In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 3rd edition (Cornell UP, 2022) and The Illicit Global Economy (Oxford UP, 2025), joins RBI Director John Torpey to unpack the myths and realities of border control, illicit trade, and tariffs in the era of Trump. Why do Trump’s border policies resonate with so many despite lower deportation numbers than previous administrations? How are fentanyl, tariffs, and military threats shaping U.S. relations with Mexico and Canada? Andreas explains the performative politics of the border, the historical amnesia around immigration enforcement, and why the lines between legal and illegal economies are blurrier than we think.

Below a slightly edited transcript of this conversation

Transcript

John Torpey 

Perhaps the most consistent promise of presidential candidate Donald Trump was his plan to deport millions of illegal immigrants from the United States to their countries of origin. Some of that undertaking has begun, but preliminary indications are that the numbers of deportations are lower than under either the Biden or the Obama Administrations. Border politics have also gotten mixed up with tariff policies in part on the basis of the administration’s claim that Mexico, at least, has been a major source of fentanyl, and Trump is demanding more support from Mexico and from Canada getting the fentanyl problem under control. So what’s going on at the border? Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and we’re fortunate to have with us today Peter Andreas, who is the John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University. Andreas is the author, co-author, or co-editor of a dozen books, including Border Games: Policing the US-Mexico Divide, which recently came out in a third edition from Cornell University Press, and most recently, The Illicit Global Economy: What Everyone Needs To Know, from Oxford University Press in 2025. In 2024 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime. Thanks for being with us today, Peter Andreas.

Peter Andreas 

Thanks for having me.

John Torpey 

Great to have you. Great to see you after many years.

Peter Andreas 

Indeed.

John Torpey 

Since you’ve recently written this sort of primer on the global illicit economy, maybe we could start there. The book appears in Oxford’s What Everyone Needs to Know series. So what does everyone everyone need to know about global crime right now?  Sure,

Peter Andreas 

Sure, I mean, this is a topic or subject that either tends to be just ignored and bracketed and not thought about, or, like, it’s often grossly misunderstood, and so part of what the book’s about is myth busting. First of all, importantly, it’s not particularly new. There’s a lot of talk out there that they’re worth some fundamentally new and different era of illicit globalization, but from a longer perspective, not just years or decades, but even centuries, the illicit global economy has been with us for a very long time, and it’s not clear that it’s actually been, you know, more important now or more of a problem now than it has been in the past. Also, another myth,it’s really not run by, you know, massive, large, hierarchical criminal organizations, sort of, you know, the multinational corporations of the of the criminal world. It’s actually extraordinarily diverse in terms of the actors and also the activities, the variation in what the illicit global economy is actually composed of, and it’s also inseparable from the legal economy. So, you know, these are pretty much divorced fields of study, studying, you know, the international political economy versus the illicit economy. But to be honest, they should, they should be part of the same thing, and it’s also not particularly out of control. I mean, a lot of the discourse around this is that borders are under siege and states are under siege, and it’s unprecedented. But I think, you know, this suffers from historical amnesia, and it varies a great deal across place and time, and even illicit activity across borders. So, you know, part of what the book does is try to summarize and synthesize, you know, and in some ways, over three decades of my work on issues related to the illicit global economy. And, you know, tell people the sky’s not falling. It’s simultaneously an incredibly important subject, but also not something that we should have knee-jerk over reactions to that lead to, actually, policies that end up doing more harm than good.

John Torpey 

So I’m always kind of curious how people study criminality. Now, I mean, other than studying, you know, statistics from the FBI, or whoever might, you know, be gathering statistics. How does one approach criminals? I mean, there are plenty of, you know, legal actors who don’t necessarily want to talk to a researcher, but one imagines that criminals especially wouldn’t want to do that. So what do you do? How do you deal with that?

Peter Andreas 

Yeah, I mean, part of what the book also does, it just shows just how terrible and awful the statistics are in this realm. I mean, these are guesstimates at best. So you have, you know, governments and international organizations and NGOs making wild claims about the size of a particular sector of the illicit, you know, drug trafficking, migrant smuggling, intellectual property theft and so on. But if you scratch below the surface, you know these at best, these are, these are guesstimates. So, you know, the book doesn’t really come up with better measures, but it it encourages us to be more skeptical. You know, consumers of the data that that’s out there, certainly some illicit trades are easier to trace than others. Those are close, those which are closer to the surface, for example, tobacco smuggling, since it’s a legal industry, and we have good data on on tobacco exports, the fact that tobacco imports are 1/3 lower than tobacco exports is a big puzzle, right? They should be exactly the same number, but part of the explanation of that discrepancy is black market diversion, for example.

