Smuggling of immigrants

Definition: Practice of illegally conveying undocumented aliens into the United States

Significance:A 2007 report of the United Nations declared that human trafficking and smuggling of willing and unwilling persons into the United States and other affluent nations had become one of the largest international crime problems in the world. Only illegal trafficking of drugs was known to be a larger criminal business. Human smuggling, which remained a significant humanitarian issue into the 2020s, has been practiced by small bands, organized street gangs, and large well-funded and well-equipped crime syndicates. The ability of the US government to combat human smuggling has been impeded by budget cuts, resource shortages, and the sheer number of possible entry points along the nation’s long coastlines and land borders.

The smuggling of immigrants into the United States has taken two primary forms: human trafficking and human smuggling. Although the two forms have points in common and the terms are not always used consistently, they also have significant differences. Human trafficking may be characterized as preying on impoverished individuals, particularly in countries disturbed by political unrest, famine conditions, warfare, or other problems that magnify economic problems.

Human Trafficking

Human traffickers lure individuals to immigrate to other nations with promises of good jobs and other inducements. However, after the traffickers convey the individuals to the other nations, they typically hold them hostage to exploit them economically. The most common victims whom traffickers bring to the United States are women, who may be made to work as exotic dancers, prostitutes, personal servants, or sweatshop employees in exchange for their travel to the United States. The common goal of the traffickers is to prey on defenseless parties and force them through sexual or labor exploitation into a modern-day form of slavery.

Victims of human traffickers generally have few freedoms, and the bulk of the earnings from their employment go to the individuals or groups responsible for bringing them to the country. During the early twenty-first century, worldwide human trafficking was estimated to involve almost 1 million victims a year. According to the United Nations, approximately fifty thousand human trafficking victims were detected in 2018 alone.

Human Smuggling

Human smuggling differs from trafficking in that the people whom professional smugglers illegally convey into other countries are willing immigrants who voluntarily pay the smugglers for their services. Most immigrants who pay to be smuggled into the United States and other nations do so to seek economic opportunities not available in their own nations. Some smuggled immigrants are also motivated by the desire to be reunited with family members and friends who have preceded them.

All parties involved in human smuggling in the United States do so knowingly violating the criminal statutes of the United States. However, the risks of getting caught do not outweigh the potential rewards of succeeding. Smuggled immigrants who are apprehended in the United States are usually deported out of the country. In contrast, immigrants who are the involuntary victims of human traffickers are sometimes granted sanctuary in the United States. When smuggled immigrants find economic success in the United States, their experiences often inspire more people in their homelands to attempt to follow their examples.

Smuggling of Immigrants from Mexico

Undocumented immigration from Mexico, which shares a long border with the United States, has long been an issue. Only a fraction of the millions of Mexicans who have wished to work in the United States have been permitted entry with documentation, leaving the rest to consider ways of entering without authorization. Smuggling has consequently become a popular option. Stopping illegal human crossings and drug smuggling at the border are daily concerns of US Border Patrol agents.

Smuggling attempts begin with the groups that prepare to transport immigrants across the border. These groups are sometimes small and unorganized, but most are run much like organized crime elements such as the Italian Mafia. The smugglers are popularly known as “coyotes” because they prey on immigrants desperate to reach the United States. The means of conveyance they provide are usually not comfortable and may include overland walking and running, river crossings, and carriage in trucks and trains, sometimes within windowless compartments. The trips may take from days to weeks, during which time the travelers may be provided with little food, water, or rest. The goal of the coyotes is to conduct large numbers of eager immigrants as quickly and cheaply as possible. Moreover, it is not uncommon for the coyotes to abuse their charges. Women, and most often adolescent girls, are forced into sexual acts and may be beaten by their male handlers. Those too weak to continue may be left to die.

The Human Toll

Because of the brutal conditions that smuggled immigrants are often forced to endure, injuries and deaths are common. In May 2009, for example, the US Coast Guard rescued twenty-six people, ten of whom died, who were being smuggled by sea from Haiti and the Bahamas. Until the early 2020s, the deadliest smuggling incident on record, however, occurred in Victoria, Texas, in 2003, when nineteen immigrants abandoned inside a sweltering van perished from suffocation. During the early twenty-first century, smuggled immigrants have died because of suffocation, drowning, torture, dehydration, and starvation in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, California, and many port cities along the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Apprehension and prosecution of the smugglers responsible for these deaths has been difficult. The Victoria, Texas, case took more than five years to reach a conclusion, when one of the smugglers involved finally pleaded guilty. A total of ten people died after having been kept, along with twenty-nine others, in a tractor-trailer that was discovered in a San Antonio, Texas, Walmart's parking lot in 2017.

