Crossing the border is a trip that has a shitload of danger and financial burden to it. Many people fall victim to cartels: one known case is the execution of 58 men and 14 women by the Zetas Cartel in what is known as the San Fernando massacre. They didn’t have money to pay the fee the Zetas asked, so they were executed.
Smuggling people is a business and we must admit that President Trump’s early rhetoric on securing the border, along with the unknown number of border guards that will be hired in the coming years, and the longer leash that ICE has had lately, is driving the cost up for anyone who wants to enter the U.S.
The price for smuggling a person from Central America to Mexico and then to the U.S. has increased from $3,000 to $8,000 since October last year.
That sum amounts to years of savings in countries where monthly salaries are approximately $500. Combined with the perception that staying in the U.S. will not be so easy since ICE is in hunt mode, it makes people more reluctant to try. The DEA would have loved to force such an increase on drug prices, as prices of illicit goods are an indicator of how much pressure your policing actions put on the bad guys.
For those reasons there is a substantial decline in people trying to cross the USA-Mexico border. In October 2016, U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained about 45,000 people; by March 2017, that monthly figure had fallen to 17,000.(1)
Cartels are another set of people who President Trump wants to stop with the wall.
Cartels have over the years tried various ways of trafficking drugs, from “mules” tunneling, to hiding drugs in trucks that cross the border, to load-carrying drones, and even catapults have been employed in the fenced areas.
Cartels are difficult to counter because they have the money and the manpower to pull a vast array of tricks from tunneling way beyond the wall’s seismic sensors to the use of drones to go above it. We are talking about guys that had their own signals intelligence and commo networks in Mexico, and the now famous Cali Cartel (of “Narcos” fame) is rumored to have had access to a cray supercomputer. When you have that kind of money, all toys are available. In the event of a problem being too hard for the cartel leadership, you can always force people who have the required expertise to work for you.
The only use the wall can have is as a symbol of a very tough stance on the issue and to make good on a campaign promise. Neither of those is worth $26 billion, and who knows how much more to man and maintain the wall.
There are measures that can be taken with a fraction of the cost that will actual deter illegal entry. The effect of ICE running around and the fear of a large increase of border guards have already made the whole endeavor prohibitively expensive for a large number of people. For visa overstays, biometrics are considered as a solution to check if a person has left the U.S. All that, again, with a fraction of the cost.
With China growing bolder, the need to upgrade infrastructure of the U.S. and a multitude of other problems, building castles in the sand is not advisable.
“Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man”
George S. Patton
Featured image courtesy of AP
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