This article provides evidence on irregular immigration to the US from Mexico in the years 1963-2014. It aims to answer to two questions. The first is: how much is irregular immigration responsive to changes in the US labour market? Compared with legal immigration, irregular immigration seems to be more sensitive to short-run economic cycles as it is not directly regulated by the policies of the destination country. Second, what effect does border enforcement have on irregular immigration? One of the proposals of the recent bill is the construction of a double layer fence on the Southern border. We do not know, however, to what extent a further increase in border security will prevent irregular immigration and at which economic cost. The contribution of this article is dual: first, it provides empirical evidence on irregular immigration to the US Second, it provides evidence about the effect of US border policies on irregular immigration.

Human smuggling towards Europe has reached an unprecedented level in the last years. The past decade has seen an intensification of the demand for irregular migration services, which increased the role of smuggling rings as service providers to assist irregular migrants in evading national border controls, migration regulations and visa requirements. These criminal organizations feature an entrepreneurial, rent-seeking behaviour using methods such as corruption, deceit, violence, and threats. Literature observes a number of elements which are essential for the establishment and development of any criminal organisation (capital collection, profit maximisation, differentiation of tasks, systems to conceal criminal money flows), but their actual presence within the human smuggling rings has never been verified. Using secondary sources, this contribution aims at verifying the presence of these entrepreneurial elements in the case of human smuggling rings by using a multiple case-study analysis.