Irregular Migration

Irregular migration (migration through unofficial, often illegal, channels) is driven by an array of pull and push factors. Obvious pull factors include the prospect for

employment or reuniting with family members already living abroad. More subtle, contextual pull factors include favorable notions of migration, which is “perceived very

positively by Caribbean peoples” as a mechanism for progress.313 _{Push factors include}

much of what we have discussed in this chapter (crime, corruption, unemployment). In Central America, for example, excessively high crime rates have pushed migrants

northward, to Mexico and the United States.314 And, as with human trafficking, this is

seen on a sub-regional as well as interregional scale. In fact, while much of the

undocumented population in the United States crosses the U.S. border through Mexico, there has actually been a negative net flow of licit emigration from Mexico into the United States. Most immigrants traveling north through Mexico and Florida are of Central American and Caribbean origin. Mexico can only respond to a handful of the masses flooding its southern borders. The country deports more than 100,000 Central

American migrants every year, many in a bid to reach the United States. 315 _{The United}

States, meanwhile, has witnessed a “44-fold increase in Haitian migrants in the Mona

Passage” in the last several years.316 Between 2005 and 2012, Southern Command

more than 2,000 were detected.317 Facilitating this surge are many of the same networks and smuggling infrastructure seen throughout this chapter.

The media and politicians still favor the term ‘coyote’ as a label for those who help illegal migrants over the Mexico–U.S. border (one of the busiest mixed migration routes and the most crossed border in the world).318 Yet, in recent years, greater enforcement efforts on the border and rising migration rates from Central America and the Caribbean have acted in concert to raise the cost of transit from only three hundred dollars in the mid-1990s to several thousand dollars in the early 2000s.319 Larger, integrated networks have an advantage in coordinating more expensive and complex operations, and thus, the “old-fashioned coyote may soon be obsolete.”320 If the coyote were the “small-scale entrepreneurs,” their replacements, polleros, are “professional smugglers.”321 _{The longer the distance an immigrant needs to travel, the more likely they} will need to employ the services of a criminal network to help them move.322 And today, people are moving considerably farther distances than they were only a decade or two ago. Migrants from China’s Fujian province or Thailand, for example, rely on

sophisticated networks to help move them half way around the world (frequently by sea) to Central America or Mexico before continuing overland to the United States or Latin America.323 Regionally, similar forces are at work. Pulled by economic potential and pushed by criminal insurgencies, migration from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador rose sixty percent on the year in 2013.324 Similarly, most asylum claims in Mexico originate from Central America, and all three major North American countries have seen a rise in asylum claims from the Caribbean Basin.325 _{As with human trafficking, the} context in which irregular migration takes place is significant. Dire circumstances produce a pervasive desperation, which can push people to escape at any cost.

Unemployment rates in the region are “among the highest in the world, up to 42,9 per cent in Guatemala and 44,6 per cent in Honduras.”326 The concurrent spike in gang membership and criminal violence throughout the Basin has made things even worse. In the words of one Salvadoran migrant: “we are going to die, one way or another.”327 The sudden arrival of tens of thousands of Caribbean children on the U.S. southern border in 2014, sparked by nothing more than a rumor, speaks to the panicked context in which this massive scale of migration takes place. This was confirmed only months later, in early 2015, when the announcement of an American–Cuban rapprochement triggered a massive wave of Cuban migrants, many afraid that the ‘wet foot, dry foot policy’ would soon be repealed (despite Coast Guard statements to the contrary). Migrant smuggling networks expanded in the Caribbean in 2014 largely because “new laws in Cuba and erroneous perceptions in Haiti of changes in U.S. immigration policy” have increased flows from the Eastern Caribbean.328 The U.S. Coast Guard announced that nearly 10,000 Cubans, Haitians, and Dominicans were caught attempting to illegally enter the United States by sea in fiscal year 2014.329 _{In FY13, that number was only slightly lower, near} seven thousand.330 Migrants are increasingly entering the Dominican Republic through Haiti (the largest demographic of interdicted migrants) to take small boats to Puerto Rico.331 _{This can be seen as mirroring the narcotics flows transiting the same routes} (occasionally even using the same boats—see Appendix A).

