Smuggler Nation (51 page)

In this heated political climate, in which politicians spanning the political spectrum were scrambling to outdo each other in proposing tough new immigration-control measures, President Bill Clinton launched a high-profile border-enforcement crackdown. Signaling the administration’s new commitment, the attorney general and the INS commissioner became frequent visitors to the border, and the attorney general even appointed a special representative to the southwest border—immediately dubbed the “border czar” by the press.

Long viewed as the neglected stepchild of the Department of Justice, the INS suddenly became one of the fastest-growing federal agencies. Indeed, even as most agencies were struggling in the face of budget cuts, the INS was struggling to manage its rapid growth. The INS budget grew from $1.5 billion in fiscal year 1993 to $4 billion in fiscal year 1999, with border enforcement by far the largest budget line item. The size of the Border Patrol along the southwest border more than doubled between fiscal year 1993 and fiscal year 1998, from 3,389 agents to 7,231. By the end of the decade, there were as many Border Patrol agents in the San Diego sector alone as there were along the entire southwest border in the 1970s. As a result of its hiring spree, by the late 1990s the INS had more officers authorized to carry a gun and make arrests than any other federal law enforcement agency.
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The new border enforcement campaign also included an influx of new equipment, ranging from infrared night-vision scopes and low-light TV cameras to ground sensors, helicopters, and all-terrain vehicles. The increasingly high-tech nature of border enforcement included a new electronic identification system called IDENT, which stored the fingerprints and photographs of those apprehended. The military also played a supporting role by assisting with the operation of night scopes, motion sensors, and communications equipment, as well as building and maintaining roads and fences. Along the border south of San Diego, for example, army reservists built a ten-foot-high steel wall that extended for fourteen miles. Similarly, in Nogales, Arizona army
engineers constructed a fifteen-foot-tall fence that was nearly five miles long. Praising the growing collaboration between the military and law enforcement, INS commissioner Doris Meissner declared, “Think of this as one team, different roles, different uniforms, but with the same game plan—and that is to restore the rule of law to the border.”
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Congress ensured that the border buildup would continue by passing the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996. The sweeping immigration law authorized the hiring of a thousand Border Patrol agents a year, reaching a total force of more than ten thousand by 2001. The 1996 law promoted other measures to secure the border, among them a sharp increase in the penalties against migrant smugglers.

The border control offensive was based on a strategy, designed by the INS in 1993–94, called “prevention through deterrence.” By using more physical barriers, surveillance equipment, legal sanctions, and law enforcement agents, the objective was to inhibit illegal entry rather than try to catch entrants once they entered the country. The infusion of law enforcement resources at the most popular entry points was designed to disrupt traditional border-crossing methods and routes, forcing migrants to give up or else attempt entry in more difficult and remote areas and at official ports of entry.

The deterrence strategy had its origins in Operation Blockade (later given the more diplomatic name Hold-the-Line), launched in El Paso on September 19, 1993. Some 450 agents were paid overtime to cover a twenty-mile stretch of the borderline. The sudden show of force led to a sharp drop in attempted illegal entries in the area. The high-profile operation drew the applause of Washington, the media, and local residents. It also attracted the attention of political leaders in California, who pushed to replicate the El Paso “success story” along their part of the border.
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Impressed by the El Paso show of force and the domestic support it generated, in 1994 the INS announced a comprehensive plan to apply the “prevention through deterrence” strategy across the entire southwestern border. The strategy would first target the busiest entry points: the El Paso and San Diego sectors, which at that time accounted for more than two-thirds of all southwestern border apprehensions. Operation Hold-the-Line in El Paso was thus matched by Operation Gatekeeper
south of San Diego in October 1994, targeting the fourteen westernmost miles of the border.
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The strategy would then be expanded to the Tucson sector and south Texas, where migrants were expected to shift after the El Paso and San Diego sectors had been secured. As envisioned by the Border Patrol, the strategy would eventually be applied along the entire border.
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Noticeably left out of this immigration-control offensive was any meaningful focus on the workplace; about 2 percent of the INS budget was devoted to enforcing employer sanctions. There were only seventeen hundred or so INS investigators assigned to cover the entire interior of the country, and less than a fifth of their time was devoted to worksite enforcement.
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The number of investigations of employers for immigration violations had plummeted since the early 1990s, as had the number and total amount of fines.
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Equally downplayed in the rush to secure the border was the fact that around 40 to 50 percent of all illegal immigrants in the United States had entered the country legally (for example, as tourists or students) and then simply overstayed their visas.

As expected, tighter border controls in El Paso and San Diego pushed migrants to attempt entry elsewhere along the border. Consequently, apprehensions in the El Paso sector plummeted, but they shot up to the west in New Mexico and Arizona. Similarly, apprehensions in the Imperial Beach sector south of San Diego, traditionally the single most important gateway for illegal entry, declined sharply once Gatekeeper began, but arrests jumped in the more remote areas of east San Diego County.

