Abstract
The issue of irregular immigration, particularly with respect to Mexican immigrants, is poised to play a major role in the upcoming US presidential election in 2016. Ahead of the Republican primary, campaigns and debates have been punctuated with anti-immigrant rhetoric, with one leading Republican candidate even asserting that many Mexican immigrants are ‘criminals, drug dealers, [and] rapists’ (Lee, 2015). In Human Smuggling and Border Crossings, Gabriella Sanchez challenges such sensationalistic characterizations of Mexican immigrants, focusing on those who facilitate extralegal crossings of the US–Mexico border, with empirical research. Sanchez provides a rare window into the experiences of human smuggling facilitators through her analysis of testimony, interviews and informal conversations with these facilitators, their families and those who engaged their services. Through this window, we learn that human smugglers are not ‘profit-driven, blood-thirsty Mexican criminals’ (p. 5), as the media and the Arizona state government contend, but rather, they are ‘ordinary people’ (p. 11) seeking to ‘improve the quality of their lives and that of their families[’]’ lives (p. 6).
Known as ‘ground zero’ of the US irregular migration debate (p. 32), Arizona has been identified as the main entry point into the US for undocumented Mexican migrants (Los Angeles Times, 2010), and is the setting for Sanchez’s research. Over the course of the past 15 years, the state has enacted a series of highly controversial laws and policies targeting undocumented immigrants, no doubt fuelled by the vilification of smuggling facilitators by Arizona’s media and politicians. Among the most hotly contested are SB 1372 (known as the ‘Coyote Law’), used to prosecute irregular migrants for conspiring to commit their own smuggling (p. 2), and SB 1070, which requires state law enforcement agents to determine the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest if they have ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the individual is in the country illegally (p. 32), a provision upheld by the US Supreme Court in 2012 (Arizona v. United States). It is against this backdrop that Sanchez explores the perspectives of human smuggling facilitators operating in the Arizona-Sonora region.
Sanchez captivates the reader throughout the volume with her engaging writing style, adding colour with quotes from the smuggling facilitators themselves. She introduces the book by tracing her interest in migration and human smuggling to her time as a Maricopa County Superior Court officer, where she conducted interviews with undocumented migrants at detention centres in the area, as well as to her and her relatives’ migration experiences. As a Mexican immigrant subjected to immigration detention herself, Sanchez brings an ‘insider’ perspective to the subject. She reflexively engages with her own migration experience (which she classifies as ‘privileged’ since she had a passport and a visa) and that of her relatives, many of whom crossed the US–Mexico border illegally (p. 8). The shared background, language and ethnicity among Sanchez and her research participants facilitated communication and rapport-building, undoubtedly allowing her to obtain information that would be extremely difficult for an ‘outsider’ to access.
In the first chapter, Sanchez situates her research within the landscape of literature on migration and human smuggling. Despite the abundance of sensationalistic depictions of smuggling facilitators in media and politics, there is a dearth of both theoretical and empirical inquiry concerning them, particularly in relation to those operating on the US–Mexico border (p. 20). Furthermore, facilitators’ voices are largely absent from the scholarship that does exist, which is at least partly attributable to some researchers’ fear that direct contact with smugglers would put their safety at risk (p. 27) (reflecting the dominant characterization of smugglers as dangerous criminals). While Spener (2004: 318) conducted interviews with facilitators on the Texas–Mexico border, he notes that due to the rapidly changing nature of border crossing in response to US border patrolling efforts, his findings should only be relied upon regarding conditions no later than early 2002. Consequently, the location and timing of Sanchez’s research, along with its focus on the social dynamics of smuggling from facilitators’ perspectives, address a significant gap in the literature.
