Immigration is a perennial issue in American politics, but the rhetoric we hear from candidates on the campaign trail is often very different than the day-to-day experiences of migrants traveling from central America to the United States and the smugglers who help them make the often dangerous journey to get here. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, anthropologist Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years. The result is the book "Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling," which we discuss on this episode.
De León is visiting Penn State for a lecture on "Soldiers and Kings" Sept. 17 from noon-1:00 p.m. ET in 110 Henderson Building or via Zoom. Register for the webinar here.
De León is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles with his lab located in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a research, arts, and education collective that seeks to raise awareness about migration issues globally while also assisting families of missing migrants be reunited with their loved ones. He is also a 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and a Penn State alumnus.
Finally, we are excited to welcome Cyanne Loyle, associate professor of political science at Penn State, to the Democracy Works team. She was a guest host in the spring and will be joining the permanent lineup with Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, and Candis Watts Smith.
Episode Transcript
Michael Berkman
Music from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I'm Michael Berkman.
Cyanne Loyle
I'm Cyanne Loyle.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. First of all, we are very excited to have you with us, Cyanne now as a permanent member of the democracy works team, joining Michael Chris Candis and me, you are a guest host at the end of our spring season, and we think your expertise is going to be very valuable as we expand the types of things we talk about on the show. And I think as everybody will hear, it will certainly come out in this conversation as we talk with Jason De León, who is an anthropologist at UCLA and author of the book soldiers and kings, which is really a great anthropological study of smugglers bringing folks from Central America to Mexico and on to the Us. It's a group whose stories are not often told, and Jason talks about that and some of the political implications of immigration. And I know it's come up a lot in the campaign, and it's easy, I think, to forget that Kamala Harris, as vice president, immigration was one of her priorities, something she spent a lot of time on during her first few years as Vice President.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, thank you, Jenna, and welcome Cyanne. Pleasure to be here with you. And so this is a really interesting book and interesting conversation that you had today, Jenna, immigration is so much in the news, it is a very complicated issue. And I think our guest today gives us a perspective that we really have not seen before, and that's this focus on the smugglers and and through that lens, I think we can better understand, for one thing, what Kamala Harris's job really was supposed to be on the border. And talk about that a little bit, and also just get into some of the nuances of immigration from Central America through Mexico up to the United States. So Cyanne before I turn it over to you, why don't I just say a little bit something about Kamala Harris? So we keep hearing about Kamala Harris's border ra that actually really wasn't her job. That label was never used by the administration, to my knowledge, but she was tasked with investigating the underlying conditions in the Northern Triangle of Central America, which is El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and the book that we're talking about today is all located in Honduras, through to Mexico, and her job was to identify the root causes of immigration and investigate kinds of solutions to this, or ways that the United States might be able to impact These conditions.
Cyanne Loyle
I mean, I think the underlying conditions that have led to the immigration crisis, if we want to call it that, at the US border, is really something that is both of the us's own making, right? So we want to think about some of the implications of the US involvement in economies and political systems in Central and South America over the last few decades, banana republics and things like that. But also when we think about underlying conditions, we need to think about poverty, violence, political instability, gang violence. And one of the things that I appreciated de Leon talking about in the book was the impacts of climate change, right, and the ways in which kind of changing economic and climate environments are really impacting how people are living and the options that they have. The other thing that I wanted to bring up, Michael is you mentioned that the kind of focus on smugglers is a voice that we don't often hear in the immigration discussion. I think that's really important, but there's also an important discussion or distinction to make here between smugglers and human trafficking. So de Leon is focusing really exclusively in his book on smugglers, and that's that's people who are being paid for a particular service, right, to help move people through what is often a really complicated, treacherous and highly kind of political environment, whereas human traffickers are people who are moving individuals against their will, right? So we can think about things like sex trafficking or labor trafficking. So this is kind of when people don't want to be moved. And there's a really important distinction here, because while smugglers can become traffickers, we're smugglers in and of themselves, particularly how Deleon portrays them, are really kind of, in some ways, independent business entrepreneurs that are capitalizing on a chaotic situation.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, I think that distinction is so important, especially since in the contemporary discourse, I think that they are often substituted for one another, and there is political gain, I suppose, from commingling smuggling and trafficking and trying to label all of these i. People that work in the smuggling business of moving migrants through Central America, from Central America through Mexico to the United States, and traffickers who are truly evil in what they're doing. I do want to push a little bit more on the climate change and hear about that, because I usually think of that of refugee flows from climate change, more in Europe and Asia, where we could be looking at entire countries being essentially wiped out from climate change over the next number of years, unleashing huge refugee flows. But the argument that that he makes in the year making too is that it had an impact in Central America as well.
