Why Immigrants Need US Border Enforcement
Many people were surprised by the number of Latinos who voted for Trump, but opposition to mass migration does not just come from Anglo nativists.
A review of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De Leon, 400 pages, Viking (March 2024)
One of the reasons Donald Trump has just been re-elected US president is the battle over how to manage the country’s southern border with Mexico. Stopping illegal movement into the US was one of Trump’s salient campaign promises; deporting all illegal immigrants was another; neither prevented him from attracting 45 percent of the Latino vote, a leap from the 32 percent he won in 2020 and the 29 percent he won in 2016. Why so many Latinos voted for Trump may have more to do with the affordability crisis than with thorny immigration issues, but Democrats may want to rethink the assumption that a permissive border policy will win them Latino votes.
A handy summary of progressive views about illegal immigration can be found in the life and work of Jason De Leon, the most well-known anthropologist conducting research on the US–Mexican borderlands. De Leon started out as an archaeologist studying the Olmec civilisation of Mexico, but he became interested in the border issue because he grew up in southern Texas and California. Since 2009, he has recruited hundreds of students and activists into the Undocumented Migration Project, which interviews illegal border-crossers and tracks down what happened to those who did not make it.
The archaeology of death in the desert has attracted so much funding and media attention that De Leon and his colleagues have launched two travelling exhibitions for colleges and museums. “State of Exception” focuses on the trails of discarded clothing, backpacks, and water bottles that columns of border-crossers leave behind as smugglers guide them north. “Hostile Terrain ’94” displays a wall-size map of the US–Mexican border and invites viewers to pinpoint the locations where thousands of migrants have died.
De Leon’s first book, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015), blames this tragedy on Prevention through Deterrence, the federal government’s policy of fencing off popular crossing points. These barriers force migrants to take longer and more dangerous routes, with the result that several hundred drown in waterways or die in the desert every year. By highlighting this ongoing toll—deaths and disappearances spiked to 686 in 2022—Open Graves has become a popular college text and mandatory reference in border scholarship. De Leon has now published another page-turner, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling.
Participant-Observation with Human Smugglers
Coyotes, the usual term for smugglers along the US–Mexican border, have acquired legendary status. There are countless stories of how they swindle their customers, but also of how they miraculously lead their clients to the smooth highways of the Promised Land. Since coyotes are outlaws, you might think they would never allow an anthropologist to spend time with them, record their conversations, and snap their photos, but in this case you would be wrong.
De Leon’s opportunity to embed with smugglers arrived during a 2015 summer field school in southern Mexico. Hanging out next to the train tracks were young Honduran hustlers, whose job was guiding fellow Hondurans across Guatemala, then atop freight trains to Mexico City. They and their girlfriends were also quite a party scene. Still in his thirties and with the stamina for this sort of thing, De Leon was able to bond with at least five men and two women who become his key characters. But even as he conveys how fun, relatable, and unreliable they can be, he does not make friends with everyone. An avid knitter named Payaso (Clown) has been seen cutting off testicles and is later arrested for a number of murders. Sombra (Shadow) is a Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) member who is shepherding three females he plans to sell to a brothel.
De Leon’s low-level smuggler friends are the “soldiers” of his title, in contrast with the “kings” or kingpins who direct them to migrants and who order the execution of anyone who makes a big mistake. It is this, apparently more than law enforcement, that makes the guides so paranoid. They have too many knife and machete scars and “the potential for violence … is always bubbling under the surface,” not just because of their diet of marijuana, cocaine, crack, and meta-amphetamines, but because MS-13 collects head-taxes from each migrant. The charming nineteen-year-old asking for help in front of a migrant shelter with her daughters in tow is also an MS-13 lookout. Her job is spotting newcomers trying to go north without a guide, whereupon they must hand over US$100–200 or start losing fingers. A friendly grocer turns out to be the local MS-13 head. As for Mexican police and officials, they are less likely to protect migrants than rob them; some officials who show an interest in De Leon’s research are later implicated in ransom kidnappings.
