The Attorney–Smuggler Analogy: Parallel Economies of Mobility at the US–Mexico Border

Guest post by Marielys Padua Soto. Marielys Padua Soto is a lawyer and researcher currently completing an MA in Migration and Refugee Studies at The American University in Cairo. She specializes in migration, forced displacement, and refugee protection, with field experience in the USA, Latin America, Europe, and the MENA region.  

Crossing borders are acts of strategy, risk management, and financial negotiation. Hierarchies of privilege shape this process, as passports, wealth, and citizenship often determine who moves freely and who must risk everything. Public debates around border control are often framed around enforcement, security, and deterrence. Politicians and media outlets routinely vilify the people that facilitate irregular crossings while rarely acknowledging that both smugglers and immigration attorneys alike operate within the same restrictive system, which is one that monetizes access to mobility. They share more in common than society often acknowledges. Both navigate complex border systems, charge significant fees, and offer migrants a pathway to reach their destination country. Border scholarship has continuously described smuggling as a service industry, a market that emerges in response to the criminalization of mobility and the scarcity of legal pathways.  

Within this framework, smugglers are providers of an illicit service that enables movement where the state has closed legal options. They facilitate clandestine crossings, relying on knowledge of terrain, checkpoints, and surveillance systems. Their expertise, honed through experience in high-stakes environments, can at times resemble the strategic guidance offered by attorneys who navigate complex legal frameworks filled with paperwork, deadlines, and court appearances. However, the smuggling economy is far from uniform. Actors involved in clandestine crossings range from loosely connected facilitators and drivers to local guides and opportunistic intermediaries. Relationships between them are often informal and situational rather than hierarchical or highly organized. Their market is fundamentally demand driven. As Gabriella Sanchez has shown, smuggling economies arise in response to restrictive immigration regimes. Smugglers price their services according to the route’s danger, duration, and likelihood of success, but their fees are shaped by more than logistics alone. Evidence shows that prices are also shaped by social and relational factors, such as shared community ties, linguistic familiarity, and the interest of maintaining a positive reputation. In this sense, the price of smuggling services depends not only on the service provided, but also on who is purchasing it.  

On the other hand, immigration attorney fees vary widely, reflecting the complexity of cases, the attorney’s experience, and the stakes involved. Of course, access to legal representation is itself a form of privilege: in the United States, fewer than one in three asylum seekers are represented by an attorney in immigration court, and the rate of legal representation in removal proceedings is even lower. Still, both attorneys and smugglers rely on trust, demand payment, and expose their clients to risks that extend far beyond the financial. In both cases, migrants are betting on expertise to secure access to a territory or status that would otherwise remain out of reach.  

Furthermore, risk is another point of convergence. Attorneys, despite their formal standing, cannot guarantee outcomes. Well-prepared cases are often denied, leaving clients in prolonged uncertainty. Smugglers operate in even more precarious environments, facing dangers that range from arrest to desert crossings, border violence, and death. In other words, political barriers, not only geographic obstacles, create the conditions under which smuggling thrives. Like any market, this economy reflects variance in cost, quality, and risk, shaped by demand, opportunity, and the uneven distribution of mobility rights. For many migrants, whether paying an attorney or a smuggler, the financial burden is immense. Both services exist because knowledge and access to mobility have been commodified. Both services, legal and illicit, are parallel markets where knowledge and access come at a premium. According to Human Rights Watch, thousands of migrants face life-threatening risks each year attempting desert crossings, while asylum seekers may wait over a year for their first legal hearing, highlighting the cruel trade-off between speed and legality. In both cases, payment is an investment in the hope of a better future, but it is an investment characterized by uncertainty. Nevertheless, both legal and informal actors offer solutions in a system where structural barriers often determine who succeeds and who doesn’t. 

While reliance on informal migration networks is a global phenomenon, the attorney-smuggler analogy is particularly revealing in the U.S. context, where the legal immigration process is both highly bureaucratic and prohibitively expensive. The interplay of restrictive visa regimes, inconsistent asylum adjudication, and prolonged backlogs leaves many with no realistic option but to seek alternative forms of facilitation. This exposes a fundamental truth about the system: when access to legal avenues is limited, migrants may be forced to turn to informal networks. Smugglers step into a market created by restrictions, just as attorneys operate within spaces shaped by complex legal industries. Both illustrate how migration policies generate demand for intermediaries whose knowledge and connections can determine life trajectories.  

The attorney-smuggler analogy raises a difficult ethical question for migrants: how does one choose between legality and survival when lawful channels are slow, limited, or inaccessible? One could argue that smugglers are a mirror of the legal system because they provide guidance through the border’s labyrinthine barriers when access to lawful entry is scarce or non-existent. But both legal professionals and smuggling service providers ultimately operate within, and profit from, the same global hierarchy of mobility. In both markets, access is mediated by money. The ability to hire an attorney or pay a smuggler becomes a privilege that only a fraction of people on the move can afford. This selective accessibility reinforces the socio-economic hierarchies embedded in contemporary migration governance. The result is a system that enables the circulation of capital and the privileged, while criminalizing the mobility of the poor. In this sense, both attorneys and smugglers do not merely respond to inequality; they help reproduce it by sustaining a global migration regime that privileges the few and excludes the many. This perspective has implications for policy and public discourse. Border enforcement alone cannot eliminate demand for intermediaries. Restricting legal access without addressing structural barriers simply shifts risk from attorneys to smugglers. Recognizing the structural drivers behind smuggling does not condone it; it reframes it as a symptom of policy failure rather than solely individual criminality. The attorney-smuggler analogy highlights the fact that both actors operate in a world defined by restrictions, uncertainties, and high stakes, providing expertise to those navigating difficult choices, provided they have the economic means to do so. The human costs of borders are rarely confined to those crossing them. They ripple through every actor engaged in the struggle to move, whether through safe and legal channels or risky and illicit ones.  

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