Cyanne Loyle
I mean, it absolutely does. When we think about climate change, we can think about some of the bigger issues, about deforestation, desertification, salination, right? That's when we're losing entire countries, right, that are going underwater because of sea level rise and things like that. In South and Central America, we see the impacts, for example, of hurricanes and the increasing pressure from natural disasters, man made natural disasters. So things like in El Salvador, where communities are repeatedly hit and wiped out by hurricanes during hurricane season. So it's not just making a particular farming cycle untenable, it's making future farming cycles untenable, and so land that was habitable before is just becoming too dangerous to continue to stay on. And then we can think about the political and social conditions that are exaggerated by that right, so the exaggerated presence of gangs and things like that because of this instability, but people that were able to make a living, or maybe even just eke out a living on the land in which they were raised are no longer able to do so because of the changing climate. So it's really changing some of the economic pressures that we saw previously as we as sea levels rise and as temperatures increase,
Michael Berkman
Yeah, that's very interesting. And completely left out of the contemporary debate about climate change is how it ties in with other issues such as such as immigration. Absolutely, you know, I also think the podcast, the the discussion today has me thinking about the role of migrants in the United States as well. They are so vilified, and especially by by former President Donald Trump, just constantly vilifying immigrants and pointing out the worst of them. One thing that strikes me when I hear stories about smugglers is just the tenaciousness of the migrants, the capacity to endure right to be able to make this 1000s of miles trek from Central America through to the United States. So these are, these can be some pretty impressive people, actually, when they get to the United States and and I've been, I'm often struck by stories coming out of places like the Midwest, where immigration seems to be an issue that that has a lot of play, that the important role that they actually play as employees, as the workforce for local businesses.
Cyanne Loyle
We can go back, you know, cultural anthropologists talk about some of the early immigrant movements in the United States that have made the United States what it is right. So the folks, you know, from Western and Central Europe that were able to make the very difficult trek across the ocean, you know, made us the best and the brightest, right? I mean, it's that tenacity and and spirit. There were plenty of people that did not make that trek. And so I think we can tie it all the way back to that. You know, I'm from Southern New Jersey, and anybody from Southern New Jersey knows that there are huge parts of the labor market there that are run on, on immigrant labor, right, of people that have have traveled from other parts of the world to continue to work on, you know, the farms and to Harvest New Jersey, blueberries and tomatoes and corn. We don't have to go New Jersey. We can stay in Pennsylvania, you know. So Kenneth square is the mushroom capital of the world. And PR just ran a great story last week on how the labor market there is really not only powered by immigrant labor, but requires it to stay alive, to be sustained. And so I think that an important part of this discussion is just how the American economy is so reliant on a labor source that at this point in the in the debate, were really vilifying.
Michael Berkman
I'm glad you mentioned. I'm from New York. You're from New Jersey, and so I used to spend summers working in Manhattan, and frankly, I thought that the entire service labor force were immigrants. To me, that was just that was just what it is. And it was hard to ever imagine New York operating without all of these immigrants. And I think that's true, without all these migrants into New York, I think we would find that's true in a lot of industries spread throughout the United States. So why don't we turn to the interview and hear from Jenna and Jason.
