Illegal immigration has been a long-standing problem. In Feb. 1994, the Attorney General announced a broad, five-part strategy to strengthen enforcement of the nation's immigration laws. This report focuses on one of those strategies -- to deter illegal entry along the southwest border. It addresses: what the strategy calls for; actions taken to implement the strategy along the SW border; whether available data confirm the strategy's hypotheses, with respect to expected initial results from the strategy's implementation; & the types of indicators that would be needed to evaluate the strategy to deter illegal entry along the SW border.

A wide-ranging journey through the history of borders and an exploration of their role in shaping our world today. Since the earliest known marker denoting the edge of one land and the beginning of the next—a stone column inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform—borders have been imagined, mapped, moved, and fought over. In The Edge of the Plain, James Crawford skillfully blends history, travel writing, and reportage to trace these borderlines throughout history and across the globe. What happens on the ground when we impose lines on a map that contradict how humans have always lived—and moved? Crawford confronts that question from bloody territorial disputes in Mesopotamia, to the Sápmi lands of Scandinavia, the shifting boundaries of the Israel-Palestine conflict, efforts to build a wall on the United States-Mexico border, and the dangerous border crossings pursued by migrants into Europe. And yet the role of borders extends beyond specific sites of conflict. On the largest scale, borders define the limits of empire—the two walls in Britain that once represented the northwestern edge of the Roman Empire; the mythological eastern gate supposedly closed off by Alexander the Great; China’s virtual “Great Firewall.” On the smallest, human scale, cell walls are the last physical barrier against disease, after lines of quarantine have failed. Finally, as The Edge of the Plain reveals, humans have not only made their mark on the landscape: the landscape itself is now changing, more and more rapidly due to climate change. Crawford introduces us to both the Alpine watershed—one such shifting, natural borderline—and the “Great Green Wall” in Africa, envisioned as an international, community-built bulwark against desertification. Borders are as old as human civilization, and focal points for today’s colliding forces of nationalism, climate change, globalization, and mass migration. The Edge of the Plain illuminates these lines of separation past and present, how we define them—and how they define us.

In his gripping and provocative debut, anthropologist Jason De Le—n sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our timeÑthe human consequences of US immigration policy.Ê The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De Le—n uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of ÒPrevention through Deterrence,Ó the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, this policy has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field. In harrowing detail, De Le—n chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert. The Land of Open Graves will spark debate and controversy.

This is the second of 6 planned reports on the Attorney General's strategy to deter illegal entry into the U.S. Even among those who enter the U.S. legally (e.g., as tourists or students), many are believed to overstay their visas & take jobs. This report addresses: (1) the effectiveness of the current employment verification process in preventing employers from hiring unauthorized aliens, (2) INS's efforts to improve the employment verification process; (3) the level of effort that INS & the DoL devoted to worksite enforcement activities & the results of these activities, & (4) changes being made to INS's worksite enforcement program. Charts & tables.