Framing Littoral Maritime Security Through the Lens of the Broken Windows Theory Sub-regional irregular migration in the Caribbean Basin takes place for much the same reasons as migrants flow to Mexico and the United States. Uneven* _{prospects for} employment and varying levels of governance act to direct Caribbean migrants across the Basin, often in illicit ways. Barbados, for example, has strong literacy and per capita income numbers, and ranks high in the UN Human Development Report’s Human Poverty Index, thus making it an attractive destination for irregular migration.332 Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago, considered “borderline countries” (between developing and developed) are also enticing destinations,333 as are the Bahamas, Guyana, Jamaica, the Netherland Antilles, and St. Lucia.334 _{It is within this} flow of people that human trafficking is nestled even more deeply, and it is the undocumented status of irregular migrants that places them at heightened risk of trafficking. The cons used to deceive trafficking victims—predominantly employment offers—are made all the more believable by this pervasive irregular migration pattern. The Bahamas, whose geographic position between Florida, Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba makes it a hub for such activity, offers an illustration.335 Small boat and plane captains are alleged to be in frequent transit between Hispaniola and the Bahamas, advertising construction and hospitality jobs in the country.336 Guyanese migration to Barbados is similarly spurred by agencies advertising employment overseas.337 In Guyana, Jamaica, and Suriname, children are often solicited by recruiters who offer cash incentives to impoverished parents for their services.338 Industrious Haitian boat owners also charter migrants to the Bahamas for a cost,339 all to serve the needs of a burgeoning tourism sector. While such trips may not be coerced, in the most direct sense, they are

nevertheless very dangerous. Boats are frequently loaded beyond capacity, and reports of migrants drowning in sinking vessels are tragically common. After three successive fatal incidents involving individuals from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Jamaica in 2013, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees “expressed its official concern” over the plight of economic and political migrants.340 In one incident, more than one hundred Haitians were crammed into an “overloaded sail freighter,” which ran

aground off of the Bahamas’ Staniel Cay.341 _{Thirty migrants died before the U.S. Coast} Guard and Royal Bahamian Defense Force arrived.342 This tragedy is part of a wider trend in the northern Caribbean, which saw a steep rise in maritime deaths between 2012 and 2013.343

Just as with human trafficking, human smuggling and irregular migration present a number of challenges for communities. We have already addressed how smuggling places migrants at risk of trafficking, which opens communities up to the exploitative schemes of transnational crime. We have also discussed how illicit networks are multidimensional, opportunistic, and capitalistic, expanding into a range of

interconnected trades.344 To put it simply: “clearly, criminal networks can move just about anything on these smuggling pipelines.”345 _{Criminal networks may even use human} smuggling to swell their ranks. The deputy commissioner of police in Guyana once voiced concern that “foreign mercenaries” were augmenting gang membership in the

* _{GDP per capita is as low as one thousand dollars in Haiti, and as high as twenty thousand dollars in} Trinidad and Tobago. Life expectancy ranges between sixty-one and over seventy-eight, while adult literacy can be as low as sixty-two percent and as high as one hundred percent. See, International Organization for Migration, Exploratory Assessment of Trafficking in Persons in the Caribbean Region, Second Edition (Washington, DC: IOM, 2010), 25.

country.346 There are similarly public health risks that accompany the mass underground movement of people. In the midst of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the commander of Southern Command told an audience at the National Defense University that the spread of the disease in Central and South America was worth considering.347 Haiti and Central America are of particular concern348 because of poor healthcare and their significant roles in irregular migration. General Kelly noted especially that the individuals smuggled by transnational criminal networks into the United States may be infected and enter without medical oversight.349 And the fear may not be merely

theoretical. The region is a cauldron for epidemiological tragedy; the Caribbean is in fact the hardest hit region in the HIV/AIDS epidemic after sub-Saharan Africa.350 In a visit to the Costa Rican–Nicaraguan border, General Kelly recounts meeting several African migrants. The men told U.S. embassy personnel they were Liberian and had been traveling for a week, with the aid of a network from Trinidad, to the United States (illegally).351 The General noted that those men could have made it all the way to New York City within Ebola’s incubation period.352 And while fear of Ebola in the West was almost certainly overblown, the premise is nonetheless significant. Smuggling helps transport not only people, narcotics, and goods, but also diseases which can ravage the underprepared littoral and small island states of the Basin.

