The Illegal Migration and Crime Nexus: The U.S.-Mexico and Hungary-Serbia Borders
The open-borders lobby likes to pretend that there is no connection whatsoever between mass illegal migration and increased crime. Acknowledging any such nexus is frowned upon, because the open-borders lobby treats victims of terrible crimes or widespread trafficking as collateral damage, worth sacrificing to preserve the limitless flow of people. However, as much as the pro-open-borders crowd may want to look the other way, the relationship between mass illegal migration and smuggling routes and decreased public peace and order is quite obvious. Take the cases of the U.S.-Mexico and Hungary-Serbia border zones.
Many (but not enough) Americans are aware of the grip brutal Mexican drug cartels have on their country’s side of the frontier. According to Art Del Cueto, Vice President of the National Border Patrol Council, it is the drug cartels that control that southern border and “what’s coming across and what’s not.” Cartels use masses of illegal border crossers as both a conduit for drug smuggling and a distraction to divert Border Patrol agents from narcotics trafficking. The human wave also serves as cover to smuggle in criminals and gang members who infiltrate the migrant throngs, some of whom then falsely claim to be victims of those gangs to obtain grounds for remaining in the U.S. Additionally, the human waves include victims of sex trafficking, one of the most horrendous forms of immigration abuse.
The cartels charge thousands of dollars per person to smuggle in illegal aliens (one estimate ranged from $6,000 to $15,000 per individual) and are willing to commit the greatest of atrocities (torture, rape, murder, etc.) to make sure they get paid. Even for an American, such sums are not always easy to come by, never mind people from impoverished countries. These merciless and blood-thirsty organizations are now raking in billions because, thanks to what they call Joe Biden’s “invitation,” business is “like never before.” Globally, criminal organizations involved in human trafficking make $150 billion in profits annually. For some idea of how much this really is, it is a figure by way of comparison equal to the valuation of Elon Musk’s mega-corporation X. The opportunity to cash in on the human smuggling enterprise leads to more violence, like gunfights between rival cartels in Ciudad Miguel Aleman, across the Rio Grande from Roma, Texas. This severely risks the public safety of American and Mexican citizens on both sides of the border.
Hungary and Serbia are experiencing an analogous problem, albeit on a smaller scale, on their own shared border. That’s because the Balkans and Hungary serve as a smuggling route for migrants from the Middle East and elsewhere attempting to reach their “El Dorado” of Germany and its generous welfare system, in spite of Hungary’s best efforts to stop them (e.g., by erecting a border fence). This is not to suggest that deterrence or border barriers don’t work – they do – but that it is more difficult to halt illegal migration waves once they have gotten into a largely demobilized Europe than at the European Union’s land or maritime borders.
It has recently been reported that “[t]he village of Hajdukovo/Hajdújárás, a small farming community in the north of Serbia on the Hungarian border has been described as a terrifying warzone this past week as what are reported to be migrant smuggler gangs face off in hours-long gun battles,” both with the police and with each other. According to several news reports, the smuggler gangs are composed largely of Afghans and are attempting to settle scores between themselves, which are no doubt fueled by a turf conflict over lucrative illegal alien smuggling (although tribal tensions may also play a role). Things got so bad that local residents complained that the police deployment wasn’t sufficient, and demanded that the military to step in. The gun battles began on July 24, leaving one person dead and several injured. The locals were forced to remain at home and cower on the floor to avoid getting hit by stray machine gun fire.
The fact that the Hungarian-Serbian borderland has not seen this kind of violence for many decades underscores the destabilizing effects of massive unauthorized influxes. Apparently, illegal migration is not always an act of love. Rather, it is connected up with criminal gangs and human smuggling in a vicious cycle in which mass illegal migration and crime reinforce one another.
While the pro-mass-migration lobby usually depicts illegal migration as a romantic and courageous, if not heroic, grasp at a “better life,” the cases of U.S.-Mexico and Serbia-Hungary show that it actually makes life worse, both for migrants and border communities. It is high time we acknowledge this because looking the other way is both callous and immoral. The only solution is strong physical barriers, changes to legal loopholes, and the political will to stop open borders.