Author: Mark L. Torrey

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Courtesy Don Loucks
Contributing columnist to The Statesman

It is difficult to understand the video showing two small girls ages 3 and 5 being dropped over 14-foot-tall border wall in Texas and then left there while the perpetrators fled back into Mexico. However, as the saying goes, “follow the money.”

Human trafficking — modern slavery, really — is a booming and very lucrative business. In fact, it is only a close second behind the illicit drug trade. How big, one wonders? Hundreds of billions of dollars big.

There are many facets to this tragedy; many layers and intensities of activity are in play. The dropping of children over the border and border walls is only one small part. Human beings in various capacities are valuable commodities.

Keep this in mind: This horrible human tragedy would not be happening if President Joe Biden had not cancelled the Trump plan to complete the border wall and strictly control who may enter the United States. It is clear that the word went out very early after the election that Biden would stop enforcing control of our borders. His administration cannot even call this crisis a crisis.

Set aside America’s Southern border crisis for a moment and consider something that came to light in late 2019 in the form of a so-called pandemic. Certainly, COVID-19 can be a deadly disease, but how was it so rapidly distributed from Wuhan, China, to other parts of the world such as Los Angeles, New York City, Florence, Italy, and Madrid, Spain, to name just a few?

The answer to the “why” is slave labor. Communist China provides laborers to other countries. In the case of COVID-19, it was primarily textile workers (clothing makers) who were contracted out to do clothing manufacturing. Who was paid?

The Communist Chinese regime “owns” its citizens. The money paid for their labor goes to their government, which takes a nice cut, then a pittance is paid to the laborers. This is slave labor. The Communist Chinese government owns its citizens, they are considered property.

To whom do the people crossing our Southern border then belong?

One of the terrifying smuggling techniques for monetary gain is to charge a large sum for conveying a person into the United States. Reported amounts of $5,000 to $15,000 dollars are common. Then, one would ask how these supposedly destitute people obtain such funds when the countries form which they originate are so poor?

Evidently, the new method is a form of “installment plan.” The coyotes (smugglers) take a deposit from the person seeking passage, and then the now-indentured slave is made to promise to send direct deposit payments monthly to the coyote’s bank accounts. If the payments are not made, the collateral (families of the migrants back home) are harmed or killed. This is serious business.

It is also reported that the drug and human smuggling cartels are intertwined and are so powerful they have become the actual government of most of northern Mexico. Is it possible for Americans to imagine the entire Southwest United States being controlled, government and all, by the Mafia? Please imagine that because that is exactly what it would be.

Some of the illegal immigrants act as “mules” for smuggling drugs across the border. If caught they are subject to drug smuggling charges and can be incarcerated. But there are other, more efficient means of smuggling drugs, such as tunnels, disguised shipping containers and even model aircraft and drones.

As a public, we have been aware of drug smuggling and the effects of drug addiction for many decades. It has only been relatively recently that the human trafficking and slavery prostitution have become newsworthy. The number world-wide is estimated to be 25 million slaves.

The Jeffery Epstein scandal, where under-age girls were taken to his private island for the pleasure of well-heeled clients, is just the tip of the iceberg. More coverage of kidnapping and sex slavery will be included in the second of this two-part column series.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]