Jenna Spinelle
Jason De León, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us.
Jason De León
Thank you so much for having me.
Jenna Spinelle
So lots to talk. About your latest book, soldiers and kings, survival and hope in the world of human smuggling. And I'd like to just start with some definitions. We've talked on this show before about how the anti democratic forces in our society are very good at manipulating the definitions of words or giving connotations to words or groups that they maybe didn't have before. So can you tell us who smugglers are, what smuggling is, and, maybe more importantly, what it is not?
Jason De León
Well, I think the most important thing to understand is that smuggling and trafficking are two radically different things, and the problem is that most people, including I would say the majority of media and politicians, conflate those two things. Human trafficking is something that is done against somebody's will, right? So like you're taken from one place to another. You are sold into slavery. You are moved with without. You know, against your free will, people who are smuggled literally pay someone to move them right from one place to another. And so you can think about one as smuggling as a as oftentimes as a service provided to a client where trafficking is something that is done against against somebody's will. It's not to say that you can't pay a smuggler to take you someplace and then they end up trafficking you. That does, that does happen, but, but they're two very different things. And you know, just even watching this current ramp up around, around this presidential election, and and seeing both parties talk about this, this desire to crack down on human trafficking across the US Mexico border. It's not actually what they're what they're interested in doing. They're interested in stopping migration that is facilitated by smugglers. You know, not by I mean, not by, not by, I mean trafficking across the US Mexico border, like through Arizona, through Texas, that's not, I would say, like 90% of the people who come across those borders are being smuggled and not and not trafficked. So that's a really important distinction, and that was something that in the beginning I really wanted both to understand myself, but also I really wanted the general public to understand that, because we talk about undocumented migration, we talk about border security, we talk about migrants all the time, and yet we never talk about smugglers, despite the fact that you can't have any of these processes occurring without those individuals involved in this thing. And so people should think about smuggling as as literally a service that migrants actively seek out, pay for review, you know, make recommendations, you know, based on good smugglers, bad smugglers. But it's really part of this, of this much larger system of clandestine migration that, but I think it's one of the, one of the least understood elements of it.
Jenna Spinelle
And in fact, it's quite big business, as you you just alluded to, and you also write about the migrant industrial complex, and then, in some ways, the smugglers and the Border Patrol folks kind of need each other to make the whole thing work. Can you? Can you tell us more about how that whole system operates?
Jason De León
I mean, we're talking about hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars a year spent on smuggling people across international borders. And, you know, it's incredibly big business. It's growing, and it's in both its complexity and in its scale and the amount of money that's this big. I mean, think, I mean, it used to be like we talk about undocumented migration in the Western Hemisphere. Really, the discussion was about the US Mexico border, and we know now that getting across the US Mexico border, for most people, that's one of several borders that they have to cross. So we can imagine people coming from Haiti or coming from Africa who fly into Brazil to Venezuela and then work their way, oftentimes walking across numerous borders to get to the US Mexico. And each one of those borders that they have to cross, each one of those countries they have to cross, countries they have to cross, they are shelling out money to smugglers and different, you know, entities who are looking to tax, to tax that. And I think as as the world gets more and more unlivable, and people have to flee, flee their home countries and make these long journeys, you're going to see more people, you know, trying to capitalize on that process. And you know, it used to be when I began working on this subject, almost 20 years ago, you could get across the US Mexico border for a couple $1,000 and now you can't cross the US Mexico border probably for less than, I would say, six or seven, $8,000 and that's just that border. So people, you know, the bulk of the folks that I worked with for this project were coming from Honduras, who can pay upwards of $10,000 just to get across Mexico, and then have to pay additional funds to get across the US Mexico border. And you know, just keep in mind too, that like as migration has ramped up. Now, as more countries are becoming more and more livable, people are experiencing the impacts of climate change and famine and growing, you know, poverty and political corruption, as they're having to cross more and more borders, you have all these criminal organizations who now see these things as very easily, easily taxed. And so as migration has picked up, so has the the way in which criminals are trying to charge money for to people at different different parts of the journey.
