Border Bombshell: The big business of illegal immigration & human trafficking
Bottom Line: There are a myriad of staggering takeaways to consider with the crisis at our southern border. Two that stick most prominently in my mind are these numbers I recently calculated based on DHS statistics:
- We have more asylum seekers in the pipeline than we’ve had in the prior 15 years preceding 2018 combined
- 98.5% of all asylum seekers processed since December 21st of 2018 have been illegitimate asylum seekers (aka illegal immigrants)
Throughout the past couple of years, I’ve also detailed the work of corrupt open borders organization Pueblo Sin Fronteras that pays for and organizes caravans in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Most recently I exposed and aided the effort to prevent 1,000+ illegal immigrants from being dumped in Broward and Palm Beach Counties per month. I’m resetting the table for a purpose. With all of this going on you might imagine there’s a gigantic and flourishing black market for human trafficking into the United States and you’d be right.
The Rand Corporation just completed a comprehensive study entitled Human Trafficking and Associated Revenues. What it uncovered was a staggering, sophisticated, system of cartels creating “programs” for trafficking people into the US with huge profits.
Among two of their initial findings:
- Actors that engage in human smuggling range from independent operators, to ad hoc groups, to loose networks, to more-formally structured networks, such as TCOs.
- Many of these actors are subcontractors that offer their services to different networks or groups or other independent operators at the same time.
And once you peel back the layers of what they’ve found...it makes roaches sound pleasant by comparison. Various packages are advertised to people looking to illegally enter the US. They range in prices based on circumstances with costs typically as high as $10k per person. There are packages to smuggle you across the southern border or in through other avenues based on how much one’s willing to spend. There are programs for children and for pregnant women. There are methods that include considerable physical activity and little.
Rand found that as recently as 2017, long before peak crisis, these traffickers pocketed up to $2.3 billion per year. You can only imagine what those numbers look like today given what we’ve recently seen at the border. But there’s no crisis right? And the point is two-fold. At $2+ billion annually that tells you that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants have been trafficked into the US per year. These are the one’s not accounted for as part of the documented DHS numbers. Second, by not adequately addressing the crisis we’re in effect incentivizing human traffickers to earn billions per year to put illegal immigrants into harm's way to enter our country. It’s a moral obligation to address this for Americans, but also for those encouraged to be subjected to human trafficking to enter the US. Including women and children.