These shifts in human traffic generated further political pressures and a bureaucratic rationale to geographically expand the border-policing campaign. Operation Safeguard was subsequently launched in Nogales, Arizona, and Operation Gatekeeper, which first concentrated on the fourteen westernmost miles of the border, was extended in October 1996 to cover sixty-six miles. Similarly, in January 1997 Operation Hold-the-Line was extended ten miles west into New Mexico. And in late August 1997 the INS announced Operation Rio Grande in southeast Texas, which included setting up portable floodlights, twenty-foot watchtowers, low-light video cameras, and high-powered infrared vision scopes along the Rio Grande. As part of Operation Rio Grande, the
Border Patrol and the military’s Joint Task Force Six started building 240 miles of roadway, a dozen helicopter pads, and fifty high-intensity lights in the Laredo area.
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Meanwhile, the heightened Border Patrol presence between the official ports of entry created more pressure at the ports of entry. Operations such as Gatekeeper prompted attempts at illegal entry through the ports of entry, and the INS in turn responded by deploying new port inspectors. Between fiscal year 1994 and fiscal year 1997, the number of INS port inspectors increased from 1,117 to 1,865—a 67 percent rise. The influx of personnel was reinforced by tougher penalties for those attempting entry through fraudulent use of documents.
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Breaking up the traditional routes and methods of clandestine entry turned the once relatively simple illegal act of entry without inspection into a more complex underground web of illegality. Past entry methods mostly involved either self-smuggling or limited use of a local smuggler. But with the buildup of border policing, the use of a professional smuggler became more of a necessity. Greater reliance on smugglers, a 1997 report of the Binational Study on Migration concluded, “helps to explain why most migrants attempting unauthorized entry succeed despite significantly more U.S. Border Patrol agents and technology on the border.”
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Indeed, hundreds of thousands of migrants entered the United States illegally every year during the 1990s, with the southwest border the most important entry point. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the total number of unauthorized foreigners in the country more than doubled in the 1990s, from 3.5 million in 1990 to 8.4 million in 2000, with a majority from Mexico.
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As the demand for smuggling services and the risks of crossing the border grew, so too did the price of being smuggled. Prices along parts of the border doubled and in some cases more than tripled. The smuggling fee could exceed a thousand dollars, with the exact price depending on location, the quality of service, and the set of services being purchased. As one Border Patrol agent explained, “It’s much like a full-service travel agency, all depending on how much you’re willing to spend.”
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The INS argued that the increase in prices was an indicator that the deterrence effort was effective. Yet higher prices were not necessarily a major deterrent, given that smuggling fees tended to be paid for by relatives and friends already in the United States rather than by
the migrants themselves. Alternatively, some migrants may have been given the option of paying off the fee by working in a job arranged or provided by the smuggler. Although the cost of being smuggled across the border was not insignificant, it could be earned back in a relatively short period of time spent working in the United States.

Higher prices did not significantly deter migrants, but they did greatly increase the wealth and power of smuggling groups. As Miguel Vallina, the assistant chief of the Border Patrol in San Diego, noted, “the more difficult the crossing, the better the business for the smugglers.”
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INS Commissioner Doris Meissner explained in January 1996 that “as we improve our enforcement, we increase the smuggling of aliens that occurs, because it is harder to cross and so therefore people turn more and more to smugglers.” But at the same time that Meissner recognized the Border Patrol had created more business for smugglers, she also emphasized that we are “moving as aggressively as we can … so that we can put them [the smugglers] out of business.”
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Beefed-up policing certainly removed some smugglers, but at the same time it increased the market position of others. Moreover, many of those arrested were the lowest-level and most-expendable members of migrant smuggling organizations: the border guides and drivers who were the “foot soldiers” of the business. Smugglers were first and foremost travel service providers. And as long as there continued to be a strong demand for their services—which the tightening of border controls and the strong domestic employer demand for migrant labor guaranteed—smuggling would persist. The high profits from smuggling—inflated by law enforcement pressure—ensured that there would be smugglers willing to accept the occupational hazards. As one smuggler explained, “Figure it this way. If I work in a factory five days, I make $125 a week. If I take one person across the border, I get $300.”
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U.S. officials went to great lengths to portray migrants as the victims of smugglers, and they used this both to deflect criticism and to provide a further rationale to crack down on smuggling. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Wheat, for example, suggested that “basically, alien smuggling is modern-day slavery. The whole idea behind slavery was moving humans to perform labor. The way the aliens are moved, the way they are treated, this is just a sophisticated form of slavery.”
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Migrants, however, generally viewed smugglers as simply a “necessary evil,” a clandestine business transaction that they willingly engaged in to evade the expanding border enforcement net. Within Mexico, many considered migrant smuggling a shady business, but one that was providing a high-demand service. Smugglers had a clear economic motivation to deliver their “clients” unharmed across the border, since a substantial portion of the payment was typically made only upon delivery. Of course, as was well documented in media accounts, smugglers could be abusive and reckless, and their efforts to bypass law enforcement could place migrants at great risk; hundreds were dying every year trying to cross the border in the harsh and remote terrain where border enforcement was thinnest. Yet smugglers were hired precisely because they generally provided a safer, faster, and more reliable border-crossing experience. Indeed, many smugglers depended on customer satisfaction for future business, since migrants who had a successful experience were likely to recommend their smuggler to other friends and relatives.
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Smugglers also became more skilled as border enforcement became more intensive. Although some of the local freelance entrepreneurs who once dominated migrant smuggling along the border were being squeezed out by the border-enforcement offensive, they were replaced by better-organized and more-skilled smuggling organizations. Those smuggling operations that had the greatest transportation and communication capabilities were the ones most capable of evading arrest. Pressured by law enforcement, some smugglers turned to using commercial trucks to move migrants across the border, blending in with the boom in cross-border trucking brought on by the liberalization of trade and transportation. Northbound truck crossings doubled between 1993 and the end of the decade. U.S. port inspectors could realistically search only a small percentage of the trucks crossing the border.