Abstract
While empirical research on human smuggling worldwide is scant, there is a vast, well defined narrative pertaining to irregular migration: its facilitation as controlled by heinous transnational networks of exploitative traffickers who operating in the dark corners of the migrant universe take advantage of infantile migrants and asylum seekers, traffic virginal women, allow for the smuggling of drugs and weapons, and do not think twice about leaving their human cargo stranded in desolate deserts or deadly oceans. Over the last decade this rhetoric has been challenged by the scholarship of brokerage and precarity, and by attempts by social scientists to articulate new theoretical approaches to labor that incorporate illegitimized forms of work among marginalized populations in late modernity within its definition. Despite these critical efforts, scholarship on the facilitation of irregular migration has reached an impasse. Emphasis on providing data over migration routes, costs, distances, and an over-emphasis on narrating the most tragic journeys as a way to generate awareness on the experiences of migrants and asylum seekers, provide a narrow counter-narrative to the visually powerful rhetoric of smuggling as criminal, in fact often reinscribing perceptions of migrants as prone to violence and crime. How can the field of irregular migration facilitation articulate new visions that foreground critical analysis of its own concepts, while identifying new research and analysis paths? In this essay I return to the field to revisit and reconsider with the help of migrants who were successful in crossing the border extra-legally the very notion of smuggling. Through their testimonies, border crossings emerge as grounded on notions not of profit or risk alone, but instead, as connected to people’s survival strategies under new forms of globalization, where human security, solidarity, friendship, love and humor emerge as the organizing principles of migratory journeys.
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Notes
- 1.
Scholars in the US and Latin America have often favored the terms coyotaje and coyoterismo responding to Spener’s critique of the migratory discourse as being state-centered to designate the provision of migration services. There is also a body of scholarship that has further explored the use of the term coyote as being tied to indigenous narratives and story-telling traditions, where the coyote (Canis latrans, a wild wolf species) is depicted as the trickster, able to circumvent challenges and to outsmart its captors. In contemporary Latin American folklore and life, coyotes are not only the individuals who facilitate irregular migration, but are also the brokers of burdensome, bureaucratic processes, primarily those concerning state services (Spener 2008; Spener 2009).
- 2.
Feminist scholarship on transnational parenting is one of the few exceptions, however it often situates the migrant’s identity primarily in the context of labor, or of her condition as a source of financial support for family members in her country of origin. Hagan has also raised concerns over how faith, hope and the meaning of the migration journey have often been absent in migration research and analysis (2008: 19).
- 3.
For an expanded discussion on how the work of coyotes can constitute a form of intimate labor and care in mobility, refer to Vogt’s analysis of smuggling along Mexico’s migrant route (2016).
- 4.
Immigration agents.
- 5.
Between 2009 and 2015 the US Border Patrol reported a total of 2624 deaths registered along the US Southwestern Border (Williams 2016).
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Sanchez, G., Natividad, N. (2017). Reframing Migrant Smuggling as a Form of Knowledge: A View from the US-Mexico Border. In: Günay, C., Witjes, N. (eds) Border Politics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46855-6_5
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