A Bang-Up Business in Illegals; The United States tightens its border. And 'coyotes' couldn't be happier--or richer.

Byline: Monica Campbell

The town of Altar has all the trappings of a way station on the underground railroad that ferries illegal aliens from Mexico to the United States. Located 80 kilometers south of the Arizona border, the grimy community of 14,000 is host to flophouses, wire-transfer outlets and general stores stocked with backpacks, sneakers, hats and those most indispensable items for the migrant preparing for a trek across the desert--gallon-size plastic jugs of water. A pay-phone center near the main plaza is packed with migrants asking their loved ones to wire half the fee a local people smuggler will charge for safe passage to the Other Side, as the United States is widely described inside Mexico. One of those smugglers is Javier, a sinewy 22-year-old Mexican in jeans and baseball cap who got his start in the trade when he was still a teenager. Javier, who didn't want his surname published because his activities are illegal, says he earns up to $40,000 a year as a "coyote," a healthy income in a country where the average citizen makes about $12,000 a year. "Don't think this is easy work," says Javier. "[But] no matter how tight they make the border, I'll find a way through it."

It isn't getting any easier. Earlier this year President George W. Bush ordered the deployment of 6,100 National Guard troops to back up the U.S. Border Patrol in its losing bid to stem the tide of illegal immigration. Unmanned drone surveillance planes, not to mention private vigilantes known as minutemen, further complicate Javier's work. As a result, demand for coyotes' services has never been higher, particularly in the vicinity of Arizona, whose parched hinterland took the lives of most of the 473 immigrants who died crossing the border last year. "Years ago a coyote was a luxury, somebody you paid so that you didn't get wet crossing the border," says David Kyle, an expert on migrant trafficking at the University of California, Davis. "Now it's too dangerous for people to attempt crossing alone."

As the obstacles confronting migrants become steeper, so too do the going rates for their desert guides. In the mid-1990s Juan Pablo TucumAn paid a coyote $600 to get him into Nogales, an Arizona border town that sits directly opposite a Mexican city of the same name. In July of this year the 32-year-old auto mechanic shelled out $2,000 for a three-day hike from the international frontier to the state capital, Phoenix. "I was shocked by the price back then," he says, referring to his ...