Arizona: The deadly boundaries of politics

"Is he fresh?" a recovery station attendant asks, unzipping the body bag lying on a gurney in a carpark at the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office in Tucson, Arizona.

"I'd say about a day and a half," a female answers off camera. The corpse is tagged as case number 10-1277.

"Well, he's young," says the officer.

The video, shot by the Arizona Daily Star, shifts inside where a skeleton, partly covered by desiccated flesh, is examined. "His hands have been chewed off," says a doctor. "My gut feeling is he's been chewed on by critters."

Bone samples are taken to determine sex and personal items tagged in a bid to identify remains and notify relatives. The bodies are grisly statistics in an ongoing tragedy. Almost 2000 illegal border crossers have died since 2001.

"The names change, the location maybe gets a little more remote as the years go on ... but it's the same old story," says Dr Bruce Anderson. Many died of thirst due to extreme dehydration. All hoped for a better life in the United States.

It's hard to know how many people evade drug cartels [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called Mexico's bloodbath, with 28,000 dead, an "insurgency"], cross the border fence and elude the US Border Patrol, then perish in remote desert.

By August, authorities in Pima County had recovered the bodies of 170 illegal immigrants from the vast Sonoran Desert that straddles the US-Mexico line. Fifty-nine were found in July alone, as record temperatures soared into triple digits.

Officials fear the 2010 death toll may surpass the previous record, from 2007, of 218 bodies.

"We know those numbers are probably higher," says Sofia Gomez of Humane Borders, which runs desert water stations. "Unfortunately the bodies are hard to reach in certain areas."

As US interdiction intensifies smugglers shift to brutal terrain, where many migrants die lonely deaths.

"We see all sorts of things that really make you question how prepared they were," says Gomez. Many people come from the jungles of Central America and are utterly unprepared for the unforgiving desert terrain. "The coyotes [guides] may tell them it's just a few hours across the border, when it's really three, four or five days. It's impossible to carry enough water for such a journey. We have trucks that help us carry water to stations. I cannot imagine how you would walk for days with the water that you will need."

Nonetheless, vandalism at water stations has increased as anti-immigrant feeling grows in the US. With illegal immigration "there's no middle ground," says Gomez. Rancour has intensified with the recession and is now feeding into politics. Arizona passed SB 1070, the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighbourhood Act, which took effect in July and allows police to demand identification on "reasonable suspicion". Latinos fear racial profiling.

Condemned by opponents as unconstitutional, SB 1070 - which has sparked interest among other state legislators - was blocked in July by a federal injunction and is subject to a Justice Department lawsuit. A nativist rallying point, the law was embraced by the conservative Tea Party, viewed as Republican kingmakers in the November midterm elections.

"Border security is literally the ticket for being re-elected," says Gomez.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer revived her flagging career after she signed SB 1070 into law.

And Senator John McCain, who once supported immigration reform, executed a one-eighty and demanded stronger border security when faced with a far-right primary challenge.

Ironically, border crossings are down, largely due to the US recession. In September the Pew Hispanic Centre reported the "first significant reversal" in 20 years, with the total number of illegal immigrants living in the US down from 12 million in 2007 to 11.1 million in 2009. The report said the number of illegal immigrants dropped from about 850,000 between 2000 and 2005 to 300,000 from 2007 to 2009.

With the Republicans expected to do well in the midterms, anti-immigrant feeling is high among conservatives in Nevada, California, Colorado, Texas and Florida. Arizona lawman Joe Arpaio, "America's toughest sheriff," notorious for pursuing illegal immigrants in the Phoenix area, has become a Tea Party darling, endorsing conservative candidates.

In Nevada senate majority leader Harry Reid hopes to best Tea Party candidate and SB 1070 zealot Sharron Angle with the Dream Act, which proposes citizenship for illegal immigrants who attend college and serve in the military. Over in California, America's most populous state with the largest number of illegal immigrants - 2.6 million according to the Pew report - the issue is more complex.

