Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has
announced a new immigration index to measure border security at the
Southwestern border of the United States in a more pertinent fashion
than such data are currently recorded and analyzed. This new index,
Napolitano says, will look beyond simple statistics of crime and will
look more deeply into environmental damage, levels of personal security
and the economic impact to U.S. residents living near the border with
Mexico.
To describe the intricacy of information that will be in the immigration
index, Napolitano described examples of data that would be collected,
including data such as “calls from hospitals to report suspected illegal
aliens, traffic accidents involving illegal aliens or narcotics
smugglers, rates of vehicle theft and numbers of abandoned vehicles,
impacts on property values, and other measures of economic activity and
environmental impacts.”