John Torpey 

So when we started talking, I mentioned this issue of the border situation and Trump’s demands about controlling, you know, the Canadians and the Mexicans doing more to control the influx of fentanyl into the into the United States. And, of course, it’s all gotten mixed up with migration question, immigration questions, illegal migration, etc. So maybe you could start to tell us a little bit about this idea of border politics, and what you think is going on, and how we got to this kind of current impasse where, you know, it was one of the central things that Trump ran on, and that obviously has a lot to do with the number of illegal immigrants in the country.

Peter Andreas 

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Trump has, in some ways, mastered the border game. I mean, he, if we remember his first term, his the centerpiece promise and the main rallying call of his, of his campaign, was, was, build a wall, right? “Build the wall, build the wall,” would chant his followers. And it was, it was brilliant, simple messaging, right? A concrete, visible thing that you could do. None of his political opponents were willing to call it a wall, even though they’d spent decades actually supporting hardening the border. So, you know, Trump kind of took it to the next level, and continues to do so,you know. What’s different now is, you know, it’s, he doesn’t talk much about a wall notice, right? The wall was about, was about keeping people out. It’s kind of a defensive, you know, move. Now, it’s all about deportations, it’s an offensive move. It’s kicking them out, not keeping them out, right? But the border game, I mean, since it’s this is not new. He’s just the latest player and the most prominent one, and has gained the most political mileage out of it. But, you know, it goes back decades, and it’s, it’s across the political aisle. I mean, we forget too easily that in the 1990s Bill Clinton played the border game, where he actually, you know, part of the reason he won Southern California against Bob Dole in 96 was because he toughened, toughened the southern border, and he threw lots of resources at it, built new fencing, made a much more prominent issue of it than it ever had, ever had been. And then after 9/11, across the political aisle, there’s a kind of a bipartisan consensus to build more border fences. I mean, the Secure Fence Act, 2006 under Bush Jr., it’s bipartisan support. But what’s interesting is people shied away from calling a wall wall. It was too still, too close to the Berlin Wall, right? People, it was like, you know, walls are bad. You don’t, you don’t do that. I mean,  Pat Buchanan tried to call for building a wall in the 90s, and you know, there, as a Republican, he got ostracized from the party for for doing so. But years later, you know, Trump did something that no one else was willing to do, was to call it a wall, though, in fact, it’s, you know, in some ways not that different than what had had happened before. The big move now, of course, as I mentioned, is, is the promise of deportations, mass deportations. So far as you know, the numbers are not particularly different than under Obama. In fact, less than Obama and not that different than than under under Biden. What is different is the celebration of it, the visuals, right, shackled migrants being put on planes and flown off on military, you know, carriers and so on. This is, this is the sort of the tone and the visuals this is, this is not how Democrats, you know, show that they’re getting tough on migration. In some senses, Clinton out tough the Republicans in the 90s. But you can’t out tough Trump on the border now, right? You just don’t go there. You don’t support this kind of mass and you don’t even, you know, you also, of course, distance yourself from calling a wall, but… So, you know, Kamala Harris tried to show that she was tough, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t win the border game against, against Trump. Though it’s interesting, people forget just how much resources were actually thrown into border enforcement and so on during both Democrats and Republicans alike. I mean, the big change in terms of the flows are one that you know, since the Obama years, most people at the border are claiming asylum, right? They’re not trying to avoid the Border Patrol. They’re actually trying to find the Border Patrol and report to them and then ask for asylum. And the huge machinery that had been built up till then wasn’t designed for that, you know, it was designed to keep people out and to, you know, send workers back across the border to try again. Now people are coming to you, and the system is overloaded. And so when Trump came into the picture, he basically painted this image of an out of control border, as if he was the first person to ever think about border and enforcement. You know, border free, you know, open borders Democrats was the slur that he gave, but the system was not built to handle asylum seeker. So that’s the one big change on the migration front. And then on the drug front, you know, it’s fentanyl, which basically, you know, if, look, if you’re a country, geography is destiny. If you’re a country that’s right next door to the largest drug, illegal drug, consumer market in the world, the United States, you’re going to be an importer. You’re going to be an exporter of drugs to that, to that market. Mexico is, and even Canada is, to some small extent. And so, you know, Mexico, it’s been cannabis, it’s been heroin, it’s been methamphetamines and now the big attention grabber is, of course, fentanyl, because of the record overdose deaths the US has had in recent years, so it’s gone down slightly in the last couple years. So it’s ready made for finger pointing at neighbors, given the fact that fentanyl is implicated in the majority of drug overdose deaths in recent years. The fact that the finger pointing is also ay Canada is a little new and different. It’s not entirely different in the sense that, you know, it’s, it’s a long border that lots of stuff has been smuggled across in both directions since forever. You know, back in the prohibition era, Canada was a major source of alcohol to the US. But for the most part, Canadians have not been accustomed to being bashed for, you know, being lax on border enforcement. Mexico, all the finger pointing has mostly been south to Mexico and, and now the finger pointing is in both directions. And you know the idea that Canada is even remotely close to being accurately described as a fentanyl source is ridiculous. I mean, it’s, it’s, we’re talking less than 1% of fentanyl flows into the country. My guess is more fentanyl comes into the US, more than comes in from Canada, comes right, directly into the US, to the mail system, right than from Canada. So you know the catch is Trump is demanding a stop to fentanyl imports, but that’s in practical terms and impossible demand. So because they have so little to do with it, they have so little, but even Mexico has a lot to do with fentanyl, but can’t put a stop to it. Can’t put a stop, you know, basically, you know, cocaine can’t put a stop, just like the US we conveniently ignores the source of most of the firearms in Mexico and probably in Canada, but can’t put an entire stop to that either. So, you know, make impossible demands, countries are going to scramble to meet them, but it’s ultimately judgment call whether they’re doing enough to satisfy you, because it’s never going to be, you know…

