeezed the migrant flow into ever more remote and unpopulated areas, causing deaths to soar. An average of 350 people a year die as they try to make the treacherous crossing.
"What scares me is that there just continues to be very widely scattered deaths," says the Rev. Robin Hoover, founder of Humane Borders, a group that puts out jugs of water in remote areas used by illegal crossers.
The overall flow of migrants, meanwhile, remains unaffected. In spite of billions of dollars in additional agents, heat sensors, walls, helicopters, cameras and lights, roughly a million people a year get detained trying to cross -- the same amount of five years ago. An equal number or more make it through.
Some have called the soaring deaths the “unintended consequences” of U.S. border policy. It might be better called a national shame. The number of people who have died trying to cross the U.S. border since 1995 is now more than ten times greater than the total number who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall.
What’s become abundantly clear is that neither major party has done much of anything to reform an immigration and border policy that has failed from every perspective and by every measure. Congress has demagogued the issue, hurrying to pass more (and manifestly useless) restrictive measures while ignoring any substantive reform. Our national policy seems to be: "Amigo, if you can brave the deserts in the middle of summer and outrun our Border Patrol agents, then we will reward you by allowing you to live in the shadows while you work as our gardeners, nannies and waiters."
The media also must take its share of the blame in this national dishonor. Thousands of fawning stories were showered on last month’s fringe Minuteman Project (which I dissected here and here. But this weekend’s macabre death toll along the same patch of border has elicited only anemic interest among the major media. It’s beyond the border of hypocrisy.