Dennis was devastated when he found out there were people hidden inside the hay baler he was driving. So he confronted one of the men who recruited him. "I called him on the phone and I told him, what are y'all trying to do to me? One of my why am I hauling people?" they didn't have nothing to say at that moment. He just kept driving. When he got to his destination, the men handed him more than double the thousand dollars he'd been promised. And in the months that followed, Dennis continued to take driving jobs, hauling more and more people - making a lot of money.
Migrants looking to enter the US from Mexico illegally often pay thousands of dollars to “coyotes,” or smugglers who transport them across the border. Once inside the US, they’re hidden in trailers or the trunks of cars to get past highway checkpoints where law enforcement is on the lookout.
That’s where a largely hidden workforce comes in — people in the US, many of them citizens, who are recruited by smuggling operations to drive the vehicles through the checkpoints, hoping to avoid detection. Often these drivers are themselves barely getting by, and they risk time in federal prison if they’re caught.
Reporter Julia Love, who wrote about this shadow economy for Bloomberg Businessweek, joins this episode to tell the story of one of those drivers–a Texan named Dennis Wilson. Wilson also comes on the podcast to describe his experience–and to tell what happened when he was pulled over early one morning.
Read Julia Love’s story: https://bloom.bg/3kNxlRI
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