Finally, there can be no greater metaphor for the implementation of the Broken Windows theory in maritime security strategy than the impact of climate change on local communities. As climate change becomes an issue of greater concern for Caribbean islands and littoral states, issues of irregular migration and human trafficking will only become more significant. Storm surges, flooding from changing precipitation patterns, extreme weather, coastal erosion, and droughts will all “disrupt trade routes, threaten lives, and drain national economic resources,”353 pushing climate refugees into greater motion. The demographic factors addressed in Chapter One, “coupled with climate change, will impose extreme stress in the region.”354 The 2010 earthquake in Haiti, while not related to climate change, illustrates just how much upheaval natural disasters can bring to bear on irregular migration patterns. Even efforts to combat drug smuggling, such as the crop dusting of wide swaths of farmland, can damage the environment and instigate irregular migratory flows.355 _{As Caribbean communities continue to} respond to the stimuli of their environment, any theory of maritime security must take pains to acknowledge and address the context within which these lives are lived.

Repatriation and Deportation

Of those irregular migrants and asylum seekers detected during passage, the vast majority are repatriated to their country of origin. While not an illegal flow, this irregular migration pattern is nonetheless noteworthy. The Bahamas, for example, consistently repatriates Caribbean nationals to their countries of origin, chief among them Haiti and Jamaica.356 Migrants from Hispaniola make up such a significant proportion of irregular migrants, in fact, that Haiti and the Dominican Republic are the only two Caribbean countries for which nationals are required to procure a visa before entering Barbados.357 Yet, perhaps the greatest flow comes in the form of deportations, and the numbers can be

Framing Littoral Maritime Security Through the Lens of the Broken Windows Theory staggering. The high gang membership figures noted in the section on local crime are owed in large part to this practice. Some estimates say that as many as seventy percent of gang members arrested in the United States are eventually deported,358 most to the Caribbean Basin. As a consequence, gang networks have gone multinational—so much so that anti-gang investigations in the Caribbean Basin have direct impact for American law enforcement. Some such cases originating or pursued in the Basin have led to “a homicide arrest in Oklahoma City, the prosecution of felony extortions in Annapolis and the capture of one of the FBI’s top ten most wanted fugitives…in El Salvador.”359 These gangs are tethered to affiliates across Latin America because of such widespread

deportation. According to the FBI, “MS-13 [Mara Salvatrucha] gang leaders in El Salvador have initiated assassination plans against U.S. law enforcement personnel” and targeted Americans throughout the region.360 _{MS-13 poses such an obstacle to law and} order in the region that General Kelly included the gang in his written remarks to

Congress in 2014. He notes that the group has a particularly strong American presence in California, North Carolina, New York, and Northern Virginia.361 MS-13 “specializes in extortion and human trafficking,” and has succeeded in part because deported members help provide international reach.362 As with crime and narcotics trafficking, Honduras has suffered exceptionally from deportations. Migrants are sent back en masse from

American prisons, many members of Barrio 18 and MS-13.363 _{In testimony before} Congress, General Kelly relayed the estimates of the National Drug Threat Assessment that Mexican-based TCOs now operate in at least 1,200 American cities.364 Deportations are such a staple of the American criminal justice system that, despite sour relations on most issues between the United States and Venezuela, the two principally coordinate on just two missions: maritime narcotics interdiction and fugitive deportation.365 Yet, this is not solely an issue of American providence. Intraregional criminal deportation is also a frequent occurrence. Barbados, which we noted was a borderline country and the target of regional irregular migration, allegedly deports around twenty Caribbean nationals a week, principally to Guyana, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.366 _{Deportation and repatriation thus serve not only to facilitate irregular}

migration, but also as unexpected contributors to transnational and local crime.* 5.0 Terror†

