Why Immigrants Need US Border Enforcement

 A review of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De Leon, 400 pages, Viking (March 2024)

One of the reasons Donald Trump has just been re-elected US president is the battle over how to manage the country’s southern border with Mexico. Stopping illegal movement into the US was one of Trump’s salient campaign promises; deporting all illegal immigrants was another; neither prevented him from attracting 45 percent of the Latino vote , a leap from the 32 percent he won in 2020 and the 29 percent he won in 2016. Why so many Latinos voted for Trump may have more to do with the affordability crisis than with thorny immigration issues, but Democrats may want to rethink the assumption that a permissive border policy will win them Latino votes.

Participant-Observation with Human Smugglers

Coyotes, the usual term for smugglers along the US–Mexican border, have acquired legendary status. There are countless stories of how they swindle their customers, but also of how they miraculously lead their clients to the smooth highways of the Promised Land. Since coyotes are outlaws, you might think they would never allow an anthropologist to spend time with them, record their conversations, and snap their photos, but in this case you would be wrong.

De Leon’s opportunity to embed with smugglers arrived during a 2015 summer field school in southern Mexico. Hanging out next to the train tracks were young Honduran hustlers, whose job was guiding fellow Hondurans across Guatemala, then atop freight trains to Mexico City. They and their girlfriends were also quite a party scene. Still in his thirties and with the stamina for this sort of thing, De Leon was able to bond with at least five men and two women who become his key characters. But even as he conveys how fun, relatable, and unreliable they can be, he does not make friends with everyone. An avid knitter named Payaso (Clown) has been seen cutting off testicles and is later arrested for a number of murders. Sombra (Shadow) is a Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) member who is shepherding three females he plans to sell to a brothel.

De Leon’s low-level smuggler friends are the “soldiers” of his title, in contrast with the “kings” or kingpins who direct them to migrants and who order the execution of anyone who makes a big mistake. It is this, apparently more than law enforcement, that makes the guides so paranoid. They have too many knife and machete scars and “the potential for violence … is always bubbling under the surface,” not just because of their diet of marijuana, cocaine, crack, and meta-amphetamines, but because MS-13 collects head-taxes from each migrant. The charming nineteen-year-old asking for help in front of a migrant shelter with her daughters in tow is also an MS-13 lookout. Her job is spotting newcomers trying to go north without a guide, whereupon they must hand over US$100–200 or start losing fingers. A friendly grocer turns out to be the local MS-13 head. As for Mexican police and officials, they are less likely to protect migrants than rob them; some officials who show an interest in De Leon’s research are later implicated in ransom kidnappings.

De Leon provides detailed backstories for his key characters. In two of seven cases, their mothers went to the US when they were young and parked them with relatives. Of the other five, four were de facto orphans who came into contact with street gangs and headed north. Of the five men, each has been deported from the US. Two reached the US as minors and obtained humanitarian legal status, only to join gangs and go to prison for serious crimes. A third reached the US as a minor and received humanitarian legal status, only to have marijuana discovered in his car and arrive late for a hearing. The other two men were deported for being undocumented. Back in Honduras, the five learn that they have not been forgiven by gang enemies and so they head north again. During De Leon’s ethnographic research from 2015 to 2022, southern Mexico strikes them as a bit safer than Honduras and they can earn good money guiding other migrants north, so long as they remain on good terms with the Mexican mafias charging head-taxes.

De Leon also achieves remarkable social immersion in smuggler safehouses farther north, where migrants await the next stage of their journey. The people in the safehouses can be just as paranoid as those by the train tracks, but De Leon’s friendships are his entrée, along with his book Open Graves, which blames migrant deaths on the US government rather than on smugglers. Here too, De Leon manages to win trust, snap headshots, and record conversations. This is no small achievement. At the height of my own research on human smugglers, in a highland Guatemalan town, I was pleased when I could persuade a moneylender to talk to me about his business for half an hour.

A handy summary of progressive views about illegal immigration can be found in the life and work of Jason De Leon, the most well-known anthropologist conducting research on the US–Mexican borderlands. De Leon started out as an archaeologist studying the Olmec civilisation of Mexico, […]

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