Organized Crime and Migration: Crisis at the US-Mexico Border in Election Season

A working paper of the North and Central America Task Force on Migration

In this report, we emphasize the importance of strengthening public safety by strengthening the fight against organized crime, other criminal groups, and corrupt officials, who are increasingly important players in the migration equation. We believe that a new, concerted effort is needed at the regional level to combat organized criminal networks that smuggle and transport people across borders and, more recently, across oceans to the southern and northern borders of the United States. In the meantime, some countries — notably Canada — must play a stronger role in targeting drug traffickers, criminal syndicates, and money launderers and their associates, who are increasingly central to human trafficking and illegal migration.

At the same time, it is essential to recognize from the outset that not all smugglers are part of transnational criminal groups; many are poor locals trying to support themselves by ferrying migrants across borders. As Luigi Achilli and Gabriella Sanchez, who have spent years studying and interviewing smugglers, note: “The characters at the center of this drama, rather than men from the Global South at the helm of powerful criminal syndicates, are often poor people—including women and children—acting in their own name and for their own survival. This does not mean, of course, that illicit markets do not overlap or that hierarchical criminal organizations are never involved. The web-like network of criminality is multi-layered and often colluding with the state, elite capitalists, and the military, as a wealth of studies of drug trafficking and other transnational crimes have amply demonstrated.”

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