De Leon provides detailed backstories for his key characters. In two of seven cases, their mothers went to the US when they were young and parked them with relatives. Of the other five, four were de facto orphans who came into contact with street gangs and headed north. Of the five men, each has been deported from the US. Two reached the US as minors and obtained humanitarian legal status, only to join gangs and go to prison for serious crimes. A third reached the US as a minor and received humanitarian legal status, only to have marijuana discovered in his car and arrive late for a hearing. The other two men were deported for being undocumented. Back in Honduras, the five learn that they have not been forgiven by gang enemies and so they head north again. During De Leon’s ethnographic research from 2015 to 2022, southern Mexico strikes them as a bit safer than Honduras and they can earn good money guiding other migrants north, so long as they remain on good terms with the Mexican mafias charging head-taxes.
De Leon also achieves remarkable social immersion in smuggler safehouses farther north, where migrants await the next stage of their journey. The people in the safehouses can be just as paranoid as those by the train tracks, but De Leon’s friendships are his entrée, along with his book Open Graves, which blames migrant deaths on the US government rather than on smugglers. Here too, De Leon manages to win trust, snap headshots, and record conversations. This is no small achievement. At the height of my own research on human smugglers, in a highland Guatemalan town, I was pleased when I could persuade a moneylender to talk to me about his business for half an hour.
De Leon’s descriptions of smuggler life can be lyrical and entertaining:
It’s a Friday afternoon and everyone is feeling the effects of several hours of drinking and smoking. From the top floor of the apartment building we bask under the hazy Mexico City sky. For a brief moment we are graced with a soft breeze that counteracts the heat coming off the smoking blacktop and the suffocating feeling created by the drab concrete buildings enveloping us. … The sun begins to disappear behind a Mexico City horizon of dilapidated and half-constructed buildings. Shadows move across dozens of unfinished top floors of houses, the half-realized dreams of migrants living in the United States who send money home to build their retirement nests. Many will remain unfinished. Many will never be occupied by their builders, who work themselves to death in pursuit of the American fantasy. The exposed rebar of these buildings reaches to the sky like fields of metallic cornstalks, metal hands grasping at dreams. Flaco’s two phones buzz and chirp. … As night begins to fall, Flaco gets animated, the cocktail of cocaine and beer working its magic. He begins telling stories of his wild childhood and adventures on the tracks. In the middle of a tall tale about a time he was kidnapped by the Zetas, an enormous rat runs across his bare foot and then sails onto the apartment rooftop next door.
To safeguard his relationships with guides like Flaco, De Leon decides against getting close to their clients. But when they claim to be migrants’ best friend, he is quick to note that their business model consists of nickel-and-diming migrants for every last cent.
Illegal Migration Has Become More Dangerous
In the Guatemalan town where I’ve conducted my own research, migrants usually arrange a fixed price with local recruiters who connect them to a Guatemalan-Mexican network that takes them all the way to their waiting relatives in the US. Migrants usually make a downpayment for the trip, but the balance is not wired to a coyote bank account until the migrant phones from a Houston or Phoenix safehouse with the happy news of their arrival. Most of the journey occurs in cars, vans, and buses with fake documentation, or they are carried through US checkpoints concealed in the back of semi-trailers. From the town where I work—which is currently flush with remittance-fuelled prosperity—only the poorest migrants would hitch rides on freight trains like De Leon’s crowd.
Twenty years ago, the top of a box car was the cheapest way to cross Mexico, until the flow attracted the attention of MS-13 and other extortion networks. Nowadays, hiring a guide is crucial to pay off the gangs who control each successive stage of track:
Through a fog of weed and cigarette smoke, a hungover Flaco begins to outline some of the basics. People pay him between $2,500 and $3,500 per person to go from Honduras to the U.S.-Mexico border. The size and makeup of the group determines the per-person cost as well as the overall profit he can make. … Minimally, a client has to deposit $1,000 into one of Flaco’s bank accounts before the trip starts. The first cash payment covers initial expenses, including the various cuotas that have to be paid on the way up to Central Mexico. Fifteen hundred dollars can get you to Mexico City from Honduras, but the rest of the money has to be paid before continuing. This is why people get stuck places. They can’t come up with the second payment. It doesn’t matter to Flaco. He will leave you in Mexico City and either keep going with other (or new) clients or return to Honduras and start the process over again. Migrants who break their contract with a smuggler mid-trip because of lack of funds might look to someone like Chino or Santos; they are significantly cheaper because they charge for shorter segments of a trip that can be paid piecemeal. If someone makes it all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border and wants to cross into the United States, it costs another $2,500 to $5,000.
