Jeremy Harding · The Deaths Map: At the Mexican Border · LRB 20 October 2011 →

Unlike Brewer, Border Patrol staff believe that fewer than 10 per cent of the people they catch coming across have criminal intentions. The figures contradict her too. If drugs are the reason migrants infiltrate the border, why are there so many apprehensions of ‘illegals’ (170,000 in the Tucson Sector from October 2009 to June 2010, for instance) and so few federal prosecutions in the state on drugs charges (1107 in the same period)? How is it that out of the half-million undocumented Hispanics in Arizona, fewer than 3000 are in state penitentiaries on drug offences? Why, in Pima County, a frontline border county which includes Tucson, do crime figures for 2010 published by the sheriff’s office show incidents involving ‘controlled substances’ running at lower rates than fraud, criminal damage or burglary and only slightly higher than drunk driving?