The Migrants Spending $72,000 to Illegally Immigrate to the US
reuters.com
reuters.com
Not every undocumented migrant is poor - especially those coming from Asia and taking the Central American pathway, which is what this investigation by Reuters is about.
This is the Reuters investigation into the India-Dubai-France-El Salvador-Mexico route that was disrupted by French intelligence recently - https://apnews.com/article/france-indians-plane-grounded-hum...
Destitute Asians immigrate illegally to the Gulf, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia - where salaries, living standards, and protections for the poor and undocumented are horrid. They don't have the funds to fly to and get a visa to much of Central America (at minimum a $4-7k endeavor with an additional $6-8k to go donkey from there to the border). That is middle and upper middle class money in a lot of Asia.
* are they discovered or are they invented? this is a question of philosophy among the community serving (U)HNWIs.
EDIT: on the other hand, if the objective were avoiding even a hint of KYC (as in 935 Pennsylvania's NOC theory of "illegals"), maybe these pathways would make sense?
> I'd suspect dropping 14k somewhere like Henley&Partners might offer better options than the reported 70k for one of these packages
My Tau's land in the old country is now valued at $100-150k thanks to a highway expansion tender and can generate $15k a year being rented out to Reliance Jio as a gas pump, and the remaining land is still tilled and gets MSP benefits of $5k. That's a passive income if $20k/yr in a small Himalayan village.
My Tau has a high school education and has never heard of the American legal system or investors visas.
This is a common story with the rural middle and upper class.
With that level of money, it's very easy to make a successful business in India, China, or Vietnam, but a mix of ignorance and Social Media convinces gullible people that this is the only way.
So it's not really $72k up front. It's some smaller amount + a cut of what you earn once you're working in the higher income country.
Horrific nonetheless.
The issue is some people are ignorant and don't realize that they can deploy capital in a much more efficient manner (eg. Go to college, start a factory, grow organics, buy property in Mohali) and fall prey to advertisements on social media about how you can earn $75,000 a year as a janitor illegally (not realizing that income tax is a thing AND undocumented laborers would be paid way less).
EDIT: thanks for all your insights here, I learned something today which is cool. I can't help but be a bit philosophical about this thinking that illegal imigrants are denied citizenship (which, to be honest, I think is fine and would prefer the legal route for something like this) but the government is happy to collect its payment from them.
That said, most undocumented migrants don't understand these complex systems and will go unbanked by being cash first or using hawala networks
The typical employee is taxed via withholding tax[1] by their employers, not through their bank accounts.
The person that cleans my house from time to time is undocumented, for example, but she declares income and pays taxes.
Here's a longer explanation: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/how-do-undocumented-immigr....
Although this is difficult, it's actually pretty common:
> The best evidence suggests that at least 50 percent of undocumented immigrant households currently file income tax returns using Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITINs), and many who do not file income tax returns still have taxes deducted from their paychecks.
- https://itep.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/immigration2016.pdf
Remember that most undocumented immigrants don't believe they've broken any laws (and many haven't), so of course they're going to pay taxes if they can.
But not in the US, which is what makes migrating so attractive (and the price so high) in the first place.
> and no you can't even save that in a decade there
There are many ways around that (loans, pooling family income/assets), as other have pointed out. (It's not entirely unlike the cost of US college, which the average US student probably can't save in a decade either.)
I personally would consider this as an option if I wanted to migrate to the US. Probably wouldn't take it; I don't like risk or rule dodging. But there is something to be said for it. From a distance it looks like a relatively low-risk high-reward approach to migration and I can imagine even if it is a terrible choice a bunch of people in the global middle class would take it out of confusion and optimism.
Thinking it through I doubt it'd be for me - but there must be a lot of people in South East Asia for whom it'd look like a reasonable gamble at ~$100k. That wouldn't make up the bulk of the migrants, obviously, but there is a value proposition to justify the money.
> you'd get all the benefits of living in the US
There are more benefits to US citizenship than "not being deported". Illegal immigrants certainly don't have all the same benefits a citizen (or even legal immigrant) has.
Which ones do you think are material?
Being able to work in legit, not under the table jobs
Access to social benefits
72k USD is easily accomplished by big 20 plus member families pooling money together to pay a mule to have one member get in America . Because they know once he gets status they ALL will be allowed to come thanks to the generous family entrance rules.
So no, this isn't the exception. This is the norm. They'll then pool their cash to buy a 4 bedroom house and live 25 in it because that's what real families in developing countries do.
I mean legally immigrating to UK can easily cost £30,000 for a family just in direct fees to government, lawyers and in various surcharges.
Just moving between states in the US can require a third of that.
My cousin payed someone to get a work visa to Canada from North Africa, which cost about $15k. Although the first time she did it it was a scam and she lost all of that money, which was pretty devastating for her. Another cousin payed a coyote to get him to Europe (via Greece), and that was cheaper, but they also left the boat for dead in the Mediterranean and he ended up getting deported back to North Africa.
So yeah, $72k is a lot, but if you're desperate and it's not all upfront, I can see it happening.
My family is from one of those villages where immigration (documented and undocumented) to the West has been common since the 1970s.
The ones who are truly desperate (the rural poor and working class) cannot afford to immigrate illegally to the West so they end up immigrating to the Gulf, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or South Korea to work as unskilled laborers.
The only people who take these routes in Northwest India are those who area weird mix of landed (so rich as they have a high value asset that can be mortgaged) and ignorant. Oftentimes a healthy dose of "stunting" as well, because even if the guy immigrated abroad illegally, they can at least get a wedding offer now whereas before they were a NEET.
