The land is what it is, wherever you go.
In some places it’s soft grass, soft breezes. Others it’s fragrant forests, stark rock cliffs, or damp riverbanks.
There’s a reason the Border Patrol’s official strategy since 1994 has been to fence off and heavily guard the lengths of the U.S.-Mexico border that are softest, dampest, easiest to cross—densely populated San Diego on the California coast; bustling Nogales, Arizona with its abundant roads and restaurants; the flat bends of river around El Paso, Texas. That’s where most migration back and forth has taken place over the decades: places with the resources to keep you alive.
In contrast, endless expanses of Southwestern desert—the southern boundaries of California and Arizona and New Mexico—are utterly inhospitable to human life for miles on end. Try to walk there and you could freeze in the winter, burn in the summer, cut yourself up on stones or cacti, and starve or die of thirst in any season.
In the last twenty-five years, the Border Patrol has deliberately tightened and tightened their operations in safer areas to funnel migration routes further and further into that deadly region. Their leadership stated bluntly in the nineties that they figured after enough people died there, the word would get out back in Mexico and further south in Central America, and people would stop attempting to migrate there.
But that hasn’t been the case.
The desert has just seen more and more and more deaths.
That’s what happens when you fail to address the actual political, social, and economic factors that drive people to leave their homes and make the difficult journey to a distant country, a new life. That’s what happens when instead you just weaponize the land and wait to see what happens.