Editor's Note: Death and politics on the border

Immigration is one of those impossible issues. Many conservatives would build a wall around the country and not let anybody in (especially anybody with brown or black skin). Many liberals would throw open the borders, allowing everybody to roam to and fro, including terrorists and others who don't have our nation's best interests at heart.

Reality is somewhere in between. We have built a huge bureaucracy around immigration, letting in certain people just to visit and others to work temporarily. Some earn citizenship while others are denied entry altogether or sent home at a prescribed date. We employ thousands of sentries along the borders to nab those who try to sneak across. It's a mess; everybody knows it, yet few clear, compelling solutions have been presented.

Meanwhile, the United States has become highly dependent on immigrants, illegal and otherwise, to keep the country operating. Certain industries, from agriculture to framing houses in Las Vegas, would collapse without access to immigrant labor. So, while many conservatives bemoan immigration, their business-owning buddies rely on a steady flow of immigrants to keep their companies functioning.

The underlying causes of illegal immigration are, in part, beyond our control. In Mexico and Central America, the economy is in shambles. Much of Mexico easily earns Third World status, racked by rampant unemployment, primitive living conditions, polluted air and water, organized crime and political corruption. The prospect of earning enough money to eat and help provide some of the elements of modern life to their families compels thousands of Hispanics to come to the United States. In that sense, they are no different from the millions of immigrants from Europe who flooded this country from the 17th well into the 20th century.

There are no easy answers, so it's not surprising that President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry have largely ignored the topic thus far in the campaign. To be fair, it's not a simple issue to parse in a 10-second sound bite. At the same time, they surely are trying to avoid taking a stand on such a contentious topic. We shouldn't let them off the hook, though. Immigration policy should be among the top five issues for the U.S. president.

An excellent starting point in learning more about this issue would be to read Luis Alberto Urrea's startling new book, The Devil's Highway. Urrea, a highly respected writer on border issues, documents one of the most horrific immigration-related events in recent memory. You may remember the news reports. In May 2001, 26 men attempted to cross the broiling desert of southern Arizona en route to jobs and a better life. But their young guide led them astray and they became lost in the desolate, bone-dry desert between Yuma and Tucson. After days of unrelenting heat and sun with no relief in sight, 14 died from heat stroke. Some had become so desperate that they drank their own urine to survive. Twelve were finally discovered by Border Patrol officers and lived.

It has become almost commonplace in recent years for border-crossers to perish in this remote area, known as the Devil's Highway. Once upon a time, illegal immigrants found their way through urban areas such as San Diego and El Paso, but we built imposing walls and stationed hundreds of officers in these areas to stop them. As a result, those determined to enter the country had to find new routes, and the Arizona desert has become a last--and sometimes deadly--resort.

Naturally, bad people have figured out how to profit from this demand. Sophisticated organized crime networks have been set up in Mexico and the United States to quickly escort immigrants through these desert areas and whisk them to jobs awaiting them in places like North Carolina, Arkansas and, yes, Las Vegas. "Coyotes" entice desperate men across Central America and Mexico, demand large sums from them and drive them to the border, where they are led on foot along roughly established paths to awaiting vehicles miles inside the country. Sometimes they are caught by the Border Patrol and returned to Mexico. Often they make it through the desert largely unscathed.

The "Yuma 14" weren't so fortunate. Their guide was young and inexperienced. He got lost in the barren and mountainous desert, taking a series of wrong turns as his charges grew dehydrated and exhausted, slowly losing their minds as the unrelenting sun literally baked them.

Urrea masterfully chronicles their ill-fated journey, weaving into it a fair portrait of the Border Patrol, which seems unfairly reviled by liberal critics of the nation's immigration policy. He also offers a detailed picture of how the ruthless coyote network operates (a picture, he notes, that he risked his neck to get).

Urrea notes that this tragedy, which generated massive press coverage, did not lead to immigration reforms: "Since that May of 2001, the filth and depravity of the border churns ahead in a parade of horrors. The slaughtered dead turn to leather on the Devil's Highway, and their brothers and sisters rot to sludge tucked in car trunks and sealed in railroad cars. The big beasts and the little predators continue to feed on the poor and innocent." Urrea says a glimmer of hope emerged when President Bush and Mexico President Vicente Fox talked seriously about sweeping changes. But the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks ended all that.

With post-9/11 hysteria dissipating, American political leaders should dig into this critical issue. Culpability for the deaths of the Yuma 14 is not limited to the one errant coyote who failed to lead them to safety. The U.S. employers who pay the coyote criminal networks to find workers and therefore encourage these dangerous acts of illegal immigration have blood on their hands, as do the U.S. companies that built factories in Mexico to take advantage of the cheap labor, then pulled up stakes to exploit even cheaper labor in the Far East. The Devil's Highway should be required reading for Bush, Kerry and congressional candidates.

--GEOFF SCHUMACHER