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146 Death which any worker at any job site might logically attempt to resolve problems as they arise. Yet for undocumented workers complaints may be routinely dismissed and the workers themselves may be threatened with dismissal. By maintaining a fear of dismissal, employers silence workers and sustain a systematic undercounting of employer abuse. The constant threat of unfair dismissal, the incessant and cumulative assaults on their performance and dignity, can take a toll physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Valenzuela et al. (2006) show that day laborers tend to be active members of their communities with half (52 percent) attending church regularly and one-ifth (22 percent) involved in sports clubs. Many workers (11 percent) have been living in the United States for more than twenty years, and 29 percent have lived in the United States between six and twenty years. Twenty-nine percent of the children of the day laborers surveyed had been born in the United States. Chances are high that anyone living in the United States has had daily interaction and discourse with immigrants as employees, neighbors, or coworkers. Kelli Chapman See Also: Domestic Work; Employment; Employment Visas; Family Economics; Shadow Population; Single Men; Wages; Workers’ Rights. Copyright © 2014. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved. Further Reading Beermann, Nick. 2006. “Liability in More Ways Than One: Employing Undocumented Workers.” http://library.indlaw.com/2003/Sep/30/133064.html (accessed January 3, 2006). Entelisano, Carol A. 2003. “The Woes of WAL-MART: A Lesson in Independent Contractor Practices and Immigration Law (Non)Compliance.” http://library.indlaw.com/ 2003/Dec/29/133231.html. O’Leary, Anna Ochoa. 2007. “Petit Apartheid in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: An Analysis of Community Organization Data Documenting Work Force Abuses of the Undocumented.” Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Roundtable. Available at: http://www.forumonpublicpolicy.com/papersw07.html#crimjus. Valenzuela, Abel, Jr., Nik Theodore, Edwin Meléndez and Ana Luz Gonzalez. 2006. “On the Corner: Day Labor in the United States,” unpublished manuscript, UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty. Available at: www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/csup/index.php. Death From the mid-1990s through the present, thousands of Mexican and Latin American immigrants have lost their lives while attempting to migrate to the United States. Although there is no complete and accurate count of these deaths, it has been estimated that over 5,600 bodies have been discovered on the U.S. side of the border between 1994 and 2009. Over two thousand known migrant deaths have occurred in Arizona alone since the year 2000 (Rose, 2012). Undocumented Immigrants in the United States : An Encyclopedia of Their Experience, edited by Anna Ochoa O'Leary, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=1693470. Created from uaz on 2018-07-20 07:08:48. Death Copyright © 2014. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved. Juana Garcia Martinez poses next to a photo of her late husband, Ildefonso Martinez, in Vista, California, 2012. Ildefonso Martinez died from dehydration trying to cross back into the United States after being deported in 2011. The death of migrants crossing the Southwest border has long been a tragic consequence of increased poverty and the massive increase in U.S. border enforcement and border militarization. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi) The deaths are seen by scholars as a grave human rights crisis caused primarily by U.S. immigration policy. Studies have demonstrated the correlation between increased enforcement and a rise in deaths. During the Clinton Administration there were border enforcement policy changes predicated on the idea of prevention through deterrence, the goal of which has been to deter would-be unauthorized migrants by increasing the human costs of crossing. Undeterred migrants are routed through remote areas where U.S. authorities have a presumed tactical advantage due to geography. In a strategy of segmented enforcement, the traditional urban crossing-points were fortiied, leaving open remote expanses of land and sea. The policy changes were enforced locally under the names “Operation Hold the Line” in El Paso (1993), “Operation Gatekeeper” in San Diego (1994), “Operation Safeguard” in Nogales (1995), and “Operation Rio Grande” in South Texas (1997). These policy changes created a “funnel effect” whereby migrants were effectively pushed into remote desert and mountain areas, where they perished in high numbers. Border enforcement efforts have not stopped unauthorized crossings, but instead have made the process more clandestine and dangerous. Unauthorized migration is a complex social process that is inluenced by various individual-, household-, regional-, national-, and global-level “push” and “pull” factors. Segmented enforcement efforts were designed to increase the individual-level physical and inancial costs associated with unauthorized crossings to the point where they would exceed the beneits of expected earnings in the United States and therefore deter migration. However, this has Undocumented Immigrants in the United States : An Encyclopedia of Their Experience, edited by Anna Ochoa O'Leary, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=1693470. Created from uaz on 2018-07-20 07:08:48. 