As De Leon ends his 2015–22 research, there are more and more migrants, from more and more countries, and there is more and more violence. “Welcome to our global future,” he declares. The southern Mexican border town of Tapachula has long been a crowded smuggling hub. It is now populated by thousands of Haitians standing in line at banks, selling things in the street, and sleeping in parking lots. Adding to the flow are larger numbers of Cubans, Venezuelans, and Brazilians. Head-taxes are higher than ever, with more predators than ever, including kidnappers who demand ransoms from families by sending them cell phone footage of their loved one being knifed or beaten.
De Leon’s smuggler friends are all gang-adjacent, which narrows his book to a very particular migration stream from Central America—gang members and people running from gangs, a subset of whom turn out to be ex-members trying to go straight. Of the various migrant flows across the US border, it is this one that most alarms Americans who believe in border enforcement. Given how widespread such fears now are, De Leon must have pondered the wisdom of publishing so much corroboration. That he went ahead must be due to his conviction that the criminality he describes is far outweighed by the hardship caused by US border enforcement—a moral axiom he shares with most migration scholars and advocacy groups.
De Leon and company may be correct that, had the US not declared its war on drugs and fortified popular crossing points, undocumented migration would not have become as dangerous as it is now. Exhibit A is De Leon’s encounters with Programa Frontera Sur, a joint US-Mexican campaign to stop undocumented migrants on Mexico’s southern border. When governments multiply checkpoints, raids, and deportations, De Leon points out, they multiply the number of officials who must be bribed. These costs are then passed on to migrants, producing new profits and bloodshed over who gets what, all of which empowers gangs like MS-13.
Had Washington not hardened its southern border in the 1990s, argues De Leon (and many other scholars who agree with him), then transnational mafias would not have reaped the mega-profits that have enabled them to neutralise Mexican security forces and seize control of smuggling routes. If this is true, then the very idea of hardening a border against labour immigrants is not just counterproductive, it is downright stupid—unless you happen to be the US border-security industry, in which case hardening borders increases your profits too.
David Stoll
Protection from Extortionists
Back in 2015, De Leon began his first book Open Graves with an elaborate explanation of why the US Border Patrol is to blame for migrant deaths when smugglers lead them on harsh treks through the Sonora Desert to evade detection. It is to point this particular finger of blame at the Border Patrol as a “killing machine” that De Leon designed “Hostile Terrain 94” (below), the twenty-foot art exhibit on which toe-tags identify the names of 4,177 migrants who perished on their journey. Some people find this moving, others dismiss it as agitprop, but what about the human cost of the smuggling industry farther south of the border?
Were De Leon to extend his map southward, he would have to add more of Mexico’s 450,000 homicide victims and 110,000 disappearances over the last 15 years. Migrants who die of thirst north or south of the border would be outnumbered by migrants murdered for failing to pay head-taxes, citizens murdered for failing to pay protection money, and gang affiliates executed for choosing the wrong side. Were De Leon to make his map even more inclusive, he could show the astonishing difference in US and Mexican homicide rates. But that would undercut the point he wants to make, because it would show how the same border controls that he blames for migrant deaths also reduce other kinds of death.
The seemingly arbitrary line dividing the US from Mexico has protected a wide array of people for almost two centuries. Prior to the US Civil War, thousands of black Americans fled south of the border where the Mexican legal system refused to return them to slavery. Later, during the Mexican Revolution, the border provided safety for even more war refugees, fleeing northward. Today, one of the reasons US and Mexican homicide rates are so different is that criminal organisations cannot escape prosecution north of the border as easily as they can south of it. The border therefore reduces the number of people being murdered, because it marks off one jurisdiction that is more effective at punishing killers than another jurisdiction.
