May 6 2011

Napolitano Announces New Immigration Index to Measure Effects of Border Security on US Residents Living at the US/Mexico Border

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."