When I lived in the Sonoran Desert, I came to know it as a place of majesty and tragedy. The pink sand desert has incredible biodiversity and a vibrant border culture. But it can be an unforgiving place with coyotes, scorpions, rattlesnakes and, yes, temperatures in the 120s. In fact, temperatures in Phoenix surpassed 110 degrees 55 times this summer — tying last year’s record and causing at least 177 deaths. [Chicago Tribune]

The U.S. government has long wielded Arizona’s hostile environment as a weapon to control immigration. Those who know the land observe that over time, immigration enforcement patterns shifted border crossing points to increasingly desolate and dangerous areas with the notion that migrants would be deterred from making the trip. In desperation, they came anyway. The effort to save lives and count the lives lost in the desert is a serious undertaking by organizations such as Humane Borders and No More Deaths.

Now, I live in Illinois where I am a political science professor studying American politics and immigration. The underlying philosophy of the federal government’s immigration control tactics is deterrence through attrition — essentially making it so difficult to immigrate that people simply give up. Immigrant rights activists and scholars call this the “misery strategy” because these policies make it hard to survive, much less claim asylum rights or ask for help. Despite the fact that there are now more people fleeing conflict, famine and persecution than ever in history, Latin Americans were told: “Do not come.”

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