The Effects of Enforcement on Illegal Markets: Evidence from Migrant Smuggling Along the Southwestern Border
By Christina Gathmann. Social Science Research Network, 2008
201 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper analyzes how enforcement along the U.S.-Mexican border has affected the market for migrant smugglers. Using a unique dataset that links border crossing histories from illegal Mexican migrants to aggregate enforcement and punishment statistics, we find that the effect of enforcement on smuggling prices is small. Though enforcement has more than tripled over the past fifteen years, smuggling prices have increased by at most 30 percent. Unlike estimates from illegal drugs, the demand for border smugglers is however price elastic. We also show that illegal migrants have switched from heavily patrolled areas to more remote and dangerous crossing routes. These avoidance costs are in fact three times. the direct costs of enforcement on smuggling prices
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/529f6f2272789b3a552723c32ca385124096288e
How researchers see this paper
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- M. Czaika
- Hein de Haas
- Marie‐Laurence Flahaux
- Katharina Natter
- Edo Mahendra
- S. Vezzoli
- María Villares-Varela
- T. O. Mahmoud
Citations in the corpus
- The economics of human trafficking and labour migration: Micro-evidence from Eastern Europe (2010, background): “This situation has fostered the emergence of shadow migration industries offering services such as border crossings and the procurement of illegal work abroad (Orrenius 1999, Stalker 2000, Gathmann 2008).”
- US Border Enforcement and the Net Flow of Mexican Illegal Migration (2012, unknown): “A number of more recent papers use MMP data to study different features of the relation between enforcement and inflow, for example, inflow quality (Orrenius and Zavodny 2005), the illegal crossing market (Gathmann 2008), and patterns of crossing places (Carrion-Flores and Sorensen 2006).”
- International Migration: Trends, Determinants, and Policy Effects (2019, background): “Cornelius (2001; 2005), for instance, found that border enforcement increased migrant mortality by redirecting unauthorized migrants to more hazardous areas, raised smuggling fees (see also Gathmann 2008), and discouraged unauthorized migrants already in the US from returning to Mexico.”