Summary of Crossing Arizona

Summary of Crossing Arizona

The documentary ‘Crossing Arizona’ by Joseph Matthew examine on the national issue of the crisis of the illegal immigration in the American Southwest area. Since the nineteenth century, an increasing number of people from Mexico and Central America attempted to make their way into the United States illegally by crossing the Arizona Desert. However, few succeeded in doing so as many of the immigrants eventually died from long periods of heat exposure and dehydration along this risky route. Apart from the major death of those illegal immigrants, consequent issues arose such as the environmental disruption of the neighborhoods and even more the huge impact on the local residents as the immigrants blended into their community. The director Joseph Matthew presented us with a grim reality of the plight of the illegal immigrants with the personal accounts of different people. Attitudes vary greatly from each other. In the documentary, a man an American philanthropist engaged in distributing waters along the route that the illegal immigrants would come across. As he states, ‘No one deserves to die in the desert for a couple of water’, he believed that those immigrants aliens have no choice but to seek a job at the united states for the sake of supporting their families. Meanwhile, opposite attitudes were also addressed. Also, farmers were in favor of the undocumented immigrants for they contributed to an essential part of their labor force. Meanwhile, a minuteman group stood up to guard Mexico and Arizona border with their own weapons, holding the idea that those illegal immigrants contaminated their community and should be swept away. Besides the diverse attitudes addressed toward the crisis, the documentary takes a realistic point of view on the problem with much supporting evidence. Upon seeing the image of an actual photo of the body of an eight-mouth pregnant Mexican woman, I immediately felt sorrow