Good Story, Mediocre Research

This is a book about immigration. This is a book about Latin Americans attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexican border that has becoming increasingly dangerous over the years. This is a book about heartbreaking stories of illegal immigrants, who suffered, struggled, and died, on the migrant trail.

It all started in 1993, when Silvestre Reyes, then Chief Patrol Agent of the El Paso Border Patrol Sector, launched the controversial “Operation Blockade”. The idea behind Operation Blockade was to display border patrol agents in highly visible areas along the U.S.-Mexican border so that undocumented immigrants would be deterred from crossing the border. The core logic behind the operation is a strategy called Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD)-guard easier-to-cross areas thereby forcing illegal migrants to cross through more hostile terrain, such as inhospitable desert that might pose a fatal threat, and thus deter crossings. U.S. policy makers soon adopted the strategy. Along the border of densely populated cities, fences and walls were built, border patrol agents positioned, patrol vehicles displayed, and surveillance helicopters deployed. Airtight security forced vulnerable border crossers into the deserts, where they faced a mortal danger. Death might visit at any time-snakebite, sunstroke, dehydration, and drug cartel extortion, to name a few. Dead bodies were left unattended in the open desert, torn apart and eaten by coyotes and vultures. The desert became a land of open graves. Even if some migrants managed to cross the desert on foot, the devastating experience left permanent scars on their bodies and minds. Many migrants ended up attempting to cross the border multiple times. This also means that they walked between life and death more than once. A number of really persistent ones would keep attempting, until they eventually succeeded or died helplessly in the desert.

Stories of border crossers are heartbreaking. I could not help crying multiple times while reading the book. I was also deeply moved by a quote from it that reads, “anthropology that doesn’t break your heart just isn’t worth doing.” (p. 153) The book has great stories and rich ethnographic details. Yet the social scientist part of me was constantly yelling from the inside: “no this isn’t how research should be done.” Judging by a set of narrowly focused principles of my own discipline, the book sometimes makes strong claims without empirical evidence, moral judgments without a well-specified standard, and policy recommendations without a comprehensive assessment.

For example, a recurring claim of the book is that PTD did not achieve its intended effect of deterring illegal migrants from crossing the border, and that it simply channeled them all to the inhospitable desert and killed them there. Stories told to support the claim include moms and dads going through innumerable attempts just to get back to their children, American citizens separated from their repatriated parents. Devastating stories. But how about other migrants? Not everyone ended up crossing or dying. It is reasonable to guess that some gave up after several attempts because they realized that the cost was too high. Other successful ones might convince their brothers and sisters to stay home because they did not want their beloved ones to go through the same hell they went through. Without a rigorous study of the trends in attempted border crossings, the book makes an unsubstantiated claim.

A related statement claims that migrant fatalities in the desert were underreported. One reason is that body decomposition in the land of open graves was much faster than previous studies had thought. A large proportion of dead bodies of the undocumented immigrants degraded significantly before anyone could obtain a trace of their existence. An experiment was conducted for the purpose of demonstration. Cadavers of pigs were positioned and exposed in the open desert. It took no more than a week for the corpses to vanish. Setting animal ethics aside, I was initially amazed by the experiment. However, the amazement soon developed into disappointment when I found that the author was not interested at all in obtaining a rough measure of the rate of underreporting. If they can measure the rate of body decomposition and pair that with the rate of border patrol scouting the area, a rough number of how many migrants died untraceably should be obtainable. This is not only a statistical correction for all the (shamelessly) low fatalities reported by the Department of Homeland Security, but also a starting point for figuring out what was going on and for showing respect to victims of inhumane government policies.

The book also claims that the strategy of PTD is ineffective, is evil, and should be stopped. Ineffectiveness is a positive statement that requires empirical evidence. Evilness is a normative judgment that should be held against a clearly defined system of moral standards. Termination of the strategy is a policy recommendation that should be based on a comprehensive assessment of its pros and cons. I have discussed why the author fails to provide sufficient empirical evidence demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the policy. The book also does not well justify its normative claim. Who are the subjects of the welfare evaluation? Illegal migrants only? Are potential beneficiaries and consequence-bearers of large-scale migration included? Will an alternative policy lead to sufferings of a different group? Evil compared to what? A utopian where everyone lives happily? While I totally believe that the policy is unnecessarily cruel (for other reasons), the book does not do a good job of convincing me of that. Killing people is not a reason enough for me to believe that the policy is evil, as all policies do, in one way or another.

For similar reasons, making policy recommendations on the basis of unsubstantiated claims and moral judgments is untrustworthy. Good things do not always go together. The difficulty of policy making is to choose among a set of bad alternatives the less evil one. I would rather not to repeat the tragic history of the 20th century. But if the past century has taught us any lessons, being cautious with theoretical ideals that have not been held against the realpolitik must be one of them.

I am heart-broken from reading stories of the book. An immigration policy built on tens of thousands graves is profoundly flawed. It is a masterpiece of ethnography, a good casual read, and a starting point for reflection on what has gone wrong in U.S. immigration policies. Yet this is not a well-executed research project.