The decline of alien smuggling in Mexico

Abstract

As border control has tightened during the last two decades the demand for human smuggling services and the price of being smuggled have gone up. It is generally believed that higher smuggling fees are fuelling the growth of better organized, increasingly sophisticated and more profitable smuggling groups; small-scale smugglers being replaced by larger criminal organizations with nexus to drug cartels that have shown complete disregard for human lives. This paper questions these assumptions and concludes that this business has lost its profitability because alien smuggling organizations have to pay increasingly higher fees to operate through drug cartel controlled corridors, and the number of migrants wishing to cross the border into the United States has diminished as a result of the violence.