How a Smuggling Network Prices a Border Crossing and Who Gets Paid

Nobody in the smuggling trade sends a thank-you note to a policy that makes crossing look easy. They send an invoice.

That is the thing the public debate leaves out. We talk about the border in the language of rights, numbers, courts and compassion, and all of that matters. But there is a market underneath it all, with sellers, buyers, middlemen and a price, and the people running it read our laws more closely than we do. Whatever our policy announces, they translate into a sales pitch.

The claim

My claim is that human smuggling is a business, that its customers are migrants who pay and its profits flow to criminal organizations, and that policies which signal that entry is possible increase the demand the business sells to. I say this with no hostility to the migrants. They are the product's customers and, too often, its victims. The target of this post is the trade.

What the law says

Start with the statute, because it is the foundation. Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, codified at 8 U.S.C. 1324, makes it a federal crime to bring in, transport, harbor or encourage the unlawful entry of people who are not authorized to be in the United States. Several features matter.

• The core offenses cover bringing a person to the United States at a place other than a designated port of entry, knowingly transporting a person who is in the country unlawfully in furtherance of that violation, harboring or concealing such a person, and encouraging or inducing unlawful entry.
• The penalties scale with the harm. Transporting, harboring or encouraging unlawful entry carries a prison term of up to five years, and up to ten when the offense is committed for commercial advantage or private financial gain; bringing a person across at a place other than a port of entry carries up to ten years in any case. If the offense causes serious bodily injury or places a life in jeopardy, the maximum rises to twenty years. If a person dies, the sentence can be any term of years or life, and the law permits a sentence of death in the most serious cases.

I would ask you to read the text on Congress.gov for the details. The point is that Congress has recognized, in the structure of the penalties, that smuggling is not a single act. It is a business that can end in a death, and the law grades the crime accordingly.

The stages of the trade

A crossing is not one transaction. It is a supply chain, and each link has its own operator who takes a cut. In general terms, the stages run as follows.

Recruitment. The trade begins far from the border. Recruiters, often working through family networks, social media and word of mouth, find customers in their home countries and sell them a package: a route, a price and a promise. Some of what they promise is true, and some is not. The recruiter's income depends on a steady supply of customers, so his message is shaped by what customers want to hear, which is that the journey is manageable and that arrival is likely to be rewarded.

Transport through the countries in between. Many migrants travel through several countries before they reach the United States. Along the route they use buses, trucks, boats and local guides, each of which charges. The expense of the journey is rarely a single payment. It is a series of fees, with debts piling up as the trip goes on.

Stash houses. Near the border, migrants are held in houses, motels or other buildings until the crossing can be arranged. The stash house is the warehouse of the trade. The operators control who comes and goes and often demand additional payments. A migrant who cannot pay or whose family cannot pay may be held until someone does.

The crossing itself. Guides take migrants across the border on foot, through rivers, over fences and across desert, or they move them through checkpoints in vehicles. Some of these guides are employees of the network and some are freelancers who pay the network for the right to operate.

The corridor tax. This is the part that surprises people. In the regions where criminal organizations control the crossing corridors, no one crosses without their permission. Smugglers who work the corridor pay a fee for access, sometimes called a piso, which is a Spanish word for the right to operate on a piece of ground. The organization collects its tax whether or not any individual crossing succeeds. This is why the cartels' interest in smuggling is steady and low-risk: they do not need to carry the people themselves. They own the road and charge the tolls. The business model of those organizations is discussed more broadly in The Cartels Run Like Multinational Firms, So Policy Should Treat Them That Way.

The delivery end. On the American side, drivers, safe-house operators and sometimes document providers complete the trip. In some cases the final payment is collected on delivery, which is why migrants' families are often told to be ready with the money.

At every stage, someone takes a share. The recruiter, the local guide, the transporter, the stash-house operator, the corridor controller and the delivery driver each earn income. A rational criminal enterprise would not give up any of those stages, and the price a migrant pays covers all of them.

How the price is set

I will not give you figures. I do not have verified numbers, and the numbers shift with the route, the nationality of the customer, the difficulty of the crossing and the time of year. What I can describe is the logic.

The price rises with risk to the seller, because the seller must be paid for the chance of arrest. It rises with distance and complexity, because a longer route has more links. It rises when enforcement is strong, because the smuggler's costs go up and because a customer who is more likely to be caught is willing to pay for a better chance. And it falls when the crossing becomes easy, or when a customer believes that being caught at the border will not mean being sent home.

That last point is the critical one. A price is set where supply meets demand, and demand depends on the customer's expected result. If a person believes that reaching the border and making a claim will lead to a long stay in the United States, then a high price is worth paying. If he believes that crossing illegally will lead to prompt return, the price is not worth paying, and fewer people buy.

The same logic applies to policy. A rule that is widely understood to allow release into the country pending a hearing that is years away raises the expected value of the journey. A rule that is widely understood to lead to prompt removal lowers it. Smugglers advertise accordingly. They did not invent the incentives. They read them.

The abuses

The harm in this trade is not abstract, and I would be failing the reader if I wrote about prices and left it there.

