Money And Guns: Could Tackling The Flow Of Illicit Goods Drive Down Illegal Immigration To The US?

President Donald Trump has long obsessed about illegal immigration and the streaming in of "bad hombres" into the US. Since taking office, he has focused on building a border wall and hiring additional border and deportation agents to deport undocumented immigrants. But these efforts are too narrow, even misguided, if the US wants to bolster border security and tackle a key driver of illegal immigration.

Two key drivers of migration from Mexico and Latin America are absent from Trump's plans: guns and money. In The New York Times, Ron Nixon and Fernanda Santos argue that cartels' power comes from southbound flows of money and guns from the US. "Drug trafficking generates an estimated $64 billion annually from sales in the United States. In addition to allowing drug cartels and gangs to buy weapons, the money generated from such drug sales has been used to bribe and corrupt Mexican and Latin American law enforcement, judges, immigration and customs officers," they write. In their piece, Nixon and Santos trace the multiple ways drug money travels south: cash, of which seizures have risen 48% this year thorough March, but also in the form of trade deals and guns, which are harder to detect and stop. 

Yet as the current policy is seemingly focused on deporting people – an analyst says they could become "potential recruits for cartels" down south – a better approach would enlist border, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to work together and try to stop illicit goods flowing back south into the cartels' pockets.