“Bier breaks down the pathways remaining for legal immigration. Those include: the refugee program, which gives qualified applicants a 0.1 percent chance of being accepted for resettlement; the diversity lottery, which offers a 0.2 percent chance of success; family sponsorships, which are capped for anybody other than spouses, minor children, and parents of adult U.S. citizens leading to years-long waits; employment-based self-sponsorship available only to the wealthy or those whose work is “extraordinary” or of “national importance”; and limited, red-tape-bound employer sponsorships out of reach of all but the lucky and well-educated.
The chart of the byzantine requirements for legal immigration captures the problem well, like a maze puzzle with no real means of escape.”
…
“”Immigration is now prohibited in a similar way to alcohol during Prohibition,” Bier commented. “Although it had exceptions for religious, medical, or industrial purposes, alcohol prohibition outlawed all other sales. For both alcohol and immigration, the result of prohibition has been the same: widespread violations of the law, black markets, the spread of criminal organizations, arbitrary enforcement, government corruption, and massive government expenditures of taxpayer money to stop the violations.”
So, with legal pathways to entering the United States out of reach of most would-be migrants, they turn to illegal means. That necessarily includes “coyotes”—smugglers who get people through migration routes and across borders for a fee. They operate in the underworld with all that implies; they might be decent people just working a job, or they could be dangerous and abusive.
“Despite the illicit nature of their work and being cast as villains in the public eye, smugglers have complex, multifaceted relationships with their migrant clients,” Jasper Gilardi wrote in 2020 for the Migration Policy Institute. “At times, the relationship can be mutually beneficial or even lifesaving; at others, it can be predatory and dangerous. Abandonment, extortion, kidnapping, and even death are common.””