Today the Associated Press published a detailed description of the multi-billion dollar business of smuggling people across the American southern border. ($4 billion annually according to U.S. estimates, $6 billion according to Mexico's government.) The report begins with a Sinaloa cartel moneyman explaining to an American AP how they smuggle so many people: “We control all the territory” along the frontier with Arizona.
I don't know how that moneyman kept a straight face. Now for the benefit of the Associated Press reporter and all other Americans who were born yesterday -- that being 96 percent of the populace -- the smuggling industry is run by governments, not crime cartels.
The governments want USD remittances in large amounts, which is a big slice of their foreign exchange.
That's been what it's all about ever since the World Bank and China's government with help from banking lobbies that wanted in on the remittances gold rush talked President George W. Bush into making it easy for foreign workers to remit wages earned in the U.S. to relatives in their home country.
That's the ball game, that is what explains the hugeness of the smuggling industry. Everything else -- all the other explanations -- is crap. Absolute bullshit.
So, for Americans who are always wondering how is it that these dirt-poor 'economic migrants' are able to scrape together enough in their funny money to pay the smugglers in many thousands of dollars: They're not scraping it together; they're not passing the hat among their relatives, not in many if most cases. They're being paid to get into the United States and get a job, wages from which will, in large measure, be remitted.
That's how important remittances are to governments who are willing to fund the migrations -- funding which goes to crime cartels, which then pass the bulk of the payments they receive back to the governments in the form of bribes or outright payments. Then the governments recycle the payments into funding yet more illegal migrations.
And so it goes, while the government's coffers from skimming off remittances get bigger and bigger, but without this spent on projects that would encourage their citizens to work in their own country. This for Americans who can't figure out how the governments can afford to keep paying citizens to migrate. The money goes round and round.
If you ask isn't this self-defeating in the long run? In the long run, we're all dead.
Now if you know all this, then a solution presents itself, one so simple it hardly needs description. Yes, just make it harder once again to remit wages. Presto! Ilegal immigration nosedives and without the U.S. spending billions in the attempt to interdict the human wave of illegals at the border and chase them down inside the U.S.
Here we come to a snag: the financial institutions that clean up by charging a pittance per remittance transaction would have hysterics. Not to mention hysterics from governments that got used to relying on a USD foreign exchange, made possible by large numbers of their citizens working in America.
But I'm just saying. If Americans are serious about stopping the waves of illegal immigration to the USA, go after the remittances industry instead of trying to empty the ocean with a sieve.
None of the above should discourage you from reading the Associated Press report, which is interesting as far as it goes. But the report is describing what is in essence window dressing.
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