Truck drivers might be seduced into smuggling

El Paso Times ^ | Thursday, May 15, 2003 | Louie Gilot

[FryingPan101]

The tragic death of 18 undocumented immigrants in a sweltering trailer in Victoria, Texas, Wednesday, could be part of a trend of commercial truck drivers being recruited by smugglers, Border Patrol officials said.

"This type of scenario exemplifies the ultimate form of exploitation and greed," said agency spokesman Doug Mosier in El Paso. Smuggling organizations "wine and dine" truckers in Juárez to seduce them into taking large numbers of people on long trips inside poorly ventilated trailers, Mosier said.

"But they can be stopped," he said.

In April, El Paso brothers Ruben Patrick Valdes, 33, and Roman Martin Valdes, 31, the leaders of a smuggling ring that hired truckers, were found guilty of conspiracy to smuggle aliens in the deaths of two men found in a crammed trailer near Dallas in July. The Valdeses await sentencing. The hired truckers, Troy Phillip Dock and Jason Steven Sprague, who were allegedly paid $5,000 each, received life sentences, Mosier said.

The driver in the Victoria case was arrested later Wednesday. No other information was available about the driver.

Although the Border Patrol has produced public service announcements for Mexico warning of the risks of crossing illegally into the United States, the agency has yet to target truck stops with warnings.

Aside from three undocumented immigrants who died in a car crash near Santa Teresa in March and another one who was shot to death by Border Patrol agents Downtown, there have been two other possible deaths of undocumented immigrants in the El Paso area this year, possibly by drowning.

The highest death toll in recent memory was in Sierra Blanca where, in 1987, Border Patrol agents found 18 Mexican immigrants dead and one barely alive in a boxcar left on a rail siding. The men suffocated in temperatures that reached 130 degrees. The sole survivor, who had poked a hole in the floor to breathe, said the immigrants had been loaded into the box car in El Paso and locked in by their smugglers.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Any truck driver that lets somebody talk them into smuggling is straight-up stupid. When you get involved with that type of people, you greatly increase your chances of winding up in a hole in the desert.

[MEG33]

I want the drivers prosecuted and imprisoned.There is no excuse. I wish we could catch the organizers.

[joesnuffy]

diffusing central america into north america....and the hispanic vote

[ChemistCat]

The way to stop this is to open a legal path to the laborers who need the work and the employers who need to hire them. As long as we prohibit a moral, Constitutional activity that is economically so desirable to the people who do it, we create a flourishing trade for the smugglers who can do anything they want to the suffering people driven to their door. What drives them? Our stupid, senseless, corrupt and indefensible immigration policy. I might add that there is nothing about our immigration policy that is Constitutional. It's all a crock!

We've permitted our government to make illegal a basic human activity: the right of employers to search for adequate labor at the cheapest price...without having to pay minimum wage when that wage is too high for the job. We're letting our reflexive conservative xenophobia blind us to the reality of what these policies do: infringe the liberties of free Americans to run our businesses. We even accept the dreadful inhumane side-effect because conservatism *is* corrupted by racism and that wicked nationalism that says "If you aren't one of us, I don't care what happens to you." Who deserves to die in the desert of thirst? In a trailer of heat stroke? What? You think a Catholic who is looking for a way to feed his family deserves to die that way? You're okay with smugglers raping women, landlords packing them into dangerous housing, everyone able to do what they want to a person because his immigration status silences him?

That person's education may fall short of your standards but I'm certain his humanity might trump yours, then. It is never right to support a law that starves people who are willing to work to eat when there are people who are willing to pay him.

It ought to be very simple. We're a free country with certain non-negotiable security and humanitarian needs. People who want to hire very cheap labor ought to have a way to do so legally. We need to be able to hold them accountable for bringing the labor in, feeding and housing the people they hire, and getting them safely and promptly back out again, while making sure that the labor actually gets PAID (at the border, in some form negotiable when they get safely home, would be my preference.)

Right now nobody is responsible for taking care of the illegal immigrant--except the American taxpayer. This means that what is happening is that we are subsidizing the often subhuman, capricious, criminal treatment of human beings. We are subsidizing a non-system that doesn't track potential threats to our security. I don't find that acceptable.

Why do most FReepers endorse measures that will only make these things worse? That will leave our country without a badly needed source of cheaper labor, and the laborers who come without a badly needed source of hard currency? You prefer to just hand billions over to Mexico wholesale as "aid"--without any benefit at all to our economy? Or seal the border? Did you ever really think of what would happen if we truly sealed our borders to an economic activity that is vital to getting things done?

