Death By Migration
Since 2001, almost 3,000 migrants have died in Arizona on their way to the United States. While visualizing such a number does not reveal the human tragedies, it is a shocking reminder of the many tragic ends to the search for a safer and better life.
The group Humane Borders and the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner collect detailed data on migrant deaths in Arizona, including spatial information. The following interactive map is an attempt to raise awareness about this issue and visualize its magnitude (click play/pause for the animation, or turn on/off layers to explore further).
Human rights groups and academics agree that the increase in migrant death over the last decades is a direct consequence of US migration policy. As one recent book on Arizona summarizes:
“Studies clearly demonstrate that increased U.S. immigration enforcement has resulted in a twentyfold increase in desert immigrant deaths since 1990 (increasing from a yearly average of fifteen to over three hundred). In 2006, an examination of the records of the Pima County Medical Examiner concluded that people were dying here — in this desert — because of an enforcement strategy launched in 1994 by the U.S. Border Patrol and that extends to current immigration policy. This “lethal plan” is enforced by closing off urban points of entry (…) and “funneling” migrants away from urban-accessible locations and into harsh geographic areas.”
The strategy —the Border Patrol Strategic Plan for 1994 and Beyond — was developed by U.S. immigration authorities with the help of the Department of Defense, and predicted that, as a consequence of stronger enforcement, migrants will be forced into more hostile environments “less suitable for crossing” (p. 7). It also acknowledged that migrants “can find themselves in mortal danger” (p. 2) in such a hostile environment. The human rights implications of such a policy can be be severe.
The impact of the strategy can be explored spatially on the interactive map: almost all migrant deaths recorded in the data set happened within the boundaries of the Sonoran desert, away from major urban areas. The Sonoran desert is a very hostile environment, with extreme temperatures, and frequent, violent thunderstorms.
While the interactive map is largely a visualization, it includes some simple spatial analysis, by identifying the regions (census tracts) that contain the largest numbers of migrant deaths (the data has not been normalized but contains absolute numbers).
A global issue
The map above is only a geographic case study of the issue of migrant deaths. However, this is of course a global issue. Coming from Austria, I am always reminded of the shocking discovery of 71 dead migrants who suffocated in a locked truck on an Austrian highway in August 2015. Hungary finally indicted several suspects earlier this month.
The Missing Migrants Projects is collecting detailed data on a global level on this growing crisis: Since January 1, 2014, the project documented more than 21,000 missing or dead migrants.