Finally, no conversation on maritime security would be complete today without mention of terrorism. As we noted in the introduction to this case study, terrorism is frequently an issue at the periphery of the Caribbean. Colombia, on the edge of the Caribbean Sea, is the major exception with its ongoing struggle to wrestle territorial control away from Marxist terrorist organizations such as the FARC. Nevertheless, for the same multidimensional reasons explored throughout this chapter, terrorism remains an issue of significance for broader Caribbean

* _{For more on the regional response to human trafficking, see Appendix D.}

† _{In this section, we choose not to use the word ‘narcoterrorism.’ Like terrorism, the term is highly}

politically charged, and perhaps even less well-defined. André Hollis, in Thachuk’s anthology on transnational crime, offers a brief account and history of the terminology. See, André Hollis,

“Narcoterrorism: A Definitional and Operational Transnational,” in Transnational Threats: Smuggling and Trafficking in Arms, Drugs, and Human Life, ed. Kimberley Thachuk (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 24-26.

Basin maritime security. In many ways, an analysis of terrorism in the Basin is emblematic of how the individual sections discussed above are even more tightly related.

The extensive infrastructure for moving people and goods in the Caribbean can just as easily be co-opted for use by terrorist organizations. By forging relationships with transnational criminal networks, and establishing their own, terror organizations absorb the capacity to “exploit porous borders and ungoverned zones at will,” just as do TCOs.367 This is particularly troubling when coupled with the scale of human smuggling discussed in the previous section. The commander of Southern Command warned Congress in 2014 that the same

networks that facilitate human smuggling and narcotics trafficking could as easily be leveraged by terrorists.368 _{This sentiment was echoed by Vice Admiral Michel}

in his testimony to Congress in 2012.369 Terror operations launched against the United States or Europe could be concealed and facilitated in the Caribbean for the same reasons illicit trafficking passes through the Basin: prime geographic and political positioning. The Caribbean is “easily a strategic gateway to all the Americas and Europe, and is accessible by modern air and sea carriers so that it could become a link to any part of the world.”370 The political relationships maintained by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France provide avenues for migration and transportation that further facilitate the “easy movement of people, money, and arms.”371 The CARICOM Regional Task Force on Crime and Security notes that terrorists could utilize the region’s lax banking regulations, air- and seaport facilities, and vast shipping networks to facilitate attacks or

financing.372 The reality is, the infrastructure of transnational crime, which supports human trafficking and smuggling, as well as narcotics and weapons trafficking, “could easily facilitate terrorist operations.”373

While no available evidence suggests any widespread collaboration between terrorist organizations and human smugglers, analysts have not ruled out the feasibility of such a scenario.374 _{And in a considerable shift from the reports}

issued just after 9/11, the U.S. Department of State now asserts that at least twelve of the world’s twenty-five largest terrorist organizations have ties to narcotics trafficking.375 _{Drug traffickers in the Caribbean Basin have been documented}

selling transport to “non-Latins” seeking to enter the United States illegally.376 Hezbollah has also been accused of engaging in human trafficking in an effort to fund its operations,377 which demonstrates the technical capacity for human smuggling as well. A case in U.S. District Court, US v AJ Tracy, highlights both the ease with which such pathways can be used by terrorists, and the difficulty in gathering substantial intelligence to that effect. Anthony Joseph Tracy, an

American-born white male, converted to Islam while in the prison system.378 _As

the leader of an international human smuggling ring based out of Kenya, Tracy admits to facilitating the emigration of nearly 300 Somalis to the United States over seven months in 2009 (five to ten a week).379 _{Using fake documents, Tracy}

would obtain visas for his clients to travel to Cuba, booking round trip flights to demonstrate an intent to return to Kenya. Two representative clients, K.A. and D.H. (Somali men in their early twenties), traveled to Cuba from Kenya via Dubai and Moscow.380 From Cuba, their trail becomes muddled, transiting South

Framing Littoral Maritime Security Through the Lens of the Broken Windows Theory America (perhaps also Honduras) to arrive in Mexico, where they successfully

crossed the border into the United States.381 _{Tracy facilitated his business through}