UCLA cultural anthropologist Jason de Leon reports that about 470 migrants died per year from 1998 to 2012 trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. By comparison, in the United States there were an average of 33,000 “deaths of despair,” a category including suicide, drug overdose and alcoholic liver disease, each year between 1999 and 2017, according to Princeton researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton.