The Great Wall of Texas... good for (shady) business

From Guadalajara-based Canadian journalist David Agren's "Tales from the Chicken Bus"...

Politics and hurt feelings aside – the Mexican government likens the barrier to the Berlin Wall and considers the construction plans unneighborly – the biggest beneficiary will probably be polleros (traffickers), whose business of smuggling migrants should become a whole lot more lucrative. In an insightful column in today's Publico (Guadalajara), editor Luis Miguel Gonzalez laid out the polleros' economics. According to a 1993 study, one of every six undocumented migrants hired a pollero. By 2004, the figure jumped to two out of every five. The value of the human-smuggling business is estimated to be worth $5 billion annually.