The Price of Tougher Border Controls--Coyotes

Professional people-smugglers, popularly known as coyotes or polleros, have been a fixture of the U.S.-Mexico border landscape since the early 1950s. They gain notoriety only when their activities culminate in violent, media-genic incidents like the recent beating of two illegal immigrants by sheriff’s deputies in Riverside and the fatal crashes of two smugglers’ vehicles packed with illegal immigrants being pursued by the Border Patrol in Riverside and San Diego counties.

Considering the inhumane ways in which many of these smugglers treat their human cargo, there is a natural tendency to demonize them as the most despicable element of the variegated criminal class operating in the U.S.- Mexico borderlands. Both the U.S. and Mexican governments periodically declare “war” on the coyotes. If apprehended by U.S. immigration authorities, they are far more likely to face long incarceration and prosecution than the illegal border-crossers whom they assist.

While it is politically convenient to target professional people-smugglers, neither the U.S. nor the Mexican government is eager to admit that its own actions or failures of performance have helped create the climate in which the coyotes’ business can flourish.

Perhaps the most predictable consequences of any action, however symbolic, by the U.S. government to tighten border controls are to increase demand for the services of people-smugglers and to boost the prices they can charge. On the Mexican side, a steadily growing clientele for coyotes is guaranteed by the government’s failure to create economically attractive alternatives to emigration and to cushion the effects of recurrent economic crises.

The coyotes themselves defy easy categorization. They range from small-time entrepreneurs to large, highly organized smuggling rings that channel labor from the U.S.-Mexico border to Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, New York and other major labor markets. Their services range from merely helping unauthorized migrants climb over a border fence to providing falsified identification documents, a prearranged job and transportation to the employment site.

Depending on the package of services, a migrant’s country of origin (those from Asia, Central and South America typically pay much more than Mexicans), and his or her final destination in the United States, coyotes may charge from $150 to $30,000 a head. The higher fees are sometimes paid in installments while the migrant works in the United States. In most cases, however, the smugglers are paid immediately, using money loaned by U.S.-based relatives or moneylenders in the communities of origin.

Many coyotes deliver exactly what they promise and do not abuse the pollos (“chickens,” border slang for migrants who use polleros) in their charge. Others are vicious and totally unscrupulous, risking their customers’ lives by recklessly transporting them in grossly overcrowded vehicles, extorting extra money from them and selling them into virtual indentured servitude.

Most coyotes are Mexican citizens based in Mexican border cities. They are subject to a Mexican law that defines their activities as a federal crime and prescribes two-to-10-year prison terms and large fines for violators (even stiffer penalties are being considered by the government of President Ernesto Zedillo). Mexico jailed more than 700 coyotes in 1995--an 80% increase over 1994.

Nevertheless, the coyotes being penalized represent a tiny subset of those operating along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, and each day brings many new entrants into this highly lucrative business. Combating people-smuggling is, in some important ways, even more difficult than stemming the illegal drug trade. While some major people-smuggling “cartels” do exist, the transborder traffic in labor is much more decentralized. Except for the most abusive coyotes, Mexicans tend to view the people-smugglers not as reprehensible criminals but as necessary facilitators. For those who require their services, coyotes are the key to entry into a labor market where they can earn up to 25 times what they would earn for similar work in Mexico.

In spite of stiffer border controls implemented by the Clinton administration, the number of U.S.-bound migrants from economically depressed rural communities, as well as Mexico City and other large metropolitan areas in Mexico, continues to increase. Migrants are just paying more to be smuggled north, and a higher percentage of them are now using professional smugglers, precisely because of the increased difficulty of crossing the border at traditionally favored ports of entry like San Diego County and El Paso.

Concentrated border-enforcement operations like Operation Gatekeeper, launched in San Diego in October 1993, have mainly served to push illegal crossings into more difficult terrain. Instead of a quick dash across the border from Tijuana neighborhoods and onto nearby freeways leading north, migrants may now face an arduous 50-mile, 2 1/2-day trek over the mountains in the east San Diego back country. Evading the Border Patrol and safely reaching pick-up points for the journey north require knowledge that many migrants do not possess; hence, the increased need for skillful guides.

The inevitability of a profit-making industry to facilitate the entry and employment of immigrant workers in today’s relatively open, increasingly labor-short, advanced capitalist economies is illustrated by the case of Japan, which has the the world’s most highly developed system of foreign-labor brokerage. Since the late 1980s, Japan has imported hundreds of thousands of predominantly unskilled workers from Latin America (mainly Brazil and Peru) and countries throughout the Pacific Basin. A high percentage of these workers have passed through the hands of professional labor brokers.

Everything that Japan’s foreign-labor brokers do is technically illegal, but their activities are virtually ignored by officials. For the companies that can afford their services (and they charge fees that make legally admitted foreign workers nearly as expensive as Japanese), the brokers perform a highly valuable if not indispensable function. They recruit workers from their countries of origin, arrange housing and, sometimes, medical insurance, pay workers’ compensation taxes to the government, handle reams of paperwork and deliver the workers directly to production lines. When demand for a product falls, unneeded foreign workers--whose contracts are with brokers rather than the companies that employ them--can be disposed of with a single telephone call to the labor broker.

As is true of the Mexican coyotes, labor brokers operating in Japan are a mixed bag. The largest of them are respectable businessmen supplying hundreds of foreign workers (mostly Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry with proper visas) to corporate clients that include subsidiaries of Japan’s largest conglomerates. Others function as part of the vast underworld of businesses controlled by the yakuza, providing mostly illegal foreign workers to small firms that cannot afford the services of major brokers and offering few (if any) benefits for workers.

In Japan as in the United States, new jobs for low-skilled workers are constantly being created in labor-intensive industries, even under sluggish macroeconomic conditions. The demand for labor to fill such jobs is not being met by native-born workers, and many employers have developed an explicit preference for hard-working immigrants, even when, as in Japan, they are not significantly cheaper than domestic labor.

Under such circumstances, the role of labor brokers seems secure. Governments in both labor-importing and labor-exporting countries may inveigh against them, but political rhetoric and efforts by law-enforcement agencies are no match for the army of workers and employers who find it necessary or convenient to use the intermediaries’ services.

Only the price tag is sensitive to what happens in the arena of laws and public policies. In Japan, most of the cost of labor brokerage is borne by the companies that use foreign workers; in the United States, it is the impoverished workers themselves who typically pay. As the economic desperation of potential migrants in Mexico rises, the hazards of placing themselves in the hands of professional smugglers are well-understood but accepted as just another cost of earning a living wage al norte.*