Jenna Spinelle
So you you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that, you know, politicians get up on the stump and talk about reducing migration and that kind of thing, and you talk about this at the beginning of the book, too. And sometimes politicians or people in the media when they talk about migrants, they're basically they're thinking of outdated stereotypes, or they have a vision in their head that is 2030, maybe older than that. Can you talk about how the migrant population has changed and evolved over time, and how it maybe differs from what a politician on the stump might conjure when they're they're talking about those things.
Jason De León
Yeah, I mean, people like for the longest time, it was really when we talked about undocumented migration, about border crossers. What we were really talking about was young Mexican men leaving for economic reasons. And post 911 you know, people were going back and forth for decades, undocumented, illegally. They were able to work for a few years, go home for a few years, go back. Post 911 border security ramps up, and that becomes suddenly an impossibility. And so all these people who were able to move back and forth between their home countries in the United States now can't go back because it's too expensive. It becomes too dangerous because of policies that are put into place in places like Arizona. And so they start bringing their families now. And so now you start seeing more children, more more spouses, family groups starting to migrate and then stay. And part of you know this changing demographic at that time was we really began to conflate, and we still do this. Now is terrorism with undocumented migration. This is a very I mean, every you know, right leaning politicians love to put those two things together, because that's a way to just generate more fear on this whole thing, as if you know Osama bin Laden is coming across the US Mexico border. What people have to keep in mind now is that it's, it's not it's, there's been really no documented examples of, like, full blown terrorists coming across. If there had, we would see that person's name and face on every single political poster right now. So you have these, these changing demographics of family groups coming but now it's not just about economics. I mean, it really is about violence, it's about political corruption, and increasingly, it's about the impacts of climate change. And I think a country like Honduras is a prime example to see. You know that country gets devastated by these Category Five hurricanes, destroys what little infrastructure exists after the last hurricane, and as soon as soon as those floodwaters recede, those people start migrating in mass. And they're young people, their kids, their family. It's anyone that can't get it that is trying to get out of the way of these, of these disasters. And so, I mean, that's who is coming now. But, you know, like, as you said, I mean, I think we have some, some incredibly antiquated ideas about who is coming. And then, right? You know, and whenever someone commits a crime, whenever an undocumented person commits a crime, the United States, that person becomes now that the poster child for all evils of migration, despite the fact that, you know, it's literally like one in a million of these examples we talk about, you know, these assaults and these, you know, these, these things that that make, that make the kind of make these headlines as if it's only migrants who are hurting people in this country, right? But if we look at statistically, you know, you're more likely to be killed by an American citizen, right? You know, there's like but, but obviously, especially in these in these election years, the evil migrant is the, is the trope that America, American politicians have relied on for over, over 100 years to to deflect away from the, I think, from these real, the actual problems that we should be addressing.