Chapter 2 traces the historical roots of institutionalized racial discrimination against Latinos (particularly those of Mexican origin) in Arizona to ‘Anglo’ racism against Latinos in the 19th century, which persisted throughout the 20th century and shaped the structures that continue to marginalize Latinos in the state today. This chapter also maps federal border control policies from the late 20th century, highlighting the displacement of extralegal border crossing flows from traditional locations in California and Texas to the dangerous Arizona-Sonora desert region due to increased enforcement along the former. Unsurprisingly, the death toll subsequently rose among irregular migrants crossing the US–Mexico border (pp. 38–39).
The third chapter delves into the nature and structure of smuggling operations and challenges conventional narratives portraying large, professional, profit-driven criminal networks as the perpetrators of human smuggling. Sanchez’s findings paint a wholly different picture of smuggling operations, indicating their tendency to be carried out by informal, flexible groups without centralized leadership, whose members perform discrete tasks and collaborate on an ad hoc basis (pp. 68–69). According to Sanchez, smuggling in the Arizona-Sonora region is truly a community-based, non-competitive activity: family and friends work together, referrals are made and income opportunities are shared with those in need (p. 54). As a result, the profits facilitators earn from smuggling activities tend to be small and used as supplemental, rather than primary, income.
The motives underlying facilitators’ involvement in smuggling, how they perceive their participation and challenges they face while engaging in smuggling work are explored in Chapter 4. Sanchez emphasizes that the motivations underlying smuggling participation are not limited to financial incentives, but rather, encompass a wide range of other factors as well, including a desire to gain social capital and improve social status, concern for the well-being of others and the belief that smuggling is a legitimate form of labour (p. 77). Sanchez speculates that this final factor, along with the tendency towards only part-time or seasonal involvement in smuggling, may underlie facilitators’ refusal to self-identify as ‘coyotes’ or ‘polleros’ (Spanish terms for ‘human smugglers’).
Chapter 5 focuses on a particularly under-theorized and under-examined group within the human smuggling business—women. Of the 66 participants in Sanchez’s study, only 12 were women. Though she correctly acknowledges that this small sample size limits the representativeness of the results (p. 106), Sanchez draws conclusions that require a larger sample size and different type of analysis to support. Specifically, she makes comparisons between male and female facilitators on the basis of characteristics such as age, education level and employment history. For example, Sanchez concludes that women were ‘more likely to have a higher level of English proficiency than men’ (p. 92). This type of conclusion should be based upon statistical analysis of quantitative data from a sufficiently large sample size in order to ensure that any difference between the genders on the relevant variable is not simply due to chance. Nonetheless, Sanchez does draw out useful themes related to the experiences of female smuggling facilitators, such as the gendered nature of smuggling tasks and the importance of financial need as a motive for smuggling involvement among women.
The sixth chapter addresses the highly provocative and politicized issue of violence in the context of human smuggling. Contrary to popular belief and the findings of Slack et al. (2013: 7) and Simmons et al. (2015), Sanchez argues that the human smuggling market in the Arizona-Sonora region is not inherently violent (pp. 121, 126). She posits that this general lack of violence is tied to the horizontal, non-hierarchical and collaborative nature of the market, which tends to employ social sanctions rather than violence to enforce agreements and behavioural standards. However, Sanchez identifies specific circumstances in which violence does occur in the context of smuggling—typically perpetrated by ‘bajadores’ (notoriously violent, criminal groups that kidnap migrants from smugglers and hold them for ransom) rather than by smuggling facilitators (pp. 114–116). She argues that the failure of the state to distinguish between the activities of smuggling facilitators and those of bajadores is unjust, may place migrants in increased danger and contributes to the proliferation of inaccurate perceptions around human smuggling.
Overall, Human Smuggling and Border Crossings is a valuable resource on irregular migration for academics and policymakers alike. Sanchez persuasively challenges dominant narratives and raises serious questions about the approach that Arizona, as well as the wider US, takes towards human smuggling. With any luck, the winner of the 2016 presidential election will pay due regard to Sanchez’s research when developing US policy on Mexican immigration and border security.