Smuggler Nation (59 page)

Then, as now, it was often difficult to clearly differentiate between greed and grievance in motivating rebellion. There is certainly no evidence to suggest that today’s insurgents are more profit-driven than some of their American predecessors; one need only examine the large and lucrative privateering business—which the British defined as piracy because they did not recognize the legal authority of the rebels to commission privateering vessels—during the American War of Independence to realize how much the profit motive can contribute to a revolutionary cause. The grievances were real, but so too were the fortunes made from war.

Illicit international trading networks are also frequently blamed for undermining UN sanctions, most powerfully dramatized by large-scale embargo busting by Serbia and Iraq in the 1990s.
⁵⁴
But no contemporary sanctions episode has been as ambitious—or as widely violated—as Thomas Jefferson’s self-imposed embargo on American trade with the rest of the world. Designed to punish European powers by denying them American exports, Jefferson’s ill-fated embargo was instead massively (and sometimes violently) evaded from within. The illicit trade was so blatant and defiant of federal authority in some places that Jefferson called it an insurrection.

Illicit trade in recent years is also blamed for impeding and complicating postwar reconstruction in places such as Bosnia and Kosovo. But long forgotten is that this was also true for the United States in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. The very smuggling practices that aided the War of Independence turned into an obstacle for the newborn American state. The powerful legacy of colonial smuggling contributed to merchant resistance to centralized state authority and regulation of commerce. Smuggling now undermined American rather than British revenue collection and greatly complicated U.S. border management and foreign relations. This was a particularly serious problem for the nascent federal government, given that most of its revenue derived from duties imposed on imports.

Illicit trade was therefore a major challenge to early American state making—just as it is for state-making efforts around the globe today. At the same time, concerns about smuggling stimulated government growth and the creation of a border management infrastructure, notably the establishment of the customs service as one of the first pillars of the federal government. Efforts to combat pirates and embargo busters also contributed to the early development of the navy. In other words, illicit trade and related activities were double-edged, both undermining and building up the new American state. The same is true today, suggesting more continuity with the past than is typically recognized. We should be careful not to overstate or misinterpret the historical parallels, but neither should they be glossed over.

BRINGING IN HISTORY TO
reevaluate illicit globalization in the early twenty-first century is crucial for a number of reasons: because it is so conspicuously absent from contemporary debates about transnational crime, because it corrects for the hubris of the present and the common tendency to view recent developments as entirely new and unprecedented, and because it helps us make sense of why we are where we are and even where we might be headed. Today’s efforts to secure America’s borders are part and parcel of historical processes that date back centuries, when Britain deployed substantial naval resources in an ill-fated effort to suppress illicit colonial trade, and the newborn U.S. federal government tried to impose some semblance of control over its vast land and water borders. The depth and extent of contemporary anti-smuggling efforts would have been unimaginable to U.S. border enforcers a century and more ago, but the basic challenges would not.

As has always been the case, there are inherent limits to how much we can deter, detect, and interdict unauthorized flows of goods and people across our borders, especially while maintaining an open society and keeping borders open for legal trade and travel. An average of nearly a million people; more than sixty thousand truck, rail, and sea containers; and about a quarter-million privately owned vehicles legally entered the United States
every day
in 2010. That same year, more than $2 trillion in legal imports crossed our borders. Facilitating this enormous volume of licit border crossings while attempting to enforce laws against illicit crossings is and will remain an inherently cumbersome
and frustrating task. Reconciling the imperatives of globalization with the domestic pressures for tighter border enforcement will no doubt continue to present a hugely challenging policy conundrum, placing great strain on the nation’s gatekeepers.

But this predicament need not lead to more collective hyperventilating about seemingly out-of-control borders and illicit globalization gone amok. We need to take a deep breath. The sky is not falling. Accounts of illicit globalization that suggest otherwise are not only overblown but can lead to counterproductive policy prescriptions. Urgent calls to “do something” to “regain control” provide ammunition for politicians and bureaucrats to justify high-profile and expensive crackdowns that may be politically popular but that ultimately fail. It can also contribute to growing calls to further securitize and militarize anti-smuggling efforts at home and abroad, regardless of the effectiveness of using military resources for law enforcement tasks. The temptation to do so has increased considerably in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, as is evident in the growing convergence between counterterrorism and countersmuggling missions. Failure to find the smuggled “nuke in a box” is the ultimate nightmare scenario, however unlikely it may be.
⁵⁵
But whether that smuggling nightmare—we could call it “catastrophic smuggling”—ever becomes a reality will depend more on intelligence gathering and international cooperation than on random border searches.

