Migrant Smuggling Data and Research

Families send their members to distant places in search of jobs to assure
the overall financial well-being of the family. These migrants effectively become
an insurance policy for the aging parents and other family members against crop
failure, market crash and a host of other adverse economic conditions at home.
In return, a family increases its resources to deal with a host of current and
future financial uncertainties. Economists have long perceived such migration
practice as a collective act to maximize a family’s income, minimize risks and
loosen constraints associated with a variety of market failures (Stark and Bloom,
1985). Migrants are rational actors who calculate social and personal costs
against potential profits in their decision-making and move to a foreign country
where they can expect positive financial returns. Therefore, any attempt to seek
and procure smuggling services must be factored into this calculus of costs and
benefits. Wage differences are not the only incentive that motivates people to
move, and migration decisions are not made by isolated actors. They are taken
within larger units of interrelated people, such as families or households and
sometimes an entire community (Stark, 1991).
Still, other scholars argue that transnational migration of labour forces
reflect the penetration and expansion of the competitive market economy
advocated and promoted by the Western countries. This world system perspective
perceives the global marketplace as being dominated by a few core nations
that command vast amounts of capital and resources. As a result, the global
economic system is moving towards greater interdependent and integrated, with
other countries on the periphery are supplying not only surplus labour but also
consumer markets. However, the global expansion of a market economy causes
disruptions to the traditional economic systems and livelihoods and therefore
dislocation in these peripheral regions into the world, which in turn generate
population migration (Morawska, 1990). Therefore, transnational irregular
migration does not necessarily represent a lack of economic development in the
sending countries but disruptive development itself, because historically, it is not
the poorest countries that dominated international migration but countries that
experienced economic development. These theories all try to explain the same
phenomenon from different angles and at different levels of analysis. There are,
however, consistent elements in transnational migration that these theories
attempt to explain.
The nexus between organized crime and migrant smuggling
The UN Palermo Convention suggests two changes in the development
of organized transnational migrant smuggling activities: (1) migrant smuggling
is an organized crime that contributes to the increase of transnational irregular
migration; and (2) migrant smuggling has grown into a serious international
problem that demands international attention and counter strategies.
314
12. United States