Five years later, in 2022, San Antonio was the site of another significant immigrant smuggling incident that this time resulted in the deaths of fifty-three people attempting to migrate from countries in Central America as well as Mexico, making it the deadliest immigrant smuggling case up to that point. Amid a summer marked by particularly extreme heat waves, it was reported that the tractor-trailer holding over sixty immigrants, who had not been given water or access to air conditioning, had been left beside a highway after having proceeded through checkpoints. Using surveillance footage and registration records, authorities subsequently took four men into custody and, by July, two had been federally indicted on several related charges; one individual was accused of having driven the truck while the other was accused of involvement in the orchestration of the smuggling case. At the same time, the two other men in custody were indicted on weapons-possession charges. Several media reports noted that by this time, organized smuggling operations, several involving Mexican cartels, over the United States' southern border had only increased due to the restrictions and expulsion policies put in place following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Capturing human smugglers in the United States and other nations has been difficult in part because of the complexity of smuggling operations. Generally tightly centralized, the groups use safe houses for transporting immigrants and often change the location of these houses so frequently that law enforcement can never catch up with them. Cellular telephones, Global Positioning System satellites, and other technological advances have helped smugglers work more quickly and stealthily.

Smuggling and Trafficking as a World Problem

Smuggling is a world problem afflicting every populated region. After the collapse of the Soviet Union during the early 1990s, many former Soviet bloc nations such as Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, and Ukraine became hot spots for human trafficking and smuggling of women and young children. The sometimes willing participants are tricked into prostitution and sexual exploitation and sold to handlers upon reaching their destination. Victims find themselves in unfamiliar countries without families, friends, or economic resources. Their problems are compounded by the fact that police agencies in the countries in which they find themselves may be on the take from the traffickers who have brought them there.

European nations, such as Great Britain, have made strides in combating the smuggling and trafficking of immigrants within their own countries through new legislation, tougher enforcement, and stronger penalties.

Many Asian smuggling and trafficking groups have been known for transporting undocumented immigrants by ship and using poorly guarded port cities as places of entry into the United States. The United States has worked closely with the Chinese and Japanese governments to combat the illegal transportation of immigrants on fishing vessels and cargo ships. By the early twenty-first century, other Asian countries were also enforcing stricter penalties for trafficking.

Impact on Crime Rates

Increased human smuggling in the United States has contributed to increases in other criminal activity. For example, immigrants attempting to elude capture have wounded and killed US law-enforcement personnel. Western and southwestern states such as New Mexico, California, and Arizona have also seen increases in drug-related crimes, sexual assaults, robberies, burglaries, and murders in which immigrants have been the perpetrators. In 2004, Phoenix, Arizona, police estimated that an increase in the city’s murder rate was largely a result of violence related to illegal immigration.

In response to increased human smuggling and international projections that the issue would continue to grow, the US Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 to improve law enforcement at all levels. Under the new law, local, state, and federal agencies worked together to combat human trafficking. These efforts have included more routine driver’s license checks, sweeps of businesses to find illegal immigrants, and the increased federal efforts to detain and deport illegal immigrants. In addition, border southwestern states have set stronger penalties for illegal immigrants, including lengthy jail and prison terms. They have also provided more resources to combat illegal smuggling. Creation of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2003 as an agency of the new Department of Homeland Security has also helped efforts to combat human smuggling.

Outside the United States, Interpol, which coordinates the law-enforcement agencies of more than 180 nations, has increased its efforts to combat the problem of smuggling and trafficking. Linking the crime to drugs and terrorist attacks, Interpol has listed human smuggling and trafficking as one of its priority crime areas. In addition to trafficking and smuggling of humans, this area includes the use of internet photos and transportation of children for sexual exploitation.

In July 2015 the nonprofit, nonpartisan American Immigration Council released a special report on the criminalization of immigration in the United States. The report contradicted perceptions that rising crime is attributable to undocumented immigration. The report found that higher immigration is historically associated with lower crime rates; immigrants are less likely than native-born residents to be incarcerated; and, immigrants are not as likely as native-born residents to engage in criminal behavior. Authors of the report pointed out that many US immigration policies are created based on stereotypes rather than facts.

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