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Report: The Migrant Crisis Is Earning Billions For Smugglers thefederalist.com/2019/04/24/ill…
A new report from the RAND Corporation found that smugglers and cartels earned as much as $2.3 billion from Central American migrants in 2017.
Migrants generally pay smugglers and smuggling networks anywhere from $2,000 to $7,000 per person to get to America. A portion of that money ends up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels—TCOs—even though the cartels don’t directly participate in the smuggling.
Human smugglers and drug traffickers conduct similar activities — providing illicit transportation services across international borders — and do so along common smuggling corridors, suggesting opportunities for overlapping business.
Drug-trafficking TCOs do control primary smuggling corridors into the United States and charge migrants a ‘tax,’ known as a piso, to pass through their territories.
In addition, drug-trafficking TCOs may also coordinate some unlawful migrants’ border crossings to divert attention from other illicit activities, and recruit or coerce some to carry drugs.
This last point has been well-attested by Border Patrol agents, whose time is increasingly spent processing and transporting large groups of migrants families that have turned themselves in while cartels move drugs across the border just a few miles away.
Because these groups of families and unaccompanied minors often number in the hundreds, Border Patrol resources are almost completely diverted from law enforcement duties, giving cartels an opening to conduct their cross-border business without interference from U.S. authorities.
That is, the asylum crisis is directly related to drug smuggling. It’s all one big black market, controlled at the border by people willing to enforce the rules of the market by violence.
Given the number of people now making the journey north, which could exceed a million this fiscal year. The Rand report gives a wide range of total revenues from all types of smuggling, from $200 million to $2.3 billion in 2017.