(FWIW, in my online threat model, "30 second" explanations have a default weighting of malicious, and I'm guessing the cutover occurs somewhere around "3 hours"... Of course, you didn't take longer than 30s to read the previous sentence, so don't forget to double check my claim before relying upon it!)
once graduated, most places offer rubber stamp visas to keep international grads; use that, get a job locally, and then hang out until you qualify for residency / green card.
not esp. difficult, conceptually speaking. the devil is in the details, but its impossible to write a guide for every country and Uni. like Ontario vs. Alberta will be different, vs. California, vs. the UK, etc. etc.
And at that point, there wouldn't be a reason to immigrate to the US, because education and $100k in assets in India, China, and Vietnam is enough to start a successful business or your political career.
The people who take this route are at best ignorant and at worst idiots (and my family is from one of these villages where people would take the Dunki route abroad)
> The second, serving migrants from India, offers charter flights to Central America and overland transfers to the U.S. border for between 6 million ($72,000) and 8 million rupees ($96,000) per person – in many instances with full payment due after arrival in the U.S, according to Indian court documents and K.T. Kamariya, a deputy superintendent of police in the western Indian state of Gujarat investigating illegal migration.
The people who would get the most advantages for being undocumented immigrants (the rural poor and working class) cannot afford either any immigration route to the west.
The only people who can afford it are the subset of the rural elite (ie. Those with land) who are ignorant.
In high school, a friend complained that his mother only watched the sort of movie "with two people who love each other passionately but can't marry because they have the wrong colour dots".
Unfortunately for my movie-going, soon after I realised that Hollywood follows nearly the same formula, only the star-crossed (yet happy-ended) characters' dots are not on their foreheads, but left implicit.
[tbf, Bound (1996) did feature an unusual-for-the-time pair of incompatible dots. Try separating artist from art in that one!]
Umrika [0] and Zinda Bhaag [1] were much better movies about undocumented immigration.
And "Mehrbani"/"Shukriya"/"Shukr" is the word for thank you in the Northwest.
Hmm ... no?
Rent + living expenses + tuition for two years is way more than that. Even in really cheap places in the US. Plus, you have to account that for certain nationalities everything is more complicated, i.e. expensive.
Minimal paperwork - just wire over $70k and we send you a passport with your name on and a complimentary welcome pack for whichever city you decide to move to.
I think if you have $1m USD (or is it 500k) and open a small company that hires X employees, you get a decent visa (can't remember the type).
The problem with making that number too low is that people will be encouraged to get loans and whatnot and how does the government prevents small folk from getting exploited? Even without this, today, people are in slave-like situations already.
Sure, the government can just keep out of this and make the libertarian dream come true, but there are usually other consequences (human trafficking, violence, etc) that will cost the government (more? less? I doubt there are studies about this).
There is a reason Americans don't care about immigration from Canada but wanted to build a wall with moats, gun turrets and razor wire across the southern border.
For example, my family immigrated to South America from Italy 3 generations ago. I don't say I'm Italian and don't feel like an immigrant.
My point is that there has to be an extra force that keeps reminding them "this place is what it is and it was built by immigrants and we value that". If that exists or not in the US, I can't comment from the outside but without that core value being shared, people won't naturally think "oh, immigrants == good" (especially when illegal immigrants are being called refugees in some cases).
It does, there’s a pretty strong message in the US that it was built by and for immigrants. But it turns a large number of people have heard that and said “well now that we’re here, let’s close the gate”.
Similarly, you don't see much concern about illegal immigration from, say, South Korea, Singapore or Japan, or from rich middle eastern countries like Saudi Arabia or Dubai.
If you look for racism everywhere, you'll see it everywhere.
The US is home to more migrants than any other country in the world. More than the next four countries combined. You should question why you believe the opposite of reality.
I think neither party actually wants to stop anything. Republican farmers in the south need the labor, urban Democrats need voters (or so they think) and virtue signalling.
Immigrants can't vote. Let's just make that clear because it's a common right-wing talking point that is provably wrong and steeped in bigotry.
> In the remaining 14 states and D.C., voters can cast a ballot in person on Election Day without showing an ID document. These states have "non-documentary" ID requirements, meaning voters must verify their identity in other ways, such as by signing an affidavit or poll book, or by providing personal information. All states have procedures for challenging voter eligibility.
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-verificat...
Also, these sorts of shenanigans:
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1064385999/new-york-city-will...
(who did their own Dunki over the Bering, back in the day)
I have ancestors who were in the Colonies before the Constitution, and once upon a time, they were also FOB.
The real long term solution would be to make legal immigration easier and cheaper. But neither party seems to be pushing very hard for that.
Deglobalize, polarize, institute the rule of the power as opposed to the rule of law seems to be the message. The consequence, though, would be overall weakening of the states, erosion of trust, and making the defence of all the values our predecessors have already paid in blood for even more toothless.
I think your statement puts the cart before the horse, though. Both parties are "ok" with the status quo not because they necessarily collude to create it, but they are full to the brim with opportunists who use the status quo to their advantage. I don't think there is major political will to actually change anything, but if change forcefully comes any other way, they will happily try to ride any wave to their advantage.
I don't believe this mode of operation is going to change much while the facto regime in the US is gerontocracy which is also all about risk aversion. Oh, and quite possibly a drive to protect big money at all costs.
This is preposterous, you can’t blame Russia for every random domestic problem in USA.
Same with Syria. But in the case the immigration went to Europe, not the US. Again Europe f-ed up.
Navalny was accused of being a CIA asset, Middle East instability was there as some kind of sinister plot against Russia, even potholes in the road are somehow part of the plan.
I never thought I would see this get mirrored in the West.
Now there are people that believe that Russia blew up its own nordstream, that every bit on twitter is Russian bot, but there are no western bots, etc
Like I get that they are a sinister opponent, but you can’t blame everything on them