Migrant Smuggling on Mexico’s Gulf Route: The Actors Involved

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 16-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simón Pedro Izcara Palacios

Migrant flows crossing Mexican territory into the United States along the Gulf route are mainly driven by a demand for cheap labor. The decrease in the number of migrants wishing to cross the border to escape the violence in Mexico has turned undocumented migrants into a rare and valuable commodity. The increasing costs of migrant smuggling as a result of organized crime and the activities of the immigration authorities have prompted employers to finance this activity to ensure that they receive enough workers. In-depth interviews with 70 migrant smugglers shed light on the function and participation of the different actors involved in migrant smuggling. El flujo migratorio que atraviesa el territorio mexicano a través de la ruta del golfo para llegar a los Estados Unidos aparece impulsado principalmente por la demanda de mano de obra barata. El descenso del número de personas dispuestas a cruzar la frontera debido a la violencia que ha afectado a México ha convertido a los indocumentados en una mercancía escasa y valiosa. El incremento de los costes de esta actividad debido a la incursión de los grupos delictivos y las autoridades migratorias ha hecho que los empleadores hayan tenido que financiar el tráfico de migrantes para abastecerse de mano de obra. Entrevistas en profundidad a setenta polleros arrojan luz sobre la función y participación de los diferentes actores involucrados en el tráfico de migrantes.

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 31-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simón Pedro Izcara Palacios

During the past five years, a process of specialization has taken place in migrant smuggling networks that has led to the strengthening of those focused on transporting women. The reasons are that migrant women have been less affected than men by the violence in Mexico and that the adult entertainment industry pays the highest prices for irregular migrants. In-depth interviews with procurers, smugglers, and women from Central America describe the operation of the networks for the smuggling of women for prostitution operating between Central America, Mexico, and the United States and indicate that the recruitment of women is usually not coercive and that the employment of minors is more frequent in the United States than in Mexico. En los últimos cinco años se ha producido un proceso de especialización de las redes de tráfico de migrantes que ha conducido a un fortalecimiento de aquellas que transportan mujeres. Esto se debe a dos motivos: Las mujeres migrantes se han visto menos afectadas que los hombres por la violencia en México, y la industria del entretenimiento adulto es la que más paga por los migrantes irregulares. Entrevistas en profundidad con proxenetas, traficantes de mujeres y mujeres de Centroamérica describen el funcionamiento de las redes de tráfico de mujeres empleadas en el sector de la prostitución que operan entre Centroamérica, México y Estados Unidos y concluyen que el reclutamiento de mujeres no se produce de modo coercitivo y el empleo de menores es mayor en Estados Unidos que en México.


2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Díaz-Briquets ◽  
Charles C. Cheney

This article describes the findings of a study undertaken to shed light on some of the factors that determine the employment of foreign biomedical scientists in the United States by examining their presence at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH was selected as the focus of the study for its unique combination of characteristics. It is a federal agency with the ambiance of academe that carries out biomedical research and training internally while supporting like activities externally through grant- and contract-based linkages with a host of academic institutions and biotechnology firms in the United States and abroad. Over a two-year period, in-depth interviews were conducted with more than 200 stakeholders at the NIH campus and elsewhere, as well as ethnographic observations. The study identified several hitherto unreported important functions that NIH plays in facilitating the inflow of talented foreign scientists to meet its manpower needs and those of the broader national economy.


Author(s):  
Federico Varese

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-200
Author(s):  
Stephen Gageler

James Bryce was a contemporary of Albert Venn Dicey. Bryce published in 1888 The American Commonwealth. Its detailed description of the practical operation of the United States Constitution was influential in the framing of the Australian Constitution in the 1890s. The project of this article is to shed light on that influence. The article compares and contrasts the views of Bryce and of Dicey; Bryce's views, unlike those of Dicey, having been largely unexplored in contemporary analyses of our constitutional development. It examines the importance of Bryce's views on two particular constitutional mechanisms – responsible government and judicial review – to the development of our constitutional structure. The ongoing theoretical implications of The American Commonwealth for Australian constitutional law remain to be pondered.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Ana Luisa Calvillo Vázquez ◽  
Guillermo Hernández Orozco

It was sought to know the meaning of deportation for Mexicans who were returned from the United States in the last decade, based on their ideas, attitudes, and beliefs, from the educational approach and the analysis of content as a methodological strategy. Empirical material consisted of 25 digital narratives from the public archive “Humanizing Deportation,” six in-depth interviews conducted between 2016 and 2017 in Tijuana, Baja California, and five historical testimonies located in bibliographic sources. Findings show that post-deportation irregular re-emigration underlines a political behavior of resistance that suggests the existence of a culture of deportation, which differs from the culture of migration and the culture of clandestine border crossing, even though the current penalty for illegal reentry has inhibited or postponed these practices.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. e0262215
Author(s):  
Anna Tupetz ◽  
Loren K. Barcenas ◽  
Ashley J. Phillips ◽  
Joao Ricardo Nickenig Vissoci ◽  
Charles J. Gerardo

Introduction Antivenom is currently considered standard treatment across the full spectrum of severity for snake envenomation in the United States. Although safe and effective antivenoms exist, their use in clinical practice is not universal. Objective This study explored physicians’ perceptions of antivenom use and experience with snake envenomation treatment in order to identify factors that influence treatment decisions and willingness to administer. Methods We conducted a qualitative study including in-depth interviews via online video conferencing with physicians practicing in emergency departments across the United States. Participants were selected based on purposive sampling methods. Data analysis followed inductive strategies, conducted by two researchers. The codebook and findings were discussed within the research team. Findings Sixteen in-depth interviews with physicians from nine states across the US were conducted. The participants’ specialties include emergency medicine (EM), pediatric EM, and toxicology. The experience of treating snakebites ranged from only didactic education to having treated over 100 cases. Emergent themes for this manuscript from the interview data included perceptions of antivenom, willingness to administer antivenom and influencing factors to antivenom usage. Overall, cost-related concerns were a major barrier to antivenom administration, especially in cases where the indications and effectiveness did not clearly outweigh the potential financial burden on the patient in non-life- or limb-threatening cases. The potential to decrease recovery time and long-term functional impairments was not commonly reported by participants as an indication for antivenom. In addition, level of exposure and perceived competence, based on prior education and clinical experience, further impacted the decision to treat. Resources such as Poison Center Call lines were well received and commonly used to guide the treatment plan. The need for better clinical guidelines and updated treatment algorithms with clinical and measurable indicators was stated to help the decision-making process, especially among those with low exposure to snake envenomation patients. Conclusions A major barrier to physician use of antivenom is a concern about cost, cost transparency and cost–benefit for the patients. Those concerns, in addition to the varying degrees of awareness of potential long-term benefits, further influence inconsistent clinical treatment practices.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina ◽  
Manpreet Kaur Kang

The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space. 


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerjes Aguirre Ochoa ◽  
Casimiro Leco Tomas

The so-called self-defense forces in Mexico must be seen as a form of vigilantism generated by an incipient process of democratization that has not produced the institutional quality necessary to contain the activity of organized crime groups driven, essentially, by the high demand for drugs in the United States. Our qualitative analysis of Mexico’s Tierra Caliente (‘Hotlands’) revealed profound processes of institutional deterioration in politics and the economy that have created conditions ripe for vigilantism. In the absence of substantial improvements in the quality of Mexico’s democracy, especially at the levels of state and municipal government, the emergence of other forms of vigilantism and ongoing violence are foreseeable.


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