On CBS Saturday Morning, host Dana Jacobson sat down to discuss the border crisis with anthropology Prof. Jason De Leon, where the duo also hyped his new book on human smuggling. Both host and author claimed the issue “is more complex” than simply viewing the smugglers as bad guys who take advantage of people.
Jacobson reported, “The business of human smuggling, according to the Department of Homeland Security, is a multibillion dollar industry, run by criminal organizations intent on taking advantage of vulnerable people. The story de Leon tells is more complex.”
De Leon differentiates between smugglers and traffickers. For him, a smuggler is working within a consensual agreement with the person seeking to cross the border, whereas a trafficker is not. He therefore claimed, “I can write a story about how they're the bad guys in this whole scenario and all they do is brutalize migrants, but if you think about the realities, if smugglers only brutalized migrants, the system wouldn't function, and so I went into it telling myself that, you know, what can I find that's relatable, it's not trying to humanize smugglers, it's working from the assumption that they are human first and that they just happen to be in this brutal occupation.”
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