The List: The World's Top Immigrant Smuggling Routes

Wars, famine, and poverty drive hundreds of thousands of people each year to pull up stakes and head for greener pastures. But those seeking a better life don’t always find themselves welcome in their prospective homes. For this week’s List, FP takes a look at the dangerous routes migrants are using in order to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

Trends: Mexicans are still by far the largest group of illegal immigrants to the United States: In 2005, 86 percent of apprehensions across the U.S.-Mexico border were of Mexicans. But as Mexicans head north to find a better life in the United States, Guatemalans are falling in behind them—between 45,000 and 75,000 Guatemalan peasants cross the southern Mexican border each year, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Disturbingly, drug lords are seizing control of the human-smuggling business across the Americas, using migrants as human decoys for diverting border authorities from shipments of drugs.

Hot new route: The new fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in California and Texas merely shifted migration routes away from traditional entry ports near San Diego and El Paso. The hot new gateway is the area around Tucson, Arizona, which saw a 64 percent increase in the number of apprehensions in 2004 compared with the previous year.

Why they leave: It’s the economy, stupid. Most migrants from Latin America are looking for a better-paying job in order to send remittances home to their families left behind. But violent crime could also play a role: Increasing numbers of asylum seekers from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala cite fear of “gang violence” on their applications.

The description of these smuugling routes is interesting.

However...it is easy to tell that this "Foreign Policy" publication caters to the multicult pencil neck geeks in the State Department and in international diplomatic circles.

For example...the smuggling route in the United States is concluded with:

"What they find: In the United States, a crackdown: tough Border Patrol agents, the National Guard, and the Minutemen, anti-illegal immigrant activists who are taking enforcement into their own hands."

Sorry...but I have yet to see any kind of "crackdwon" here in the United States and the "anti-illegal immigrant activists who are taking enforcement into their own hands" quip is just a slur against concerned andf patriotic Americans who are active in Minuteman Projects. These Minuteman Project volunteers only act as a "Neighborhood Watch" on America's international borders. They have done nothing to take enforcement into their own hands (i.e., vigilantism>)

What I read here is:

Mexico has a tough southern border, secured by the military and by laws that allows civilians to apprehend illegals & for any immigrant to be deported without any right to appeal.

Walls, fences, radar systems, helicopters and military personnel working feverishly to keep black Africans out of Europe.

Russia is cracking down on the “yellow peril” of a mere quarter-million chinese (that’s 1% or 2% of the size of the US’s illegal population, or under 5% by relative population).

China deports all North Korean defectors without mercy.

Sexual slavery condoned in eastern europe, and virtual slavery condoned in the middle east.

And the US is called unfair, racist & xenophobic. Gimme a break.

KEEP UP THE FIGHT, DON'T GIVE UP. . As I predicted they would try to resurrect it and call it something else. We have to keep our guard up. We need to keep the pressure up. We have no choice but to fight. The oligarchy wants cheap labor and a destruction of the middle class and the millionaire democrats want votes they can count on. A marriage made in HELL.

STAGE TWO is to go after the people who hire illegals. Start giving them fines and arresting them. Just catch ten or 100 of them on the nightly news. The magnet will dry up and most of the 12 million will go home by themselves.

As an addendum, we should anonymously call the IRS, people working "off the books" means taxes ain't being paid. Make anonymous fliers and hang them around the neighborhood, name names. It's time to embarrass these bustards, whether they give to the GOP or Rats, we don't need them.

CALL! CALL! CALL! CALL! AND KEEP CALLING TILL THE LINES FRY!

WRITE! WRITE! WRITE! WRITE! TILL YOU RUN OUT OF INK IN YOUR PEN!

Bombard the Democrats as well, especially the ones that ran on an anti illegal immigration plank and the ones in marginal districts who could be vulnerable. keep pounding on them. This is a bipartisan issue not a Conservative or Liberal issue BUT AN AMERICAN issue.

STOP AMNESTY NOW!! WE CAN DO IT!!

The best way to stop Shamnesty

This is nothing other than “Foreign Policy” pandering that excuses - as well as enables the continuation of - the negative social-political structures in the countries the “migrants” come from; the economically and politically corrupt structures that produced the circumstances the “migrants” wanted to leave. The purpose of this pandering is to join the efforts of those corrupt structures in demanding U.S. economic assistance as the medicine needed to solve their problems. The pandering hides the fact that the solutions are based on myths.

It is the same prescription offered for the economic problems in Africa, for which nearly a trillion dollars of aid in forty years has little to show for itself.

America’s “Foreign Policy” problems stem from the dominance of the same set of ignorant foreign policy elites occupying our major foreign policy institutions, in and out of government, for over forty years.

9/11 should have been a wake up call about the ignorance of that elite because the real inception of the development of the Islamic-fascist trend in the Middle East was evident at, and goes back as far as, the close of World War II. That trend was ignored, discounted as minimal, appeased as if it could be appeased, not examined, not taught, not understood and when understood not believed to carry the weight it does in Islamic societies. The seeds were there and growing as early as 1950 and even as the branches of the tree sprouted our foreign policy “experts” persisted in their myths about it (aided by Middle East governments).

Now we are told we have an ‘economic displacement’ problem on our southern border and not a Mexican nationalist movement that is relying on and masquerading behind that myth.

How is that myth apparent? Measure the “immigration” policies of not just Mexico but all of Latin American against the immigration policies of the United States and you will find that the United States policies are the least xenophobic, least “nativist” of them all. And yet, with all of Latin American feigning “Hispanic” solidarity with Mexico they (Latin America), and our top foreign policy experts pretend that a major problem of America is its immigration policies toward Hispanics. When, in truth, America’s immigration policies are more generous towards “Hispanics” than are the immigration policies of the “Hispanic” nations of Latin America. Again, the media keeps the American people ignorant in order to sell the myths of its political allies.

The “Foreign Policy” establishment is doing no more than trying to appease that myth as a tool in offering the same failed foreign policy prescriptions it has offered for forty years.

The opposite is true. End all Latin American immigration to the United States and there will be some revolutions in Latin America that will end the reign of the Marxist bred elites there, the elites that breed the continued economic dysfunctions there. Hispanic immigration to the U.S. is nothing but an enabling factor, a relief valve that helps negate the need for the reigning Latin American elites to solve their own problems, internally; they just export them.

On the U.S. side it feeds an economic addiction that facilitates less capital investment to actually improve real productivity of existing workers, by lowering the cost of labor beforehand. Why generate, create or invest in new technology and new production facilities that get more work done with less labor, here, if you have a ready and continuous source of cheap labor? Notice that when the raid was concluded at the Hormel plant, they had no problem filling the jobs with legal replacements; they just had to offer salaries the citizens could live on.

To follow the acolytes of “Foreign Policy” and the Council on Foreign Relations, and all their friends and fellow travelers, is to learn nothing from the history of their 40+ years of failed foreign policy prescriptions.

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