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Immigration has come up as major issue in this year’s presidential race, as it does every four years. Senator John McCain’s so-called flip-flopping on the topic has been under attack from Conservatives and Latino leaders alike in the past few months. The Republican nominee for President initially claimed that he supported a “comprehensive immigration reform,” but is now asserting that border security is his priority. Given the steadily increasing number of fatalities that occur when migrants cross the barren desert of the U.S.-Mexico border, a national discussion of immigration becomes a matter of life and death. Author Joseph Nevins has put a human face on the statistics in his recent book Dying To Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid, which tells the compelling story of Julio Cesar Gallegos, an immigrant who died crossing the border in 1998. Nevins struggles with the inhumane effects of immigration policy and economics, as well as how history and its shaping of our concept of space and borders, have on the lives of millions.

GUEST: Joseph Nevins, associate professor of geography at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, author of several books including “Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the ‘Illegal Alien,’ and the Making of the US-Mexico Border,” and “A Not-so-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor,” and most recently “Dying to Live: A Story of US Immigration in an Age of Global Aparthied” (with photos by Mizue Aizeki)