Our current policy also opens us to the great risk of having enemies and terrorists bribe and bully their way in with the illegals. Changing THAT is crucial, and I'm bitterly disappointed with our side's failure to define and address the real problem.

[FITZ]

Any truck driver that lets somebody talk them into smuggling is straight-up stupid.

They're just very greedy and very unethical. Every truck and trailer and train car should be inspected at the border and anyone connected with smuggling should be in prison. There was a 5 year old child in that trailer that died.

[FITZ]

The way to stop this is to open a legal path to the laborers who need the work

There was a 5 year old in that trailer that died----- you really think he was coming over to work? Many of these people come over to be cared for by the US taxpayers, most of our low-skilled jobs went to Mexico and China with NAFTA, our unemployment rate is very high right now ---there aren't enough jobs for your open borders and our government is out of money for the welfare programs these people would need.

Mexico is a very wealthy country ---lots of oil, let them take care of their own.

[ChemistCat]

The 5-year-old was with people who were coming here to make a living.

If you condone the policies that make them sneak in, you condone his death, because even if the policies that force them to sneak in were enforced, the economic factors involved would still stimulate smuggling. The people who do it risk being murderers now--they risk real punishment. Why is that? Because there is so much money to be made breaking bad laws. It's as simple as that.

[PatrioticAmerican]

Execute any traitor truck driver found guilty of immivasion.

[Free the USA]

fyi

[FITZ]

I condemn the Mexicans for not fixing up their country so this kind of thing happens ---do you? Or would you condemn the American people ---because we allow Haitians to drown by not sending boats to rescue them? The Dominicans? How about all those Africans who might rather come here. The Mexican country is extremely rich but extremely corrupt ---blame them!

[FITZ]

According to your logic since people burglarize homes ---it's a crime but a bad law to those only trying to better themselves by stealing other people's things, that we should leave our doors unlocked ---they're going to do it anyhow so we need to make it much safer.

[junta]

And as the noted libertarian Hans Herman Hoppe wrote in his book "Democracy; The God That Failed", "mass immigration is but forced integration."

[ChemistCat]

You just posted an absolutely beautiful example of a straw man argument.

The government is making it illegal for employers to offer a wage to potential employees, and for those potential employees to accept that wage. Because this morally acceptable contract is illegal, but both sides still strongly desire it, organized crime moves in to fill the need the government won't. That's the reality. It has nothing to do with the concept of one person breaking into another person's house to steal, which is NOT the mutually beneficial exchange of a good for a good.

I might add that the government's policies of providing welfare benefits to illegal immigrants exacerbates the problem. I never said it doesn't. Shouldn't one hand know what the other hand is doing? Yet the government has policies that encourage behavior that gets some, but not all, locked up, while others get rewarded. Try raising a couple of kids that way. Kick them and reward them at random. See what you get.

If you see it that way, you are willfully failing to understand my argument, and you do not understand economics. I commend Thomas Sowell's BASIC ECONOMICS to your attention. Laws that attempt to govern economic matters ought to be informed by economics, or they will be informed by a higher law--the law of unintended consequences.

[ChemistCat]

We have no control over what the Mexicans do, only over our own policies, which shouldn't be contradictory and self-destructive.

The Mexican people are human beings like we are, and they deserve the opportunity to earn what we have. Unless we're willing to liberate them as we've liberated Iraq, we must respond to the situation as it is.

[FITZ]

So in other words since the Haitians might not come in safe boats, our government should send boats over to get them, same for the Chinese, Cubans, Africans etc and the Mexicans should be provided nice clean airconditioned buses? Everything is the US's fault isn't it?

[FITZ]

Mexico is a very wealthy country ---let them do what our ancestors --the founding fathers did ---make a good country they can stay in.

[Poohbah]

Just out of curiousity...

Are you actually going to address his main complaint--that we've made certain perfectly moral contracts illegal via the minimum wage?

We've managed to condition a couple generations of Americans to believe that stoop labor is beneath their dignity--no matter how high the pay.

[ChemistCat]

You are being deliberately obtuse. Since you cannot refute what I said, but keep going off on irrelevant tangents, I am not playing anymore. Your way causes the refugees, the wetbacks, the smuggling, pain, suffering, fear--and helps keep capitalism from spreading to those who need it.