Prevention Through Deterrence Summary

In his book, The Land of Open Graves, Jason De Leon explores the policy of ‘Prevention through Deterrence,’ implemented by the government of the US, which aims at decreasing the number of undocumented migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. Prevention through Deterrence focuses on implementing strict border policies on ports of entry, successfully diverging the traffic to the deadly Arizona desert, where migrants have to hide from the border patrol and deal with the climate at the same time. Although the policy was supposedly implemented to decrease the number of people taking up the journey, it has rather increased the scale of sufferings of the migrants, having little or no effect on their number. The impact of the desert often results in …show more content…
De Leon does a lot of fieldwork to highlight the importance of these remnants left by the migrants, as a significant method of studying the brutality of the journey. De Leon also mentions that these archaeological remains are ‘exceptionalized’ by the general public, just like the undocumented migrants, for being considered as important markers of the ongoing politically structured necroviolence, and are often considered as “migrant trash” (De Leon 170). He also emphasizes on the “dehumanization of undocumented migrants,” caused by the normalization of their miseries by the border patrol agents, the government, and the public. His group found a dead body of a woman on a mountain, which he uses as a symbolic of the various concepts of his project, like the physical and emotional torture of the journey, and the normalization of migrant death by the border patrol agents in considering the body “gross” (De Leon 216). Most of his concepts and the examples he uses from the context of Lucho and Memo’s border crossing, strengthen his argument against PTD, portraying it as a firm symbol of necroviolence and