Jenna Spinelle
So what about, like, I know you said the bulk of this book, and this project focuses on Honduras, I know, like a lot of Latin America, it's gone through its share of regime changes, and it had a military coup, and it's got, like, a kind of sort of democracy, like, what, like, what? How does the Honduran government feel about so many people leaving, and the the whole smuggling industry that's that's taken root there? Well,
Jason De León
I think we got to keep in mind that Honduras is, you know, the original Banana Republic, and the US has been, we've been monkeying with their political system and their economic systems for for over 100 years now. One of the striking things to me when this project began, and there's a section in the kind of first part of the book where, you know, I'm spending all these time, all this time with Honduran military police who are being. Trained by the United States government to stop their own citizens from leaving Honduras. Yes, I spent time with, with, with this special task force called goet, which is based in Honduras. And they, they report to the American Embassy, I mean, and they get a lot of financial support and logistical support from the US Border Patrol, who are showing them how to catch their own citizens at their northern border. And you know, so the Honduran government is doing the bidding of the United States to keep these people from leaving. I mean it, and it's I mean when you when you start to think about like, okay, US government is putting political pressure and Helping Honduras to stop its own citizens from leaving a country that's fleeing political corruption, that's fleeing climate change, the political corruption and climate change both heavily fueled by US forces, interests and in different ways, you know. So it's like we have this it's this crazy, crazy system where the US is like we're trying to stop this movement of people, despite the fact that we are largely responsible for this movement of people. And so for me, this is a this is the real Rob especially in these in these current political moments where people are so anti immigrant and not understanding where their food comes from, not understanding that migrant labor in this country is the backbone of so many industries. And then if these fantasies about kicking all of these migrants out, right? Trump talks about these, what would mass deportations look like? I'll tell you what mass deportations would look like. It would look like a crashing economy across the board, because we would no longer we would have so many industries that would that would cease to exist. But you know, most people want this to be laid out to them in an easy way. They want to know who to hate. They want an easy answer. When you start to kind of talk about the complexities of these things, people's eyes gloss over and then, you know, they it's oftentimes too much for them. But I do think that the only way we're going to move forward with with, I think discussions about comprehensive immigration reform, about what to do next, is to kind of understand how this the system actually works, and for us as American citizens to start to be accountable. You know, we're all complacent in this system, and we benefit daily from migrant labor, from smuggler labor, we just oftentimes don't want to admit it.
Jenna Spinelle
So let's, let's shift from talking about the bigger geopolitical and economic forces into some of the specific smuggler stories that that you tell in this book and and, first of all, I think most people can probably conjure that, you know, a smuggler is maybe not like what a kid puts on there, what I want to be when I grow up list, you know. So how, how do people, how did the people you talk to, find their way into this work.
Jason De León
You know, most of the people I worked with were, they're all failed migrants. They're all trying to get to the United States. They're all trying to leave poverty, leave violence behind. Some of them are involved in this violence in their home country, and they want to flee that and and they fail most, you know, they try to get to the US. They don't have a good support network in the States, and so they can't really make it, make a go of it, or they can't get across. But they find that as criminal organizations, as gangs like MS 13 and drug cartels, have gotten more interested in human smuggling, these guys, these these smugglers who come oftentimes from, you know, this, long or short lives, but ones that are dominated by violence and and risk, but they understand how to navigate it. They see that they that they actually have a have these job skills that allow them to, you know, to do this kind of work. And so right now, if you want to cross the US Mexico border, if you want to cross Mexico, which has become increasingly difficult, because of extortion, because of cartels, because of ramped up immigration enforcement, you need a smuggler who is a rough and tumble kind of character, who is willing to be violent to protect their clients, who understands kind of how to negotiate with with violent entities and individuals. And so these like street kids, kids coming out of gangs, fleeing gangs in Honduras, it's fine that they can actually make some money with those same skills in in Mexico. And I think, you know, Nobody chooses this lifestyle. It's incredibly violent, difficult, brutal. You know, most of the guys that I work with, you know they don't last long in this because they either die, they go to prison, or if they're, if they are the lucky minority, they're able to escape and find something, something else. But it's quick money. It's not a lot of money, but it is quick money for some of these guys, and I would say too for, you know, for for some of the folks that I write about, they're involved in a lot of other kind of nefarious, violent sorts of things on out on the streets, that's outside of the world of smuggling. And some of them, a lot of them, actually see the work of smuggling as as a form of redemption in some way that they like, Okay, I'm no longer being violent over here. I'm doing stuff over here, but I'm doing it in the as a way to help these people and to provide a service, and to, you know, to kind of get them where they need to go. Yeah, but it's a pretty miserable, I think, lifestyle that's full of a lot of lows, I mean, people. I mean, there is obviously a lot of, you know, drug and alcohol abuse, and it's a it's a wild ride. And I think some of these young people that I work with get attracted to that, such as part of this kind of lifestyle, but also with the recognition that that ride, you know, can't last forever, yeah,
Jenna Spinelle
And you know, I you also say, or, you know, they say that their stories aren't told.
