One of the reasons we do not have more illegal immigration than we have already is because it is expensive in terms of money, human time, and skills and sometimes, sadly, human lives.
And one of the reasons it is expensive is because the market for services facilitating illegal immigration is (in economists' terms) often an imperfect one. By imperfect I mean that the customer, the would-be illegal, is likely to have only the vaguest notion of the going price or quality of, say, a forged or altered passport, a green-card-granting phony marriage, or the services of a coyote or snakehead (a Hong Kong term that should be used more often).
Let's take the price of immigration-related marriage fraud, something I have been following in the press for the last couple of years. The news accounts of the price range from a few thousand in direct payments to the marrying citizen to tens of thousands of dollars to a middleman, usually a lump sum.
There are also some reports of continuing payments, every week until the green card arrives. In one such case there were payments of $500 a week — and when the payments stopped the U.S. citizen "bride" and her chums killed the alien payer, as I reported in an earlier blog.
These imperfections are most obvious where the traffic is the smallest and the services more complex. Yes, if you float around the back streets of East L.A. or Tijuana you probably can get a good fix on the comparative prices of phony Social Security cards; you might even be able to examine them for quality.
But supposing you want something a little more complicated than a Social Security card. Suppose you are in Brazil and want to come to the United States and feel that you can only do it illegally. You know (or think) you cannot get an American tourist visa and the Mexican border is a long way away.
Buying a snakehead's services in Brazil — in contrast to the openness of, say, buying a block of stock on the New York Stock Exchange — can be a real challenge, as an article in yesterday's Bahamas Tribune indicates. Here's the pertinent part of the story:
Wellington Dos Santos Silva wanted to come to the United States with his wife illegally. He paid a "travel agent" $16,500 for a trip from Brazil to France to England and then to the Bahamas, where they boarded a small boat, later stopped by authorities off Pompano Beach, Fla. The agent said that they would look like tourists if their passports indicated stops in France and England, and that they were to dress as tourists all the time — probably good advice for those visiting Florida, whatever the motivation. Further, they should travel on passports issued in Brazil, not the ones that they had acquired (or renewed) in the United States on a prior visit.
The newspaper account, however, failed to ask the obvious questions — why such a long and expensive trip, why the need for the newly-issued passport, when they were going to be arriving over the beach? What good would a passport do in the United States — even with English and French admission stamps on it — when there would be no admissions stamp at a U.S. airport?
Mr. and Mrs. Dos Santos, in short, were: wealthy enough to pay the $16,500, unknowing enough not to ask the questions in the preceding paragraph, and victims of the imperfect nature of the illegal alien travel market.
The continuing effort to hold down the level of illegal migration to a dull roar is, oddly, aided by the continuing imperfections in this highly unattractive market. It reminds one of the old saying that it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