John Torpey 

Full stop.

Peter Andreas 

Exactly.

John Torpey 

Right. So talk to us a little bit about how tariffs play into this. I mean, he’s, you know, imposing tariffs here, there and everywhere and but I mean, particularly on of all people, Canada, again, you know. It’s not so surprising with Mexico,there are surely industries where that’s a reasonable thing to do relative to Mexico. But Canada, I mean, again, there’s some industries steel and aluminum that seem to be, you know, reasonable targets of tariffs from our side. But you know, how does this play into the whole border, the migration and the drug…

Peter Andreas 

Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing here is that Trump himself negotiated a NAFTA replacement free trade deal with Canada and Mexico during his first term. He called it a great deal great, you know. And you know, fast forward to the present, you know, the reality is, and this is partly a product of since NAFTA is, Canada and Mexico have become tightly integrated into the into the US. So it’s actually asymmetric interdependence. I mean, it’s an interdependent North American economy, but Mexico and Canada are far more vulnerable to the US than the US is to Mexico and Canada. And so there’s there’s leverage there, and Trump realizes it, and is suddenly playing it. But it’s interesting. What’s new now is, is he’s not just saying these, these, these tariffs are for, you know, protect us industries or to increase manufacturing. In the case of Mexico and Canada, he’s basically hitting them over the head on the drug issue and migration issue. His real agenda may be these other things, but, you know, basically he’s saying Canada needs to crack down on fentanyl because it’s, it’s, it’s weaponization of tariffs in a political way that we, I have not seen before. He hasn’t quite pull it off yet, right? So he, you know, the last deadline it passed, and then a few hours later, he gave another pause and so now we’re sort of, you know, waiting to see, you know, what’s going to happen early next month. Actually, I don’t remember the exact deadline, but it’s in the first week of the next month. The promise he’s, you know, he says these things, and the entire industry scramble to try to figure out how to handle it, their supply chains and so on. And so, you know, the auto industry in particular, scrambling to meet with them to tell them what the chaos it’s creating in parts and so on, as creating a lot of animosity, of course, amongst our neighbors, the Canadians in particular, not are not used to this sort of finger pointing and and bashing. No, they’re the nice guys of North America, after all, that’s the image,yeah.

John Torpey 

You may, you may not know that I lived there for six years and taught at UBC, so I’ve spent some time in Canada. But in any case, I want to go back to something you, a couple things you said, and it has to do with his mastery, as I think you put it, of the border game. And you know the fact that there are, in fact, at least so far, you know, fewer deportations under this mass deportation program than there were under Obama and even under Biden. And, you know, the question is, why do we think that? How is it that he manages to persuade large segments of the population that, you know, he’s, as you say, sort of the one who really discovered this problem and is really going to take it on. I mean, why does that message carry and what Obama did, let’s say, which was a combination of deportations and a pathway to citizenship for a lot of immigrants. Why do, you know, why does the one message succeed and the other doesn’t?