Jason De León
I think part of it is people often want to take the easy way out in terms of, I mean, I think it is incredibly difficult to tell a new and interesting immigration story. We're flooded with them. I mean, as someone who lives and breathes, I open up the New York Times in the morning. I look at these Migration Stories, and I don't read half of them, because I already know what's going to be in there. And it's very, very easy to tell a story about a destitute, sympathetic kind of migrant, I mean, and obviously I, you know, I, I sympathize greatly with with with migrants, but I just feel like that story, we've told it so many times now that we, as a public and as a society are are kind of immune to it. Like, oh, another sad migrant story. Like, okay, yeah, I get it. It's, it's tough. It sucks, you know, I feel for them. Let's move on. And I think that part of my job is to try to tell a different kind of story about that process, so that people can begin to think about it more deeply and not gloss over it. And for me, focusing on on smugglers was a way, was a different kind of intervention, I would hope, like one that like, Oh, here's a story about that. We think we know, but I'm going to tell it to you in a different kind of way. And I think the reason that we've avoided it is because there's risk in, you know, I remember, like, on someone saying to me, like, you know, I'm really worried about, like, this book is going to humanize smugglers and and my response has always been, they are, in fact, human, right, that, like, that's that statement alone, like, Oh, don't try to humanize these people, you know? I mean, and so I think we really have to go beyond that. But it's, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult story to tell. It's one that makes, I think, people uncomfortable. It sure as hell made me uncomfortable. It's also just a lot harder to do. I mean, nobody wants to spend seven years with smugglers. You know, it's much easier to go and spend a day with a migrant. You get your soundbite, and then now let's, let's go and do but to really kind of stick it out with some of these folks and try to understand the complexities of their of their lives and their experiences and the difficulties of it, I think that requires, well, you got to be, I think in some ways, something has to be broken inside of you as well to want to go and do that, which I think for me too, was, was part of this, this whole process, but, but I do think, you know, I tell my students now, you know, graduate students who want to work on, on migration stuff. And I said, like, what's the story then? Like, what are you going to do that's going to add to this thing? So I want to go to the US Mexico border, and I want to write about migrants and say, Well, you know, when you throw a rock the US Mexico border, you're going to hit a million people telling those same stories. We got to find new things that we that will, that will make us think more about this, and will will make it, will make our jobs harder, but also in some ways easier, to tell a different kind of story
Jenna Spinelle
In your your conversations, the many, many days, months, weeks, hours that you spent talking to these smugglers did, how often, if at all, did politics come up like do these folks feel any sense of political agency or that the democratic process is something that can or has worked for them at all.
Jason De León
I mean, I think they're, they're acutely aware of its failures. And so there were lots of discussions about the failures of Honduras to support them, to provide them with jobs. There was lots of discussions about the political corruption and how there was this deep mistrust of officials in that country. Same thing in Mexico, you know, smugglers would talk about, I mean, they love talking about Donald Trump, because he was incredibly good for business, because every time he said something crazy and said, Oh, we're going to be doing this new thing, and we're going to be shutting this all. Shutting this whole thing down. Smugglers could raise their prices without actually having to change anything. And so they were sort they're sort of aware of what's happening politically. One could, because it sort of suits them, you know, economically. But I would say, you know, yeah, but, but politics would come up in different kinds of ways, partly in that they could recognize sort of the racism that existed against them in Mexico in the United States, but they also could recognize that democracy was theoretically going to function better in the United States. That was the hope, even under Trump, that was the kind of hope. Yeah, but yeah, it's mostly, I think the bigger discussions was just about how there was just a deep mistrust of Latin American governments. And, you know, it reminds me, I have a former student of mine, Amelia Frank Vitale, who's now at Princeton. You know, she did a dissertation on returned Honduran migrants, youth who were being sent back to Honduras. And it was this like Reintegration Program for these kids who hadn't been gone that long. But the government was like, oh, we need to figure out a way to kind of bring you back into the fold and make you sort of feel kind of welcomed. And the kids were like, as soon as, as soon as, you know, as soon as I can, I'm getting the hell out of here again. I mean, there was just, there was no for them. There was no there was no going back. And I think for a lot of a lot of Hondurans, they don't see that political system as one that would ever, that ever could welcome them back, or that, or that they would ever want to go back to. And that's what Mexico is becoming a destination country now, because it's, it's, despite all its problems, it's still a better place than than some of these other countries.
