How Cracking Down on Human Smuggling Helps Criminals Make Millions of Dollars a Year Dara Lind - Vox
go to original April 23, 2015

A map of border deaths from the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants.

In this week's issue of the New Yorker, Sarah Stillman has a feature on the horrifyingly lucrative business of kidnapping unauthorized migrants - including children - as they make their way across the US/Mexico border. It's a compelling story on its own, and you should read it. But it's especially useful to read in light of the migrant crisis going on in the Mediterranean right now - where thousands have drowned attempting to reach Europe - because it shows how often countries' responses to human smuggling end up targeting the victims, not the perpetrators.

Part of the reason the Mediterranean has become the most dangerous border in the world is because the industry of transporting migrants (many of whom are seeking asylum) to Europe has been taken over by professionalized, organized crime. That's exactly what's happened in North America over the past 20 years.

That's not a coincidence. When countries make it harder for people to cross the border on their own, or with small-scale, ad hoc smugglers, they have no choice but to turn to more sophisticated criminal networks. And the most desperate migrants - the ones who are most likely to be fleeing violence or persecution - become the easiest targets for smugglers, traffickers, and kidnappers.

Stillman's article explains that this is why drug cartels got into the business of kidnapping migrants to begin with. Even if a migrant's family couldn't pay the kind of ransom for an individual captive that a rich government official could, criminals would be able to kidnap many of them without attracting the attention of law enforcement.

Read the rest at Vox

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!