Peter Andreas 

Well, in the case of deportations, Obama was actually trying to impress Republicans in Congress. He was, his audience was trying to show, show them that he could get tough. And so please then sign on to a to a immigration reform deal. Trump’s audience is his base, right the broader public. And so the imagery and the language used and so on is much harsher, and the visuals are much harsher than Obama, you know. We don’t know where this is going, but exactly because it’s still early. Trump’s obsessed with numbers. So you know, one thing we do know is that he’s promised the biggest deportation in American history. And so, you know, that’s something that he’s aiming for. And so that will mean, you know, a million a year would surpass Obama’s numbers. And so, you know, that’s one thing. The other thing is that, although it didn’t help Harris politically, because it came too late in the campaign, is that the border had significantly quieted down terms of numbers of migrants attempting to enter the United States by the, you know, November elections. And so, and then that continued to, you know, quiet down, you know, into when Trump took power. And so, you know his mantras, I’m stopping an invasion, anyone who went to the border, you know, on the day that Trump took power, it’s like there’s, there’s no invasion, right? And so, but he, you know, historical amnesia can, can include what happened two months ago, right? So he’s saying, look, you know, I’ve taken control the border, but it’s, it’s already pretty quieted down. Now, what’s interesting is we just don’t know how much is a pause versus a fundamental change in things. So we’ve seen this in the past, where there have been pauses. Under his first administration, there was a pause in the numbers, and then they came back up and infuriated him. He was obsessed with the numbers he would get. He would scold his, you know, Homeland Security officials, because the numbers were creeping up and, and he would start making wild claims about the numbers going down, but everybody knew the numbers were going up and, and so we’ll see how this, this plays out. But I mean to answer your question, I mean, the biggest difference from him versus his predecessors is just the sheer glee and the visuals in kicking people out and keeping people out, that that is his rivals across, you know, the aisle just haven’t gone there.

John Torpey 

So a propos these deportations, you just said, well, it could become a situation where it’s really a million people a year, and that would supersede what Obama had done. But what are the logistics of this? I mean, see, we had Kitty Calavita, who wrote a book about the Operation Wetback, talk about this, and, you know, she was concerned that a lot of people’s lives were going to be disrupted. But she also said, you know, there’s a huge logistical problem in moving these people around. I mean, even this, you know, much, much noticed flight to El Salvador, it was 200 people, I mean, and you got to get them into a plane and you know, they better go somewhere. Okay, you have a willing recipient in Bukele, in El Salvador, but it’s a huge, it’s all a huge logistical problem. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Peter Andreas 

Yeah, I mean, on one hand, you’re absolutely right about the logistics and just the machinery that needs to be put in place. Can’t be put in place that quickly to actually, you know, do the kind of numbers that that, you know, Trump and some of the supporters dream about and fantasize about, right, getting rid of 12 million migrants, you know, unauthorized migrants in the country. So that’s not going to happen. But I think we need to really not underestimate the power of it’s not just logistics, but the power of changing the climate, the climate that the sense of fear. I mean, basically, you know, the Administration used the term shock and awe, right? You know it’s all for his base, and it’s, it’s shock for my migrant communities, who you know, okay, they’re not, they’re not in the midst of being deported, but they’re waiting for the knock on the door or the raid at their workplace or whatnot, just the sense of uncertainty and fear and disruption. There are plenty of, and this is actually what the Administration wants, is people to self deport. But there are, in fact, we don’t know the numbers, but there are plenty of people, and I think there’ll be growing numbers who basically to say, enough, I am going back. And, you know, even though there’s some been here for decades, right? Families, kids who are, who are US citizens and so on, but the climate of fear, I mean, unauthorized migrants have always, to very extent, you know, lived in a climate of uncertainty. And you know, there’s always the possibility of, you know, getting stopped or something and being deported. But I think the just the intensity of the political moment is, I haven’t seen anything like it, you know, in my lifetime. So that shouldn’t be underestimated. But the logistics are real. I mean, they’re not there that it’s, it’s slow, you know, moving process, and it’s going to frustrate a lot of officials and, and the base that it’s not going faster. But in some ways, the visuals, you know, those are visuals. They’re not about numbers. They’re about the visuals. And those, those play well to certain segments.

