The undocumented killing fields

摘要

How did you get interested in researching migration at the Mexico-US border? After years of working on archaeological excavations in Mexico, I got to know a lot of working-class Mexicans who were hired to dig ditches. Many had lived in the US, or had tried to migrate. So I started looking at immigration. Migrants leave a lot of stuff in the desert, and so archaeology ended up being one of the many ways that I could approach this phenomenon. But I've had to become an expert in a bunch of approaches, such as forensic science and anthropology. You have said that the US government uses the Arizona desert as a killing machine. In what way? By increasing border patrols in populated areas and funnelling migrants into remote areas, they have created a system where the environment does all of the beating back of migrants for them. No public record explicitly states that the goal is to kill border crossers, but the consequence has been to increase fatalities. Every year the bodies of around 300 people are found. There are probably many more whose bodies are either too ravaged to be identified, or who just disappear.