Meanwhile, some American anti-smuggling initiatives continue to generate enormous collateral damage, particularly the campaigns to suppress the smuggling of people and drugs. The tightening of immigration controls has prompted migrant smugglers to turn to more daring and dangerous border-crossing strategies, leading to hundreds of migrant deaths per year. Further barricading the border has substituted for repairing a deeply dysfunctional immigration system.
⁵⁶
The American-led global antidrug campaign has also contributed to extraordinary levels of crime, violence, corruption, and other ills. These supply-focused policing initiatives endlessly chase the symptoms rather than the source of the problem at home. Blaming foreign drug traffickers and migrant smugglers is politically easier than confronting America’s twin addictions to mind-altering substances and cheap migrant labor.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the United States, the world’s leading promoter of the war on drugs, is also the world’s leading jailer. With about 5 percent of the world’s population, America has about 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. Indeed, it incarcerates more people for drug law violations than Western Europe incarcerates for all offenses combined. The number of people in jail for drug law violations in the United States shot up from around forty thousand in 1980 to about half a million by 2010. Like the British in their crusade against the illicit slave trade in the nineteenth century, the United States leads a crusade of sorts against drugs—but whereas the former was about freeing people, the war on drugs is about locking them up, with African Americans a disproportionate number of those behind bars.
⁵⁷

Battles over illicit trade will no doubt continue to profoundly shape America and its engagement with its neighbors and the rest of the world in the twenty-first century. The particular smuggling activities and policing priorities will surely shift over time, as they always have, but it is safe to predict that America’s centuries-old illicit trading tradition will remain alive and well.

EPILOGUE

LET’S RETURN BRIEFLY
to the place where our smuggling story began: my adopted hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, which played such a prominent role in illicit trade during the colonial era and early years of the new republic. Let’s start in my undergraduate lecture class at Brown on “The Politics of the Illicit Global Economy.” I ask students how many of them have ever bought counterfeit goods; a majority of hands go up. I ask how many are right now wearing a knock-off product; a few hands go up. I then ask how many have illegally downloaded movies or music—and almost all hands go up, which is perhaps to be expected, given that all they have to do is type “download music for free” in Google to find links to illegal copies of all sorts of entertainment.

Of course, illegally buying and consuming alcohol before reaching the legal age of twenty-one—facilitated by the underground trade in fake IDs—is so common and taken for granted that I don’t even have to ask my students for a show of hands. I also don’t ask them about illegal drugs. I already know the answer. The campus newspaper conducts a regular substance use poll. In one poll more than 40 percent of the students polled indicated they had used marijuana that semester;
¹
marijuana is apparently more widely used on campus than tobacco.
²
Students also illegally buy or sell prescription pills; Adderall and Ritalin are particularly popular.
³

I also don’t ask my students from immigrant families about their legal status or how they or their parents got into the United States. Again, as the campus newspaper reports, Brown has its own unauthorized immigrant student population—not to mention an unknown number of immigrant employees who have at some point resorted to using fraudulent papers.
⁴

Yet none of this should lead us to frown upon Brown alone for such behavior. Far from it. Pick any university across the country and you will find similar stories. Look hard enough and dig deep enough, and you will inevitably find traces of all sorts of smuggling in all sorts of places. Brown, like other institutions of higher education, is a smuggler university within a smuggler nation embedded in a smuggler world. Indeed, it has always been so; a founder of the university, after all, was perhaps Rhode Island’s richest smuggler. John Brown would no doubt be proud that the smuggler tradition remains alive and well. He would also certainly find some of today’s smuggling activities bewildering, since there were no drug prohibitions in his day and nothing remotely resembling pirated music recordings and knock-off Gucci bags—though pirated industrial technology would certainly be familiar, given that his brother Moses and others in his family invested quite a bit in it and played a role in America’s early industrialization.

John Brown would also notice that Rhode Island is no longer the smuggling hub it was during his heyday. Even if Rhode Island still dabbles in illicit commerce and cannot shake off its old reputation for corruption and shady business dealings (
Newsweek
has labeled it the state with the highest per capita corruption in the country
⁵
) it is now merely a bit player in the world of smuggling compared to its early history. In the early years, Rhode Island’s fiercely independent merchants smuggled in West Indies molasses to manufacture rum and later illicitly imported British technology and machinists to produce textiles, helping to launch the American industrial revolution. They were also leading slave traffickers in flagrant defiance of state and federal laws. But the distilleries and mills are long gone, as is the African slave trade. Like my students, Rhode Islanders now participate in the smuggling economy mostly as consumers rather than producers or traders.

John Brown the illicit slave trader would also surely be startled to see that a black woman had recently served as president of the university
he helped found. The slave trade that he so defiantly defended forcibly brought to America the ancestors of Ruth Simmons—the first African American president of an Ivy League institution, whose office was located in a university building partly built by slave labor. Simmons was praised for forming a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice to examine the university’s early links to slavery and slave trafficking, including John Brown’s role. Yet Simmons was also the subject of controversy when it was reported that, as a board member of Goldman Sachs—the now infamous firm that paid a $550 million fine in 2010 to settle federal securities fraud charges
⁶
—she accepted millions of dollars in stock options and approved millions more in controversial bonuses for its widely reviled top executives at a time when the nation was undergoing the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. Simmons’s role at Goldman Sachs raised eyebrows across campus, provoked outrage in the
Providence Journal
, and drew the scrutiny of the business page of the
New York Times
.
⁷
She nevertheless survived the episode remarkably unscathed, and is widely celebrated as Brown’s most successful president.