Migrants in the care of smuggling networks have been robbed, assaulted and held for ransom in stash houses. Women and children are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. Some are abandoned in the desert when a guide decides the group is too slow. Some drown in the Rio Grande. Some die of heat and thirst in terrain where the temperature can be lethal.

Two events deserve to be named because they are part of the public record. In August 2010, in San Fernando, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, the bodies of 72 migrants were found. They had been killed by a criminal group, and the case drew international attention. And on June 27, 2022, 53 migrants died in a tractor-trailer abandoned in San Antonio, Texas, in a smuggling operation that was prosecuted in federal court. Those were people who paid for a journey, and they did not arrive. No policy that calls itself compassionate can overlook that the trade kills.

I draw from this a conclusion that some who oppose enforcement will find uncomfortable. The case for a secure border rests on a moral foundation as well as a legal one. A border that is open in effect but closed in law creates a market in danger. The more reliably the border is enforced, the less business the smugglers have, and the fewer people place themselves in their hands. That argument is made in full in A Secure Border Is the Humane Border, and Here Is the Moral Case.

The steelman: enforcement raises the price, and the price raises the profit

There is an objection, and a good one. Economists have observed that tougher enforcement can make the smuggling business more profitable per customer, not less, because it raises the price of a successful crossing. Enforcement also pushes crossings into more dangerous terrain, where more people die. On this reading, the harder the border, the richer the cartels and the deadlier the trip.

It is a serious argument, and I will answer it in three parts.

First, price is not profit, and the effect on volume matters more than the effect on price. If enforcement raises the price but reduces the number of customers by more than the price rises, the smugglers earn less in total. The aim of deterrence is to shrink the market. Higher prices on a smaller market are consistent with a smaller trade.

Second, the objection proves too much. It would imply that no law against any crime is worth enforcing, since enforcement raises the price of the illegal good. The same reasoning would have us repeal laws against theft, since tougher policing makes stolen goods more valuable to fences. The purpose of enforcement is not to make the criminal market unprofitable at every moment but to make crime less common and more costly over time.

Third, the real deterrent is not the wall or the patrol but the consequence. A customer decides whether to pay on the basis of what he expects to happen after crossing. If the expected consequence is prompt removal, the demand falls, and it falls without any shift of crossings to harder terrain. That is why the rules about what happens to a person after arrest at the border matter as much as the physical barrier. The policies that bear on this, such as Remain in Mexico and Safe Third Country Rules, How Each Is Supposed to Work, are best understood in this light: they aim at the expected value of the trip.

Who gets paid, and who should be pursued

If we take the business seriously, we can ask where enforcement pressure lands best.

1. Prosecute the organizers, not only the drivers. The drivers who are arrested are the easiest to replace. The recruiters, financiers and stash-house operators are harder to replace. Section 1324 reaches them all, and its tougher penalties apply when the offense is done for gain.
2. Follow the money. Smuggling proceeds move through money transmitters, bank accounts and cash couriers. The financial tools discussed in connection with the cartels apply here too, and the financial footprint of a smuggling network is often easier to trace than its people.
3. Hold the stash house operators responsible. Harboring is a crime, and it is a crime with victims. Raids on stash houses protect the people held in them.
4. Close the signal. Because smugglers sell on expectation, the government's public messages and its actual practice should match. If the law says one thing and the practice does another, the smuggler will advertise the practice.
5. Protect the victims. Migrants who have been abused by smugglers are witnesses and victims in a federal crime. The law should treat them as such, and use their testimony against the networks.

What the Founders would recognize

The Founders were not strangers to the idea that a nation controls its own boundaries. The Declaration of Independence lists, among the grievances against the King, his obstruction of the naturalization of foreigners and the conditions for new appropriations of land, which tells you that the Americans of 1776 thought the terms of entry should be set by the people who lived here. And the Constitution, in Article IV, section 4, promises that the United States "shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion." A government's duty to protect the states is not a metaphor. Whether mass illegal entry fits the constitutional meaning of invasion is a contested question, taken up in Does Mass Illegal Entry Count as an Invasion Under the Constitution. But the principle that a government must control who comes in, and cannot leave the gate to private operators, is not controversial.

When a criminal organization decides who crosses and who pays, it has taken over a function that belongs to the government. It collects a toll on a public frontier. That is a kind of private government, and the Founders, who feared factions and private power, would have called it by its name.

The case in brief

1. Smuggling is a tiered business of recruiters, transporters, stash-house operators, guides and corridor controllers who each take a cut, with cartels collecting a fee for the right to operate on the routes they control.
2. The federal smuggling statute, 8 U.S.C. 1324, grades penalties by harm, from a basic offense through commercial-gain offenses to those that cause serious injury or death.
3. The price a migrant pays reflects risk, distance and enforcement, but demand depends on the customer's expected result, so policies that signal release into the country raise the demand smugglers sell to.
4. The abuses are real, from the 72 migrants found in San Fernando in 2010 to the 53 who died in a San Antonio trailer in 2022, and a secure border reduces the market in danger.
5. The answer to the claim that enforcement only raises prices is that deterrence shrinks the market, and the best targets are the organizers, the money and the stash houses, with victims protected.

What you can do: Read 8 U.S.C. 1324 on Congress.gov and then ask your representative what the Justice Department is doing to prosecute smuggling organizers rather than only drivers.