Nineteen immigrants from Mexico and Central America died of suffocation in a truck trailer abandoned in the Texas desert last May 14. Police have now arrested at least three people on charges they were smuggling the immigrants into the United $tates. The local district attorney "promised aggressive prosecution of the smugglers responsible for the incident."(1)
Prosecuting the few smugglers who are caught will do little to protect the thousands of immigrants who risk their lives to come to the United $tates to take jobs few Amerikans want. As former federal immigration official Benedict Ferro put it, arresting smugglers "is treating a symptom, not the disease."(2) Above all, the United $tates and the sizeable yahoo "put a fence on the border" crowd are to blame for those who die trying to cross the border illegally. To close the borders and expect no black market in humyn smuggling under capitalism is pure hypocrisy.
Capitalism produces black markets in everything. When people are able to profit, they do so in arms, drugs and even humyns. The more successful police are in catching suppliers of black market services, the smaller the supply of those services. That only means that the price goes up in the world of capitalist supply and demand. Concretely that means drug prices go up and new suppliers rush to fill the need. In immigrant smuggling it means that the smugglers charge more money. In this case, it means that the humyn smuggler may have used a cheaper but more dangerous method to raise his profits. People who advocate capitalist systems know all this very well, but still they blame the inevitable smugglers produced by their capitalist system, instead of opening the borders.
According to a 1999 Immigration and Naturalization Service report, "alien smuggling has grown in to a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry." Security crackdowns since September 11 have only forced more immigrants to seek our professional smugglers and forced the smugglers to use more dangerous methods. About 500,000 undocumented immigrants enter the United $tates ever year.(2) Hundreds die trying to cross the desert into California alone.(3)
Within the imperialist countries, the labor aristocracy is even more to blame than the imperialists. The labor aristocracy cannot imagine a better system and hence the population within imperialist countries fights to keep borders closed with the idea of keeping living standards high for itself. The economic nationalists in the imperialist countries have the blood of the nineteen victims in Texas on their hands.
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