Jenna Spinelle
So as we think about ways to move forward and Alyssa, there's a very complicated situation. There's lots of factors, climate change, politics, etc, etc, for the smugglers in particular, that you work with, what is from a policy perspective, what is the best outcome for them. So I was thinking about it like, is it a scenario in which their services are no longer needed, or is it a something where they can still do this job, if they want to, and earn money for themselves and for their families, but maybe just do it in a safer way, both for them and the clients that they're working with.
Jason De León
I think everybody would prefer if there was no need to hire smugglers, including the smugglers. I think, I mean, I think that, you know, many of them would, would love to find something, something else. And in the book, you know, there was various moments where, where smugglers I was working with were trying to get out and do different things. And I'm trying to my failed attempts to help them, you know, kind of walk the straight and narrow and then also lacking, oftentimes, the the social skills to kind of do those things. But I think everybody involved would would much rather just be able to move back and forth between their home country and and these receiving countries, to be able to work for a fair wage, work safely, and then be able to go home. I mean, I think that the American public, we think that, like migrants, are coming here to steal our jobs and to live the American dream. Migrants don't want to stay here. I mean, so many of them would much rather prefer to go that's why. You drive across Mexico, you see so many half built houses of migrants building these, you know, these dream homes that they're hoping to eventually move back into, many of them to many of them don't die in the United States. They're never able to go back. You know, I think that we need to think about, and this is not always a popular thing, but, you know, we had a guest worker program for many years in the United States. It then became, it was incredibly abused by employers who were then turned it into the slave labor market. But, but those folks, I mean, we still have these, these, these work visas now, but these folks would much rather be able to go back and forth and not have to rely on a smuggler and all the kind of shadiness that's required to kind of be in that in that world. And I think that at the end of the day, we're going to have to move towards some kind of model where we recognize this freedom of movement and we allow people, allow people to do it safely, and we and we respect that, but I don't know, it doesn't seem like we're very close to that on any level.
Jenna Spinelle
Well, thank you for the work you've done to help open some of those interdisciplinary doors and take those steps and encouraging others to do the same. Thank you also for the all the rich storytelling in this book. I know you'll you'll read from the book and tell some more stories when you visit campus here in a couple of weeks. Hopefully, folks listening to this, we'll go over to your talk. We'll put all the info in the show notes. But Jason, thank you so much for joining us today.
Cyanne Loyle
Well, I just thought that was a really fantastic discussion. And I'm struck by a lot of things in the conversation, but, but one of the things that really stood out to me is this very strong language around the kind of migrant industrial complex use of words like migrant tax and, and, you know, Jason's work just just strikes me in in quantifying the sheer amount of money that is changing hands, right? So, how big an operation this is, you know, I was, and even his comment about, you know, it's a system that that is working, right? It is a an economic model that that is producing the outcome it's designed to produce, or else the smuggling system would would cease to exist or have to be changed in some way. There were a couple of parts about, about his argument, though, that that, you know, struck me as as that I'm a little bit less convinced by and and the in. In particular, Jason talks about how migration has really been changing recently, from a much more economic model, which we saw in the last couple of decades, to kind of a new model in which people are being driven from their homes for political reasons, for social reasons. Here we can think about violence and political instability, but then also for reasons related to climate change. But when Jason offers us some some kind of policy suggestions, one of the things he's talking about is guest worker programs and the idea that migrants really want to return home, that they're coming here for coming to the United States for economic opportunities, but would ultimately want to return to their home countries. But I wonder how things like a changing climate and political instability really undermines some of the components of that argument. Ostensibly, people who are fleeing the deleterious effects of climate change can't go back, right, despite the fact that they may really want to nothing to go back to, yeah, and when we think about, you know, kind of political instability, these are really sticky problems, right? So even regime change is unlikely to bring kind of changing and political changes in political and economic conditions quickly. And so I'm not, I'm not as convinced by the idea that something I don't even want to say simple as a guest worker program, but as straightforward as a guest worker program is going to solve all of the all of the concerns that are raised here.
