A politically conservative reader will probably find much of the content in this book fairly uncomfortable and challenging, and that is by design. The story of these immigrants and their deaths is evidence that whatever they are fleeing is so horrific and dangerous that literal death itself could not stop them from trying to escape. The cartel states in Mexico are powerful enough to threaten the Mexican citizens to no end, and with no jobs, the economy is disintegrating. They have no hope in their home towns.
Urrea shows that this story is not the story of Mexican immigrants "coming to steal American jobs," but rather Mexican family men attempting to escape political turmoil. The question of the book is therefore an analysis of empathy and privilege. The book concerns empathy because the reader has the option to either empathize with the dead and near-dead, or the reader can choose an "us versus them" attitude, disregarding the value of the lost human life.
The book elicits a question of privilege because it is solely American privilege that perpetuates harmful narratives about illegal immigration. The narratives about immigration that ignore the real threat of the cartels in Mexican cities are influenced by privilege because many Americans literally do not understand what it is like for gangs to rival the power of the government, for those gangs to randomly murder and terrorize the entire nation, and for the only hope of a future to be escape. That is why Urrea explains that more thoroughly, because the political discussion is often ignorant about the threat of danger. The question needs to be asked and answered whether these are actually immigrants or refugees.
