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According to a new report issued by the RAND corporation , human smuggling through the U.S. and Guatemala borders is more profitable than ever, representing estimate revenues of between USD$200 million and USD$2.3 billion in 2017 .
On request of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security , the nonprofit institution conducted an urgent investigation on human trafficking and the profitability of the smuggling of migrants from Central America’s northern triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) .
Of particular concern to policymakers is the possibility that a substantial share of migrants' expenditures on smuggling services is flowing to transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) .
TCOs that benefit from smuggling migrants from Central America to the United States across the U.S.-Mexico border represent a potential threat to U.S. homeland security , the report shows. They can create, contribute to, or help to shape a criminal industry that exploits and harms the people smuggled, challenges the rule of law in U.S. border states and the countries along transit routes, and degrades confidence in U.S. immigration laws.
Most TCOs' activities and revenues cannot be separated credibly from those of other actors that engage in human smuggling. However, the researchers were able to use data from DHS and other sources to construct a range of preliminary estimates of total revenue to all types of smugglers operating along routes from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to the United States.
The researchers' preliminary estimate of those revenues ranged from about USD$200 million to about USD$2.3 billion in 2017. The breadth of that range reflects the uncertainty of the underlying estimates of unlawful migrant flows, migrants' use of smugglers, and smuggling fees.
Separately, the researchers produced a preliminary estimate of the taxes, or piso , that migrants pay to drug-trafficking TCOs to pass through their territories. Those payments could have ranged from about USD$30 million to USD$180 million in 2017 .
A lack of reliable data contributes to substantial uncertainty in both estimates.
The corporation also estimated that migrants pay up to USD$10,000 to be moved from their country of origin to the U.S. border.
Other migrants prefer to make smaller payments along their way through Central America and Mexico, purchasing false identity documents and paying smugglers to transport them through the Mexican territory, among other things.
The study made three main recommendations for how DHS might use findings from this research to target human smuggling, allocate resources, and improve data collection, including the targeting of vulnerabilities of human smugglers, the use of information from the revenue estimates to inform funding decision, and an improvement in data collection.
This week, the U.S. Border Patrol announced that, following preliminary data, the number of undocumented migrants detained at the U.S. southern border since October 2018 amounted to 414 thousand as of last week, exceeding the amount of migrants detained in the previous tax year.
The Trump administration estimated that the number could rise to a million by the end of the summer.
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