When things take a turn for the worse, people often follow course, the need to blame seemingly wired into the less-blessed areas of our brains. As globalization and technology have conspired to assail the privileges of the American white middle class, fingers have increasingly been pointed, especially in this political season. Somehow, Mexicans are supposedly culpable, even though they were long welcomed here, legal or not, to work our farmland. 

Except that Mexican people are trying to beat the border patrol in Arizona in greatly diminished numbers, an inconvenient truth for panderers. Many of the immigrants attempting to stealthily enter the U.S. are Central Americans arriving in Texas. Why the shift? In an excellent London Review of Books report, Tom Stevenson answers that question and visits the checkpoints to see the harsh reality awaiting those seeking refuge. An excerpt:

If you take Route 281 south from San Antonio, past the billboards (‘We buy ugly houses – call this number’; ‘AAA finance loans from $50-$1280’), you eventually reach Falfurrias, the largest place in Brooks County but still a one-horse town. The Dairy Queen burned down in May and the Walmart closed in July. Falfurrias once had a reputation as a hub for illegal gambling but this summer the gaming houses were raided and shut down. The town seems abandoned, apart from a border patrol station and a detention centre. The United States Border Patrol operates checkpoints on main roads many miles from the actual frontier. Falfurrias is 70 miles from the border and one of the inspection points is just outside town. If you’re an undocumented migrant this is where you leave the highway and walk for miles through the wilderness. More migrants die from thirst and injury in Brooks County than anywhere else in the United States.

In Falfurrias I met Lavoyger J. Durham, a large man with a deep voice who drives a big 4×4. He was born on the King Ranch – Texas’s best-known agribusiness, roughly the size of Cornwall – and he has been a cowboy all his life. In his home he has framed copies of magazines in which he’s featured: on the front of the Cattleman he appears on horseback lassoing a calf. He has managed the El Tule ranch, just outside Falfurrias, for 25 years. His grandfather, he told me proudly, signed up with Captain Leander McNelly, a Confederate officer and Texas Ranger, to ‘clean South Texas’ of ‘bandits’, most of them Mexican: McNelly’s militia hanged hundreds of people in the 1870s. But Lavoyger is now worried about the number of would-be migrants dying on south Texas’s ranches. He’s half Mexican himself – what would his grandfather have made of that? – and speaks fluent Spanish. On the way to El Tule, he gossips about the Bush family – ‘Barbara was at my second wedding but not, well … involved’ – and plays around with names for the borderlands that don’t quite hit the mark: the ‘catch me if you can’ zone comes after the ‘free nilly willy’ zone, and so on.

I asked him how many people had been found dead in Brooks County so far this year. He wasn’t sure of the exact number and phoned the sheriff. ‘How many dead people we got this year?’ The answer was 28. ‘Tell your daughter I love her.’ That the remains of 28 migrants had been discovered in just one of Texas’s 254 counties in a six-month period ought to be remarkable, especially given that the sheriffs estimate only 10 to 15 per cent of those who die are ever found. There are no figures on the total number of undocumented migrant deaths in Texas. Lavoyger himself has come across more than two dozen bodies over the years. On the ranch he showed me a clearing littered with half-rotten clothes, although these filthy coats and jeans in this macabre collection didn’t necessarily come from dead bodies; as Lavoyger explained, most of the dead are found without clothes, and usually it’s the local wildlife – vultures circling or coyotes playing with the bones – that point to their whereabouts.

So how does an undocumented migrant end up dead on Lavoyger’s ranch?•