Border Crackdown Fuels Smugglers' Boom

"It's become a very good business _ more dangerous, but a good business," said Daniel Rivera, 63, who recruits migrants walking the streets of Tijuana.

The Border Patrol has grown from 8,400 agents in 1999 to 12,400 agents today and is projected to reach 18,000 by the end of 2008. President Bush dispatched the National Guard to the border last spring and recently signed legislation to erect 700 miles of fencing from California to Texas. Meanwhile, the government is buying sensors, unmanned aircraft and other border security gadgets.

A senior official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the fact that migrants are increasingly relying on smugglers shows that heightened border enforcement is working.

The trend of hiring smugglers is "a natural outgrowth of the fact that we have more control," said Ralph Basham, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol. He expects it will continue.

Critics say the border crackdown isn't working, that the U.S. government's own estimates suggest the number of illegal immigrants here grew by 2 million between 2000 and 2005 to 10.5 million people. The big winners, they say, are the smugglers.

"It has turned a modestly lucrative business into a fantastically profitable industry," said Wayne Cornelius, an immigration expert at the University of California, San Diego.

For this story, the AP analyzed the responses of nearly 61,000 illegal immigrants interviewed by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte researchers over six years, ending in June 2005. The college surveys were conducted at airports, bus stations and crossings in eight Mexican border cities, from Tijuana on the Pacific to Matamoros, just south of Brownsville, Texas.

The study is one of the most ambitious efforts to quantify immigrant smuggling between Mexico and the United States. People surveyed were about evenly split between those deported and those who returned voluntarily after crossing successfully within the previous three years.

Nowhere are smugglers more prominent than Arizona _ the border's desolate midsection and the central front in the U.S. government's struggle against illegal crossings.

According to AP's analysis, of those who said they crossed the border through one of three major Arizona corridors, 55 percent hired a smuggler last year. That compared to 28 percent in 2003 and 18 percent in 2000.

Along the entire border the numbers were slightly lower: 47 percent of respondents in 2005 hired a smuggler, up from 20 percent in 2003 and 16 percent in 2000.

For Meliton Aurelio Sanchez, hiring a smuggler became a life-and-death question.