Like other anthropologists, De Leon wants his research to serve the people he studies, but he knows this is easier said than done—exactly whose purposes are to be served and how? With his inside story about smugglers and gangsters, De Leon is well aware of how migration streams produce their own power structures and their own victims and victimisers. Yet, despite his unsurpassed knowledge of this realm, his anger at US border authorities verges on contempt, and this blinds him to a paradox: if Central Americans are to achieve their ambitions in the US, they too need border enforcement, to protect them from being extorted by criminals.
Consider a Salvadoran household which sends two seventeen-year-olds to the US to protect them from gangs and harvest their remittances. The twin brothers are eager volunteers, but for the family agenda to succeed, they not only need to enter the US, they also need to be protected from the same kind of gangster financial demands that afflict their neighbourhood, that dog their steps on the migrant trail, and that can easily follow them into the US. Lauren Markham’s 2017 book The Far Away Brothers is about these very same young Salvadorans learning a new way of life in Oakland, California. Among the many challenges faced by the brothers is their extreme wariness of other migrant youth who may be gang members. Are they just being paranoid? Around the same time, five teenagers at Brentwood High School on Long Island were murdered by MS-13 members, three of whom had been waived into the US as unaccompanied minors. Recently dozens of MS-13 members have been convicted of killing sprees and human trafficking around Washington, DC.
Border officials are supposed to identify violent offenders and turn them away, but actually accomplishing this is extremely challenging, even under the best of circumstances. When smugglers coordinate mass entries to overwhelm thinly staffed border posts, vetting becomes even more cursory. This is how the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua arrived in the US, among several hundred thousand Venezuelans who obtained temporary legal status on humanitarian grounds. According to the New York Times, Tren de Aragua recruits members from New York migrant shelters and posts lookouts at their entrances. It uses mopeds to snatch cell phones from pedestrians and attack members of rival gangs. It has been implicated in the shooting of two New York City police officers, the murder of a retired Venezuelan police officer in Florida, and the sex-trafficking of Venezuelan women to pay off their smuggling debts.
A Living Wage
Illegal migrants also need US border enforcement for another compelling reason: the higher wages they seek are possible thanks only to protected labour markets. Like other American workers, migrants need protection from, not just employers who break labour laws, but also from the many millions of people from all over the world who would like to follow their example, get through the border, and join the US labour force. If the US faces serious labor shortages, aren’t their jobs for any number of immigrants? It is true that the US has a long history of absorbing immigrant labour. Unfortunately, the more low-skill immigrants arrive, the easier it is to pay them less than a living wage. This is what Berkeley economist Giovanni Peri found when he used the US census to survey California wages from 1960 to 2004. Immigrants were not undermining wages for native-born California workers, he concluded, but they were undermining wages for each other by up to 20 percent.
De Leon is well aware that the majority of Central American migrants are headed for the bottom of the US labour market, so is helping them get there really a good idea? Unless immigrants have professional credentials, they pile up in sectors that cannot attract American workers because they fail to pay a living wage. Not coincidentally, one reason for basement wages is the steady supply of desperate immigrants who will accept any job no matter how bad it is. US meat and poultry companies, for example, busted their labour unions by moving to more rural locations and then switching to an almost entirely immigrant workforce. In the construction industry across the Sunbelt, contractors who hire workers off-the-books undercut competitors who obey labour laws, with horrendous results for wages.
A third example of lax border enforcement undermining labour standards is the “surge” of underage minors at the US border. This migration stream—mainly Central American teenagers looking for jobs and financed by their families to send home remittances—was allowed to enter thanks to a humanitarian waiver approved by Republicans and Democrats under the Bush administration, then implemented by the Obama administration to the subsequent chagrin of the Trump and Biden administrations. The waiver was intended to rescue minors from drug smugglers. As reinterpreted by the smuggling industry, then by US judges and migration advocates, the waiver has invited hundreds of thousands of underage Central Americans into the US labour force. While they are supposed to attend school, many instead go to work in factories, on roofs, and in other jobs that violate labour laws.
For De Leon, the basic issue is not human smuggling and trafficking, it is capitalism, which has turned undocumented migration into a “lifesaving necessity” for millions of people. Therefore, De Leon reasons, the fundamental problem is not smugglers, it is governments trying to stop people struggling for survival. Anyone who believes that illegal migration is so harmful that it needs to be stopped is, according to De Leon, “in denial” about how horrible life must be for migrants to keep coming to the US.