Speaker 1 

Yes,

John Torpey 

 Yes, certainly. So, I mean, we’re actually kind of running out of time. So I want to actually ask you, you know, a big picture question. I mean, where is this sort of cocktail of fentanyl and other drugs and border control and immigration and policing? I mean, where is this going? I mean, I understand you can’t predict the future of a crystal ball, but…

Peter Andreas 

Yeah, you know, I can speculate. I think the, you know, it’s, we’re, we’re in less than the first two, you know, we’re the two months into the into the Administration. We got four years, right? And the thing I can see happening is the potential for, you know, if you look at the three key things that are going on here, one is the tariffs, one is deportations, and one is militarization, right, sending more troops to the border and actually labeling drug traffickers as for officially labeling as terrorist organizations. And so you just project into the future, and tariffs that we’ve already seen, I think, are contributing to, you know, volatility, let’s call it in financial markets. And that could get a lot worse. We could get thrown into a recession. It’s unclear to me how much he cares about that, but certainly give some people pause, it also could potentially, and this is utterly counterproductive, is undermine the Mexican economy to such extent that, that Mexican end up coming to the US more. I mean, basically, Mexican migration itself has slowed to a trickle. It’s mostly been Central Americans and third, you know, third country nationals from, from outside of Mexico, from across the hemisphere and beyond, Chinese Indians and so on. But if Mexican migration picked up again, and it’s against the Mexican Constitution to actually, you know, stop their own citizens from, from leaving the country. So Mexican can cooperate against third country nationals, but not stopping Mexicans. So you sabotage Mexico’s economy, which is deeply dependent on, on, you know, open markets with the US. That’s, that’s short sighted. Um, the other, so the tariffs and then, um, deportations, like I said, the numbers will, will, you know, we, I can almost guarantee the numbers will be bigger than Obama, because he fixated on being able to say the biggest deportation effort in history. I wouldn’t be surprised if, quietly, there’s been, there will be an increase in temporary worker visas, for farm workers and so on, because there’s going to be a pushback from employers at some point, if this really gets going. And the quiet move will be to increase short term visas potentially. I mean, those visas have already increased significantly in recent decades with Mexicans, but I can imagine that actually, as a partial solution to the shortage of workers. And the most ominous is talk about, you know, military incursions into Mexico, going after traffickers and so on. Once you label them as terrorists, it opens up all kinds of possibilities for doing strikes and so on, with or without Mexico’s cooperation. That could get pretty dicey. A nationalist backlash in Mexico, given its history with the US, is highly problematic, to say the least. So that’s, you know, I used to think this is an impossibility, but actually there’s a long history of this with the US and with this administration, you never know. It’s not going to stop the flow of fentanyl or any of the other drugs, frankly, but it will be a new and different move for the US in relationship to these issues with Mexico in recent, recent decades.

John Torpey 

Well, and it sounds like at least some of it will be performative, essentially.

Peter Andreas 

Yeah, you know, a lot, that’s what border politics ultimately are. Is performing. The border itself is a thin line, right? It’s, it’s, you can describe it as as under control or out of control, as you wish, as a politician, it’s there for, you know, social construction, right? But if you extend, you know, operations into Mexico and then within the US, it’s kind of a thickening, you know, of the border, and what we’ve seen in recent years is Mexico considerably cooperating on curbing migration from, from, by non Mexican nationals. But Mexico’s cooperation on that could significantly take a hit if the US does drastic things like tariffs and military incursions. This is why there’s actually a split within the Trump camp over this the Steven Millers of the world, they care about immigration control, they would, you know, basically inhibit and call for slowing down any kind of military action, because they know that it will undermine Mexico’s cooperation on the migration front, whereas, as others, you know, gung ho voices with the Administration that are ready to send in special forces to take out traffickers, right? So this is an interesting political schism within the Trump camp.

John Torpey 

Fascinating. Well, as you say, I think we need to be skeptical about numbers, and we have to kind of wait and see. We don’t know whether what we’re seeing now is what’s going to happen in the longer term. It’s kind of we’ll have to wait and see how it pans out. But thanks very much for helping us think about these things and to be informed. That’s it for today’s episode. I want to thank Peter Andreas for sharing his insights about global crime and what the Trump Administration’s border control policies may have to do with it. Look for International Horizons on the New Books Network, and remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple Podcast. I want to thank Claire Centofanti for her technical assistance, as well as to acknowledge Duncan McKay for sharing his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey saying thanks for joining us, and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.