Photo: John Moore / Getty Images
For: EFE
Saturday, November 2
U.S. immigration policy increases migrant deaths, study says
The US border policy known as “Prevention through Deterrence”, designed to force the undocumented to moving away from urban crossing points and opting for challenging desert corridors only serves to increase migrant death rates , a published study indicates in the journal Science.
The rates of water loss through respiration and sweating experienced by migrants attempting to cross the desert of Mexico to the United States are enough to cause dehydration and explain the mortality patterns of these people, according to the research, funded by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
“Political, economic and climatic turmoil may result in massive human migration across extreme terrain in search of more humane living conditions , exp oncing migrants to environments that challenge human tolerance, ”says the study.
For their analysis, the researchers – including biologist Shane Campbell-Stanton of Princeton University and collaborators from the University of Idaho and the University of Wisconsin– used recorded and predictive weather data for the months of May through September for the Tucson Sector of the Border Patrol , an area that runs along a 260 miles (416 miles) from the border.
In the summer months in this region historically the highest numbers of migrant deaths are registered, UCLA said in a statement this Friday.
The researchers also used the deaths recorded in the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants database.
Combining these databases with information on how the human body reacts to water loss and exposure to the elements, they predicted how vulnerable its four physiological models (a child, a non-pregnant woman, a man and a pregnant woman of Latin American origin) faced with these climatic conditions in various circumstances.
They examined the different routes that migrants could follow through the desert , some “random” and others identified as “lowest cost”, which would be the least demanding on the body. Likewise, they compared the impact of the journey on foot in hours of the day and at night.
The probability of suffering fatal dehydration, they found, was along the random routes between Nogales, Mexico, and Three Points, Arizona, that migrants typically follow to avoid detection by U.S. authorities, UCLA said.
And what is more, when they introduced as a variable the climate change expected in the next 30 years, they discovered that for 2050 the potential for dehydration along these routes would increase by 34. 1% for an adult male, 34. 1% for a non-pregnant adult woman, 33 .1% for a child and 29. 5% for an adult woman em barazada.
“’Prevention through Deterrence has turned the natural environment into a weapon against migrants and killed thousands of people in the process, “said Jason De León, UCLA professor of anthropology and Chicano and Central American studies, and one of the study’s authors.
” This new research quantifies the effects of this policy on the human body and helps build the argument that the policy puts people in danger in the name of border security, ”he said.