The truth is, when De Leon insists that Central Americans have no choice but to come north, this is a gross over-simplification. In the remittance boomtown where I interview, middle schools have lost many of their male pupils because parents have sent them north. This is a financial investment, not a desperate refugee move. As for why parents would wager their offspring in this way, De Leon believes they are driven by poverty, but this widespread perception ignores a crucial difference between two very different kinds of poverty: pauperisation and relative deprivation. To be pauperised or impoverished is to become poorer than you were before—this is true of many Cubans, Haitians, and Venezuelans but less common among Central Americans. The kind of poverty that ravages Central Americans is relative deprivation—feeling poorer because other people are doing a lot better than you are.
Why would so many Central Americans be afflicted by relative deprivation? Who is the enviable new reference group? The new reference group includes celebrities they are following on their smartphones. But equally or more importantly, it includes their own relatives and neighbours—the ones receiving wire transfers from their stateside kin. Remittances enable the purchase of better food, clothes, and medical care than before. Remittances enable the purchase of motor vehicles, sound systems, and other forms of entertainment. The influx of cash also enables recipients to outbid everyone else when buying land or houses. And the extra cash makes it easier to send more household members north, further increasing their monetary advantage.
Ironically, therefore, the single greatest driver of poverty in Central America is the supposed solution to poverty—going to the US to earn higher wages and send home remittances.
The Dollar’s Syphon of Deprivation
This is the syphon of deprivation that has sucked millions of Central Americans into risking all the dangers of crossing Mexico to join the US labour market. The syphon begins with remittances that turn previously egalitarian family and community networks into haves and have-nots. The have-not problem, magnified by cash flows to the haves, is one of the reasons that some of De Leon’s smuggler friends were left behind by their parents early in life. Parents went north promising to send home dollars. When the dollars failed to arrive, the kids decided that they too had to go north.
Have-nots assume that anyone sending dollars from the US must be prosperous, but the reality is that most migrants become trapped in a desperate scramble. If they obtain legal status, this allows more job choices, but they still face the triple burden of repaying smuggling debts, sending remittances home, and meeting their own living expenses, which are always higher than they imagined. They must also contend with the arrival of many more people like themselves, who are often even more desperate than they are and who are therefore willing to work for even less than they do. Sooner or later their own needy relatives are likely to arrive—the relatives who did not receive remittances, and who now show up on the doorstep, uninvited and still begging for support. If they are given space in an already crowded apartment, will they help meet the rent? Or will they just make a bad situation worse?
For academics like myself who lead protected lives with nice jobs in carefully policed college towns, it is easy to overlook just how much social and legal boundaries matter to a wide range of working-class Americans, of all ethnicities, who live on meaner streets than we do. This is one of the priorities reverberating in the 45 percent Latino vote for Donald Trump. De Leon is acutely aware of just how privileged he is compared to migrants, but he never faces a stark contrast between his interests and theirs. He lives in a university and advocacy world where there is no such thing as too many migrants. The more migrants arrive, the more research, advocacy, and social services will be required, all of which can be invested with high moral purpose.
Immigrants without professional credentials live in a very different world, where more people like themselves means more competition for jobs, housing, and social services. Mixed feelings about fellow Puritans, Irish, Sicilians, and Salvadorans can be found throughout the history of US migration. When sociologist Pablo Vila studied ethnic identity in the border city of El Paso, Texas, in the 1990s, he was surprised by the lack of solidarity that Mexican-Americans expressed toward Mexicans. In a new ethnography of ageing Chicano gangsters in East Los Angeles, Randol Contreras is shocked by how hostile they are to Mexican immigrants. Their wariness shows how opposition to mass migration does not just come from Anglo nativists.
Jason De Leon is a gifted ethnographer. With his flair for showmanship, he may have a future as a media pundit. But his new book about smugglers and gangsters does not really support his political agenda of opening the US border to anyone who says they need a job. To escape exploitation and find safety, even illegal immigrants require the exercise of US sovereignty, including the power to exclude migrants who do not meet legal requirements. When scholars reduce national borders to the suffering caused by enforcement, they overlook how much migrants need the same borders as protection from other, much worse kinds of brutality.
