As border enforcement stiffens, fewer ‘safe’ routes are leaving workers and drug traffickers corralled side-by-side in northern Mexico. This precarious arrangement likely contributes to the recent drop in Mexican immigration. More and more often unarmed workers are being assaulted and robbed by traffickers, adding to the perils of border crossing.
During the day, motley clothed people play card games, moving as little as possible in the suffocating heat. The drug runners, known as burreros, stand out, dressed in black from head to toe, their faces often covered with ski masks despite the temperature. As night falls the final push begins. Most of the 2,000-mile US-Mexican border is a desert wasteland, a region where lawlessness reigns if not for the spotty presence of the US Border Patrol (BP). It is in this nether region that the prospective workers are victimized by armed burreros.
It didn’t used to be this way. Immigration and trafficking occupied different spheres, with varying veins into the US. Mexicans looking for a better life up north typically made their way to a border town whose economy was based on human smuggling. Here coyotes, human smuggling guides, would carry them into the US, while ramshackle flophouses rented rooms for $3 a day and local stores hocked canned goods and backpacks. Meanwhile, drug runners, needing to transport large amounts of cocaine or marijuana, relied on slipping their cargo past BP agents at designated checkpoints.
Now things are different. Crossings into Arizona are estimated to be down by a third between October and April, according to BP arrests in Tucson. The Mexican government reports emigration is down by 25%. The main culprit is the US recession. But the drug crackdown in Mexico is pushing the cartels to change hubs, forcing them to use the same obscure routes preferred by coyotes.
Drug cartels are militarizing what remains of the safe crossing routes. In addition to the anecdotal accounts of assault and robbery, los narcos are burrowing into the coyote business. Fetching $1,300-$1,800 a head for navigation to the US, coyotes amassed substantial wealth over much of the past decade. The cartels are now moving in to take a cut, extorting money from coyote operations. The threat of violence in the event of non-compliance is clear.
The immediate consequence of this trend is fewer immigrants crossing into the US. Fewer illegal immigrants coming into the United States may seem a good thing, unless such a trend is symptomatic of a greater evil—more crime in the American Southwest as the drug trade comes to dominate border crossings.
Beneath the surface, the policy weaknesses on both sides of the border are being exposed. To this point, the US has forsaken the realities of immigration along the world’s busiest international border in search of stricter enforcement. And successive Mexican governments have ignored the immigration issue, even passively condoning it as a way of mitigating unemployment and encouraging remittances. As a result, the US has been ham fisted in responding to the rising influence of Mexican drug gangs within its borders, and Mexico has been careless in addressing the immigration problem even while it is cracking down on drugs. More concerted policy by both the US and Mexico will be required in order to meet the security needs of each nation.