The Market in Smugglers: Survey Experimental Evidence on the Choice of Coyotes in Guatemala

(With Mateo Villamizar and Erik Wibbels). Working paper.

Recommended citation: Illicit migration is big business. Each year it involves millions of potential migrants, many of whom hire human smugglers to facilitate perilous journeys. Yet very little is known about this illicit market or how migrants choose who to hire. Faced with very high costs and uncertain prospects of making it to their target destination, migrants face a high-stakes, complex choice when identifying a smuggler to work with. In this paper, we provide descriptive evidence on how the market for coyotes (i.e. human smugglers in Latin America) works and survey experimental evidence on the key dimensions impacting the choice of which coyote to hire. Our forced choice experiment allows us to isolate the impact of referrals, reputation, reliability, safety, and price on this high-stakes choice. Our evidence draws on two original sources: a panel survey of deportees from the U.S. to Guatemala and a recent household survey (n=1,500). We find that referrals and a reputation for successful, safe journeys are key drivers when choosing a smuggler. We also find that respondents are unresponsive to price, which provides more solid micro-foundations for recent findings elsewhere that hardening borders raises the cost of migration but fails to reduce its incidence.