Take the race between Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer and GOP challenger Carly Fiorina, the ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Fiorina, says Allan Hoffenblum, who runs the non-partisan California Target Book, depicts herself as a hard-core conservative who supports Arizona's SB 1070 law. This may appeal to the Tea Party but hasn't helped Fiorina, who trails Boxer by six to 10 points, depending on which poll you read. In contrast, Republican Meg Whitman is in a tight gubernatorial contest with Democrat Jerry Brown.

"Whitman is running a traditional Republican campaign where she's moved to the centre," says Hoffenblum. "She's been very moderate on the immigration issue. She's against the Arizona law and opposes Proposition 187 [which denies taxpayer financed services to illegal immigrants]."

She has also dug deep into her campaign war chest - Whitman is the ex-CEO of eBay - to run adverts on Spanish language television. "It's a very influential medium in the Southwest," says Hoffenblum. "A lot of Latinos watch."

In effect, Whitman acknowledges political reality. Democrats can count on a Latino majority but Republicans must get at least one-third of the Latino vote to win.

A Los Angeles Times/USC poll this week found Latinos, 21 per cent of the state vote, sided with Brown over Whitman by 19 points and with Boxer over Fiorina by 38 points. But Democrats worry about mobilising disgruntled Latino voters.

A recent Latino Decisions poll blasted anti-immigrant Republicans, but chided Democrats for not pursuing immigration reform, second in importance to the economy [Latino poverty is at 25.3 per cent higher than other races, says the US Census Bureau]. Only 44 per cent of people in the August poll expressed enthusiasm for voting in the midterms.

Hardship and disappointment has fuelled anger. When Los Angeles police killed a Guatemalan, Manuel Ramirez, 37, who was allegedly wielding a knife, on September 5, in the teeming streets of Pico-Union, home to numerous illegal immigrants, the mood quickly grew ugly. As police fired foam projectiles, a rock-hurling crowd of some 300 people, including women and children, shouted "Killers! Assassins!"

At a meeting with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, Pico-Union residents begged him not to deport people arrested in several nights of violent protest. Others talked of the explosive anti-Latino mood in California and the grim conditions back home that forced Latinos to the US.

Some end up in "drop houses," such as the 37 Central Americans rescued from a room in Riverside, California, in September. Two weeks earlier federal agents found 35 people in another LA location. Such unfortunates are held for ransom as smugglers - who have already levied fees running to thousands of dollars - extort more money.

And in the largest labour-trafficking case in US history, federal prosecutors indicted Israeli-born Mordechai Orian, president of Beverly Hills company, Global Horizons Manpower, in September, for allegedly exploiting a US agriculture guest programme, which issues work visas, to enslave some 400 Thais brought into Washington and Hawaii.

Ramirez, a Mayan-speaking illegal immigrant, was a day labourer. Thousands of men wait outside hardware stores each day. A lucky few earn meagre wages. Many are floundering amid the wreckage of the Californian economy, as construction, cleaning and other menial jobs vanish.

Still, even as the Tea Party stokes anti-immigrant feeling among conservatives, California is deliberating whether to criminalise rampant wage theft from low-paid workers - US$26 million ($35 million) a week in LA County according to a UCLA study - a move the state Chamber of Commerce labels a "job killer."

And despite the conservative passions surrounding illegal immigration, Hoffenblum believes the issue is unlikely to be decisive in the midterms. But he suggests the Republicans' embrace of Tea Party racism and demagogy could backfire in the 2012 presidential contest. Polls suggest general American approval for laws like the Dream Act. And Latinos are a rapidly growing force in the electorate.

"I think there will be a significantly greater Latino turnout in 2012," says Hoffenblum, a Republican himself. "It's not what you say but how you say it. Politicians all talk about controlling the borders. But it appears to be always Republicans, particularly white males, who are most shrill about Latino immigrants. Latinos may be unhappy with Obama. But they wouldn't vote for Republicans who sound like they want to round up Latinos and send them back to Tijuana."