About This Project

We have created border walls, fences, and observation towers throughout the Sonoran desert along the United States-Mexico border. These obstacles encourage immigrants to take deadlier routes through the desert. How safe are these routes? And, if border infrastructure is expanded, how do these immigration routes change? These are the questions we plan to answer in this study.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Along the United States-Mexico border there have been more than 100 recorded border deaths in the past year. Infrastructure is partially documented in government records and open source mapping. Past migration trails have also been documented and mapped.

In this study we are combining the known data with new analysis to find the relationship between infrastructure, trails and the mortality of migrants. It is important to predict potential impacts of changes in border policy to keep people safe. We will do this by making adjustments to models successful at predicting migration in the past.

What is the significance of this project?

There are many large-scale refugee and migrant crises across the world. As this persists, the government increases border infrastructure and border policing. This research will help us better understand the spatial nature of such events and plan for more humane borders. It seeks to give a map of a current situation in the United States-Mexico border and models the potential scenarios with different border policy changes. These maps will demonstrate the efficacy of current border infrastructure along the United States-Mexico border, which could be a foundation for understand efficacy of other country borders across the globe.

What are the goals of the project?

To start we will compile and add location data for border infrastructure to our model. Using the publicly available data we will classify and analyze border mortality and trail data. We will also use this data set to classify land-use by immigrants.

Using our model we will test mortality and infrastructure data for spatial correlation. With the new model we will build current cost/behavior model predicting migration routes and make alternative scenario models with changes in infrastructure and migration.