Michael Berkman
These are sticky underlying problems, and it is a he does describe a system that works, and at least, that serves certain functions, and he does a really nice job of getting deep inside of that. What I wondered about a little bit were the voices he wasn't he wasn't hearing from. So the kind of deep research, the kind of deep immersion research that he's doing, which must be quite taxing and challenging to do, he himself alludes, you know, there's some people that are going to talk to me, and then there are other people that aren't going to talk to me, and I wonder about those other people, whether or not they are maybe a bit more brutal, maybe the migrant experience is a little less functional than being described by him.
Cyanne Loyle
Yeah, I mean, this concept of deep hanging out, yeah, you know, so just really kind of being in the space and staying there for a long time in order to gain people's trust. I mean, Jenna, I appreciated some of your comments. Your comments about different versions of journalism, right? That allow those kind of connections and trust experiences. I mean, I completely agree with you, Michael. I mean, I think the problem with a project like this is you probably have a bias against violent actors, right? So you're the most violent people are probably less likely to share those stories with you, and you're also probably more likely to get people who are proud of what they do, right, are willing to brag about their experiences a little bit, or at least able to kind of spin their experiences in a more positive light. I take Jason's point in terms of kind of humanizing some of these actors. I mean, we should humanize them. They are humans, right? That are, that are making, you know, both personal and strategic choices, but you're probably less likely to kind of get the people that are more ashamed of what they do. You're also less likely to get people who feel more threatened by what they do, right? So folks a little bit lower down on the rung, who themselves, kind of maybe feel like they have less agency in the process, are probably less likely to share these types of stories.
Michael Berkman
I can't get away from the idea that I just have never thought about this, and never really thought about the, you know, how do they get from there to here, and how does the system build up around that? With with taxes as they go from border to border, and with people such as the kind that Jason was talking to,
Cyanne Loyle
I also think that Jason does a great job of discussing how the weak governments that are involved in this process are really also central to the kind of complex or the systems that we're talking about, you know. So if you think about Honduras, I mean, it it's not just climate change, it's it's the Honduran government's inability to respond to climate change, for his for its own people, that is, that is really kind of contributing to some of these crises. I mean, Jason also makes clear that that the Honduran government's not doing as much, or there doesn't seem to be particularly sad that some of these these people are leaving, and I think that that's because in a weak state system, the resources just aren't there to provide for for people in need, creating all sorts of grievances. So rather than responding to the grievances of its people, the Honduran government seems to be willing to kind of let people to leave and seek, seek greener pastures
Michael Berkman
And where government can't step in and take care of functions that need to be performed often the market steps in instead, which is really what he's describing here, is it's an illicit market, but it's a market.
Cyanne Loyle
And that's not just climate change. That's also the ability to provide security, right, to effectively root out gangs, to provide controls against inflation and jobs and jobs
Michael Berkman
Absolutely. Yeah.
Cyanne Loyle
Thank you again. To Jason. And Jenna for a really thought provoking discussion for Democracy Works, I'm Cyanne Loyle.
Michael Berkman
And I'm Michael Berkman. Thank you for listening.