Review: The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands by Margaret Regan

Title: The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands
Author: Margaret Regan
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publish Date: February 1, 2010
Source: Library

What's the Story?:

From Goodreads.com: "For the last decade, Margaret Regan has reported on the escalating chaos along the Arizona-Mexico border, ground zero for immigration since 2000. Undocumented migrants cross into Arizona in overwhelming numbers, a state whose anti-immigrant laws are the most stringent in the nation. And Arizona has the highest number of migrant deaths. Fourteen-year-old Josseline, a young girl from El Salvador who was left to die alone on the migrant trail, was just one of thousands to perish in its deserts and mountains.

With a sweeping perspective and vivid on-the-ground reportage, Regan tells the stories of the people caught up in this international tragedy. Traveling back and forth across the border, she visits migrants stranded in Mexican shelters and rides shotgun with Border Patrol agents in Arizona, hiking with them for hours in the scorching desert; she camps out in the thorny wilderness with No More Deaths activists and meets with angry ranchers and vigilantes. Using Arizona as a microcosm, Regan explores a host of urgent issues: the border militarization that threatens the rights of U.S. citizens, the environmental damage wrought by the border wall, the desperation that compels migrants to come north, and the human tragedy of the unidentified dead in Arizona’s morgues."

My Two Cents:

"The Death of Josseline" was written several years ago but in our current political climate, this remains an incredibly important read. Immigration, both legal and illegal, has become an increasingly popular topic to rail over. There are many different sides and thoughts to consider. This book tries to capture many of these sides.

This heart-wrenching books opens with the death of a young teenager who is traveling through the harsh deserts of Northern Mexico with her little brother in order to reunite with their mother who lives in California. The author explores how she got to where she was and where she was going. The author also shows things from a different angle. Not only does she seek to show the migrants' point of view but also from the Border Patrol angle.

I know that immigration is one of the topics that I have been mulling over and I feel like this book helped me to understand things a little bit better. This is a hugely complicated issue. I know how I would handle it but as this book shows: there are a ton of different opinions and points of view that are incredibly difficult to reconcile!

This book is relatively short but it packs a punch!