Over 6,000 deaths at Mexico-U.S. border over this past 16 years

May 4, 2017 8:26 AM

More people have died trying to come to the U.S. than in two major disasters combined More deaths occured over the last 16 years in the Mexico-U.S. border than Hurricane Katrina and September 11th deaths combined.
posted by Yellow (8 comments total)

Lori Baker at Baylor is also working on this. My institution hosted a lecture from her last month and it was extremely moving. Not to self link but:
Reuniting Families is some powerful work. Additionally, if you wanted to watch her presentation you can see it here

Personally, for me, I was amazed at a person who has the emotional fortitude to continue to do this kind of work in this politcal climate. I mean, I shouldn't be surprised that we bury these folks in milk crates and hefty bags considering how we treat them in lift, but every single time I think about the rage and grief just threatens to overwhelm. The idea that people like Baker and Gocha do this work to identify them and connect them to some dignity is amazing and gratifying but I worry about them at the same time. How long can you do this work without it breaking you? How long will we have to do this kind of work? It's heartbreaking that as a people we still can't manage the simplist of kindnesses to the dead. To inter them with respect and make every effort that their survivors know where they are.
posted by teleri025 at 9:09 AM on May 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

@ teleri025, I agree immensely! I'm not sure what kind of super human bowers it requires to do this work both mentally and physically. In Buddhism, we have great regard for those who are willing to give so much of themselves for others this way. The deceased are "the Grateful Dead." It is actually where the band got their name (or so I've read, I don't know anyone from the band personally!)
posted by Yellow at 9:54 AM on May 4, 2017

More people have died trying to come to the U.S. than in two major disasters combined More deaths occured over the last 16 years in the Mexico-U.S. border than Hurricane Katrina and September 11th deaths combined.

I guess this is an attempt to elicit compassion over something terrible that people can easily overlook, but this kind of reporting strikes me as taking advantage of widespread innumeracy to offer a meaningless statistic as though unmaking a hidden truth. You could also say that almost 100 times as many people were killed every day in automobile crashes as died trying to cross the border and that wouldn't mean anything either.

They also run a graph showing the number of bodies discovered each year since 2009 and highlight the fact that The number of bodies recovered in the first months of 2017 already nearly equals all of 2010. But the graph shows that 2010 is clearly an outlier, with far fewer bodies recovered that year than any other year in the period.

I find that dishonest, and I don't think that kind of dishonesty is helpful or justified. And a comparison that says "If the events that had occurred over the course of 16 years had happened over a few days, we would regard it as a mass disaster," as one of the experts quoted does, comparing these deaths to a plane crash or a flood seems similarly wrong-headed.
posted by layceepee at 10:12 AM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

I have seen lots of chatter in migrant-advocacy circles that the NY Times ripped off the Texas Observer's Yo Tengo Nombre project on this.

I don't have an opinion on that, but it's worth flagging here.
posted by migrantology at 10:45 AM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

We don't talk much -- where 'we' is American society -- about the struggle to immigrate; we don't talk about the costs.

American society is fragmented. The anti-immigrant factions, folks life VDare.com, talk a lot about the costs, both to the countries people enter, the countries they leave, and the people doing the immigrating. Whether pro-immigrants want listen is another question.
posted by IndigoJones at 11:00 AM on May 4, 2017

This isn't quite what you're saying, I think, the way deaths by automobile have been normalized (in general) is actually an ongoing travesty. Automobile-related deaths are a real and a huge problem, precisely because there are so many of them. The same goes for here.

Yes, but if someone used these numbers to say "traffic deaths are a big problem, and the deaths of people trying to cross the border is only 1% as serious, because, well, look at the numbers," I think that's a dumb argument. You are trying to compare things that don't really have much in common except that they result in human death, so the statistical comparison of the number of deaths doesn't seem to me to add any useful information.

Similarly, what's the common thread between the attacks on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the plight of immigrants trying to make it into the United States? Not much that I can see except that there's an element of tragedy in all of them. And if innumeracy results in granting undue weight to events like floods and crashes, it seems like the comparison here is saying, "Let me coax you into giving similarly undue weight to this other example of human mortality by convincing you it's the same thing as a natural disaster."
posted by layceepee at 11:35 AM on May 4, 2017

How does it compare with, say, the figures crossing between the US and Canada?
Or, take a similar length of a major road and compare the figures?

Or even better, how many deaths amongst a similar number of any PEOPLE in that period.
I rather suspect that that number is low.
posted by Burn_IT at 12:29 PM on May 4, 2017

There is a drawing of a heart in the NYT article. I remember those items being posted to a page I follow which seeks to identify remains from their belongings; they were able to identify the woman from the drawing as Maria Cabrera from Ecuador. Maria's 10 year old (12 when identified) daughter recognized the drawing as one she drew for her mother when she left Ecuador.
posted by cobain_angel at 10:17 AM on May 5, 2017