In the United States, local immigration authorities might consider the challenges facing their Australian counterparts as something of a holiday.
One of the more complicated issues for the US is its relationship with Mexico. Sharing a 3000-kilometre border, the most-crossed in the world, serves up its own unique set of circumstances.
Anyone who has driven from San Diego to Los Angeles has seen the infamous yellow signs posted on the edge of the freeway warning drivers to be on the lookout for people crossing the road.
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Those signs, it should be noted, are not necessarily aimed at converting speeding drivers into immigration vigilantes.
The message is quite simple – try not to run over families crossing the freeway lanes as they flee north from the border.
But recently, a whole new set of numbers have been thrown into the border's equation, making the region more than a just a gateway to the US for illegal immigrants.
Mexican drug cartels are fighting a vicious war near border towns that, in some cases, is forcing families on the Mexican side of the border to cross into the United States seeking safety.
“They are killing people over there who have nothing to do with drug trafficking,” said Vicente Burciaga, who fled the Mexican town of El Porvenir for Fort Hancock, across the border in the US, after gang members burned down five homes in his neighborhood and murdered a neighbour.
“They kill you just for having seen what they are doing,” he told the New York Times.
Fort Hancock was once a sleepy Texas town. It boasts – the term is used loosely – one restaurant, a feed store, a small grocery, a petrol station and a couple of general stores.
No more. The high school has had to increase security as Mexican gangs target the children of those it continues feuds with.
A little further north, in El Paso, Texas, 30,000 Mexicans have moved from across the border in the past two years because of the gang-related violence in Ciudad Juárez.
According to a report released by Mexico's government, more than 22,700 people have been killed in the country's drug war since a crackdown on cartels began more than three years ago.
The report claimed that in 2009, 9,635 people were killed in violence linked to organised crime.
Ciudad Juárez, a city of 1.3 million people, is known as “Murder City” and called “the most dangerous city in the world” – outside a declared war zone.
In 2010, recent numbers say 686 people have been murdered in the city.
But the disease has now spread. El Porvenir now resembles a ghost town, former residents say.
It's easy to see why – earlier this year a drug gang hung a banner in El Porvenir's main square threatening death for anyone left in the town on Easter.
Not exactly what they had in mind when real estate agents describe an area as “upwardly mobile”.