147 Copyright © 2014. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved. 148 Death not been the case. Market forces such as the structurally embedded demand for immigrant workers, neoliberal economic policies, and expansive social networks have all contributed to continued migrations despite increased border enforcement. Mexico’s entry into neoliberal trade agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986 and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 exacerbated the economic situation among the working poor in Mexico, and led to increased migration. While migrant deaths date back generations, the increased prevalence of deaths seen today began in the late nineties in California and in Arizona. As enforcement in those areas increased, the deaths shifted to the U.S. Border Patrol Tucson Sector, which then experienced a twenty-fold increase in known migrant deaths between FY 1990 and FY 2005. Community-based organizations in these states began to draw the public attention to this human tragedy. In Tucson, Arizona, the Coalición de Derechos Humanos (CDH) began to make its mark in 1998 by publishing data on the number of deaths in Pima County, gathered from a range of sources, including the U.S. Border Patrol and the Pima County Ofice of the Medical Examiner (PCOME), in Tucson, Arizona, which provides medico-legal death investigation for the western two-thirds of the Tucson sector’s southern border with Mexico. Between 1990 and 2010, the PCOME handled the remains of 1,887 migrants—more than any other jurisdiction in the nation. The counting of migrant fatalities has been challenging and controversial. Two of the most common sources for approximating migrant fatalities, vital registry statistics and U.S. Border Patrol counts, are highly problematic. The former rely on death certiicate data and do not determine whether the person died attempting to cross the border. U.S. Border Patrol counts are known to seriously undercount migrant fatalities by not including skeletal remains or those remains recovered on Native American reservations. The most accurate statistics come from medical examiners’ ofices, despite the fact that there are variations in the methods and systems used to determine whether a decedent is believed to be a migrant. All body counts are limited to the number of human remains that have been found. Most researchers agree that there are far more border deaths than those which have been included in published counts. Because migrants are forced into remote desert and mountain areas, it can take months or years for their remains to be discovered. When they are discovered weeks, months, or years later, the remains may be skeletonized. In addition, many migrants never make it to the United States, but perish within Mexico as victims of violence or as casualties of the train used by many Central Americans to traverse Mexico. The causes of death for migrants on the U.S. side of the border relate to the terrain they cross. Along the California portion of the border, migrants have died primarily by drowning in the All American Canal, by being hit by vehicles while attempting to run across Interstate highways, or by exposure. In Texas, migrants face the risk of drowning in the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) or dying from exposure. Very little is known about New Mexico migrant deaths, but it appears that the deceased migrants found there have died primarily from exposure. The Pima County Ofice of the Medical Examiner in Tucson, Arizona provides the most comprehensive demographic data on migrant deaths. The Binational Migration Undocumented Immigrants in the United States : An Encyclopedia of Their Experience, edited by Anna Ochoa O'Leary, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=1693470. Created from uaz on 2018-07-20 07:08:48. Copyright © 2014. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved. Death Institute (also in Tucson as part of the University of Arizona) published a report utilizing this data in 2006 (Rubio-Goldsmith et al., 2006). Out of 927 decedents analyzed (remains recovered between 1990 and 2005), approximately 80 percent were male, and among those whose ages were known, the average age was around thirty years. In addition, the top four causes of death were exposure (59.7 percent), undetermined (21.2 percent), motor vehicle accident (12 percent), and homicide (3.6 percent). For remains listing the cause of death as “undetermined,” the medical examiner was unable to determine a cause due to the extent of decomposition or skeletonization. Both conditions indicate a longer period of time between death and discovery, suggesting a remote area of death, and therefore a likely cause of exposure. Within the crisis of migrant death there exists a secondary crisis in the number of unidentiied remains and missing people. For Pima County, out of the 1,887 remains handled by the ofice between 1990 and 2010, more than 30 percent were unidentiied as of November 2010. As of the same date, that ofice had records for over 850 missing migrants. The causes for this are primarily institutional: there is no centralized database of unidentiied migrant remains and missing persons last seen alive crossing the border. Because so many of the bodies are found in a highly decomposed state, identiication is dificult. Due to extreme poverty, many families of missing migrants do not have dental records or radiographs that can be used to identify their loved ones. To date, there is no comprehensive DNA comparison system that allows for blind-matches between samples submitted by relatives of missing migrants and samples taken from unidentiied remains found on the border. Families of missing migrants, whether they were left in the sending communities or live in the United States, experience complex grief and ambiguous loss. If they live in the United States, many are unable to effectively search for their loved ones because of their vulnerable status as undocumented immigrants. A number of immigrant rights organizations have stepped in to assist families and migrants in distress, including CDH, No More Deaths, Good Samaritans, Humane Borders, and the American Friends Service Committee in Arizona, Angeles del la Frontera, Border Angels, and Water Station in California, and Paisanos al Rescate in Texas. Countless others exist throughout Mexico that provide humanitarian services primarily to Central American migrants. Robin Reineke and Daniel E. Martinez See Also: Border Crossing; Coyotes; Devil’s Highway; Human Smuggling; Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS); U.S.-Mexico Border Wall. Further Reading Cornelius, Wayne. 2001. “Death at the Border: Eficacy and Unintended Consequences of U.S. Immigration Control Policy.” Population and Development Review 27.4: 661–685. Eschbach, Karl, Jacqueline Hagan, Nestor Rodriguez, Ruben Hernandez-Leon, and Stanley Bailey. 1999. “Death at the Border.” International Migration Review 33.2: 430–454. Undocumented Immigrants in the United States : An Encyclopedia of Their Experience, edited by Anna Ochoa O'Leary, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=1693470. Created from uaz on 2018-07-20 07:08:48. 149 150 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Jimenez, Maria. 2009. “Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S. – Mexico Border.” ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties, and Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights, October 1. Rose, Ananda. 2012. “Death in the Desert.” New York Times, June 21. http://www.nytimes .com/2012/06/22/opinion/migrants-dying-on-the-us-mexico-border.html?_r=0. Rubio-Goldsmith, Raquel, M. Melissa McCormick, Daniel Martinez, and Inez Duarte. 2006. “A Humanitarian Crisis at the Border: New Estimate of Deaths among Unauthorized Immigrants.” Immigration Policy Center: 1–5. Sapkota, Sanjeeb, Harold W. Kohl, Julie Gilchrist, et al. 2006. “Unauthorized Border Crossings and Migrant Deaths: Arizona, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, 2002– 2003.” American Journal of Public Health 96.7: 1282–1287. Copyright © 2014. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a memorandum issued by executive order by President Barak Obama on June 15, 2012. The order directed agencies that form part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the U.S. Customs Border Protection, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), to practice prosecutorial discretion towards those who as children immigrated to the United States without proper authorization. Simply put, prosecutorial discretion means that administrative agencies (such as the ones mentioned above) have discretion as to whom they select to prosecute. Typically, individuals found to be in the country unlawfully risk removal. However, with prosecutorial discretion, deferred action will be granted on a case-by-case basis. In other words, DACA agencies can select those applicants for whom removal from the country will be suspended. DACA does not give undocumented youth lawful permanent resident status such as a green card or provide a path to permanent residency and citizenship. Rather, it gives temporary relief from deportation to undocumented youth and work authorization that can be renewed every two years to eligible applicants. Under the executive order, in order to qualify for DACA individuals need to be at least sixteen years old and no older than thirty. Applicants need to prove that they were brought to the United States before they turned sixteen and have resided in the country for at least ive continuous years at the time of their application. They also need to be currently in school, have received a high school or G.E.D. diploma, or have been honorably discharged from the military. Deferred removal action does not grant lawful immigration status nor does it provide a path to citizenship. Applying for DACA is also a demanding process and there is a fee of $495.00 for a biometric background check that may be a hardship for many families. Other concerns stem from the fact that applicants must prove that they are in economic need of work to receive authorization to work. Moreover, the grant of deferred action will be given in two-year increments, and although it can be renewed indeinitely, it is uncertain how long this program will last. These concerns account for the lower number of applicants than expected. The National Journal reports that in the irst eight months that the program has been in place, about a half million petitioners Undocumented Immigrants in the United States : An Encyclopedia of Their Experience, edited by Anna Ochoa O'Leary, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=1693470. Created from uaz on 2018-07-20 07:08:48.