Commentary: The Many Ways a Porous Border Means Crime Without Boundaries

by James Varney and Abigail Degnan

When President Biden’s supporters attacked him for describing the man who allegedly murdered Georgia co-ed Laken Reilly as an “illegal,” they shined a light on one of the most contested words in American politics.

The progressive push to describe border crossers as undocumented or unauthorized can also serve to downplay and obscure the massive issue of crime perpetrated and spawned by the influx of millions of migrants since Biden was elected – often in ways that leave the migrants themselves as victims.

While migrant advocates argue that illegal arrivals commit crimes at lower rates than Americans, the claim is unverifiable because the federal government and most states do not break down crimes by immigration status.

Criminologists also note that it ignores the vast web of statutory crimes concurrent with illegal immigration – drug smuggling, human trafficking, child labor violations, prostitution, the black market in employment, and so on.

What remains undeniable by the law of averages is that the massive surge in immigration since the Biden administration relaxed border policies – a surge that it puts at more than 4 million people, but other sources millions more – has been accompanied by much more crime, however unquantifiable.

Millions of migrants, though not all, run afoul of laws by their situation more than by overtly malign criminal intent. But their first step across the border is a lawbreaking one, and it is often followed by life on the law’s margins: living in the U.S. without insurance or proper work papers, providing illicit labor for unscrupulous or blasé employers, turning to black markets for counterfeit Social Security cards, and often becoming targets for robbers or extortionists. Their desire to come to America creates a vast pool of criminality involving them or those illegally profiting from them.

“On some criminal matters, like homicides, we’ve got a good sense of the scale there whether we solve them all or not,” said Alex Nowrasteh, a vice president at the Cato Institute who studies the economic impact of immigration. “But some of this other stuff is like all black markets in that it is opaque behavior. We don’t know how much crime there might be and in a sense I think it’s sort of unknowable.”

An outer layer of this criminal onion is the so-called “coyotes” who smuggle migrants to the southern border. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which is sympathetic to the plight of refugees, paints a brutally stark picture of the  exploitive lawbreakers who lurk behind the caravans and trucks and trains heading north.

“Some criminal groups view migrants as simply one of many commodities to be smuggled, alongside drugs and firearms,” it noted in a 2018 report. “Since the smuggling of migrants is a highly profitable illicit activity with a relatively low risk of detection, it is attractive to criminals.”

The United Nations also acknowledges the near impossibility of quantifying these criminal enterprises. “Assessing the real size of this crime is a complex matter, owing to its underground nature and the difficulty of identifying when irregular migration is being facilitated by smugglers,” it said.

In order to pay back these smugglers or the people willing to “host” them in the U.S., many migrants – no one knows how many – are often dragooned into illicit behavior.

“Even people who may come here with no criminal intent at all may find themselves involved in some sort of criminal activity because the cartels that control the immigration channels are going to get their money one way or another,” said Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation of American Immigration Reform, which seeks policies to seal the border from illegal penetrations. “Going to work for the cartels is one way they can pay off their debts. Others may find themselves pressed into indentured servitude or, even worse, being trafficked in the sex trades.”

Although they gets little attention in the United States, the crimes associated with migration begin south of the border. Since Joe Biden sent a clear signal while running for president that he would welcome mass immigration, tens of thousands of people along the Central American isthmus have been inspired to migrate and have become victims too. Vulnerable and poor people making the more than 2,000-mile trek from the Darién Gap in Panama to the Texas border have been preyed upon physically and economically, contributing to the enormous human cost.

“As millions of people have put themselves needlessly in the hands of cartels and smugglers to make the journey to the Southwest border, an untold number have suffered violence, degradation, and abuse at the hands of these ruthless organizations, while countless others have perished or simply been left to die in the jungles and deserts along the way,” according to the majority report from the House Committee on Homeland Security last October.

Todd Bensman, a writer with the conservative Center for Immigration Studies who has traveled extensively along the northward immigration routes, said travelers are frequently victimized and crime has exploded along with record increases in the numbers of people on the move.

“It’s not all about killings – they are getting raped and robbed, too,” Bensman said. “There are loan sharks who let victims know they know where family members are located – that’s a crime. And people are desperate, they are forced to steal food, there have been assaults on police, and recently a camp in Panama was burned down.”

Criminologists say part of the problem in measuring migrant-related crime in the United States is “sanctuary” jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal immigration agencies. Sanctuary enforcement is also not a category traditionally tracked by law enforcement agencies. Nowrasteh said that several years ago he sent Freedom of Information Act requests to all 50 states seeking data on crime committed by or on immigrants and only Texas offered a response. Since then, he believes, Georgia has begun amassing statistics, but the state has not yet issued any public reports.

Grim arithmetic suggests the human costs of the unprecedented tide of illegal immigration under Biden, according to multiple reports and congressional testimony. A case in point is the hundreds of thousands of “unaccompanied alien children,” the innocuous-sounding phrase employed by a bureaucracy focused on avoiding the use of “illegals” who are newly arrived in the Biden years. Their oversight and handling has been mishandled, unintentionally or otherwise, by federal agencies, with the results of minors being trafficked and U.S. child labor laws being violated.

A 2023 report by the conservative Heritage Foundation found arrests for human trafficking rose by 50% and convictions for the crime by 80% in federal fiscal year 2022. Of those trafficked, 72% were immigrants, most here illegally, the report concluded. There was bipartisan outrage last July when the Labor Department revealed illegal child labor cases had risen by 44% in the last year.

The impacts are seen across the United States. The New York Post reports that “a street in Corona, Queens, has been transformed “into the city’s boldest open-air market for sex – one so popular with pervs that it’s advertised on YouTube. As police enforcement wanes and immigration surges nearly a dozen brothels have [also] set up shop along Roosevelt Avenue near Junction Boulevard.”

RealClearInvestigations has reported that many of the drug dealers who have turned San Francisco’s Tenderloin district into an open-air drug market are migrants connected to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. “The drug pushers are easy to spot: Unlike the users, they look healthy and wear clean clothes,” Leighton Woodhouse reported. “They’re almost universally young men, mostly Honduran (on the streets of San Francisco they’re called “Hondos”).”

Describing the plight of “twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee,” “underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina, and “children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota,” the New York Times has reported that “migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country.”

Millions of migrants working for legal businesses are also breaking the law. RCI has reported that “the historic surge of illegal immigrants across America’s southern border is fueling a hidden crime spree few in Washington seem willing or able to address: widespread identity theft victimizing unwitting Americans perpetrated by migrants who need U.S. credentials to work. … Federal authorities have found that well over 1 million are using Social…