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Increased border security measures under the Bush administration have focused attention on the high death rate for immigrants illegally crossing the U.S-Mexico border.

Nestor Rodriguez is co-director for the Center of Immigration Research at the University of Houston.

"We don't know the exact number of undocumented migrants who cross the border per year. The INS annually apprehends over a million, maybe 1.2 million, but even that's not a totally reliable figure because those are the numbers of apprehension. And we know that they represent the same individual in many cases who cross more than once and get apprehended more than once."

Casues of death along the border vary.

"Primarily there are three factors that have increased the number of border death. One is the volume of migrants coming, if you have more migrants coming, you tend to have more border death because there are more poeple taking risks. Another factor is the temperature or the weather when you have a lot of heat, the migrants are more at risk when they're crossing through the desert. The third and important one is the enforcement activity of the border control. When the border control are busy closing up popular crossing places for migrants, migrants tend to go around and look for other places to cross."

Some try to make the dangerous journey alone, while others hire guides.

"Try to cross, without much experience they try to cross on their own. They may come with other groups of migrants or by themselves and that's high risk because if you don't know the area and if you're trying to cross the desert or shrink through the Rio Grande you may find some serious obstacles. Another usual scenario for migrants is to hire a smuggler we call them a 'coyote,' a smuggler will bring you all the way to the border, and maybe into Houston."

Hundreds die in border crossings such as these each year. As security concerns lead to increased enforcement, experts like Rodriguez say we need to find a better way to handle illigal immigrants coming to the United States for work in order to save lives.

"A better way would be a way if we were to regulate more the migrant labor that comes into this country. It's obvious that we use a significant amount of migrant labor. So I think we need to do a hard nose estimatation of how many workers do we really need and how much do we really use. How many of those can we legalize? Because we know they're a part of the economy already, so we can reduce the number of people who cross ... which is another way of reducing risk and which is another way of reducing death."

Sally Schmidt for KPFT News in Houston.

E-mail Sally Schmidt at sschimdt50@juno.com .