The San Ysidro/Tijuana border crossing has changed a lot in a century.

As I was researching my book on Chinese organized crime, I started realizing that the history of many of our most pertinent forms of transnational organized crime--narcotics and human trafficking--had relatively little written about them and what was written essentially ignored the US/Mexico border region in Southern California. I decided to research this further, spending a summer mining the National Archives branches in Washington. D.C. and in Laguna Niguel, CA.

The research was fruitful and I was able to tell a story that helped overturn some conventional wisdom about the subjects. One of the most interesting is the involvement with covert intelligence operations in establishing modern narcotics trafficking infrastructure and TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) and the crucial importance of geopolitical considerations shaping the global drug trade. Both of these factors continue to shape this criminal enterprise in today's world, evidenced, for example, in the Vietnam War, the Iran-Contra Affair, the recent wars in Afghanistan, and the role of the likes of Hezbollah and Quds Force, the People's Republic of China, and the US in the Mexican drug wars.

The research also underscored the crucial role of legitimate businesses and public and private sector corruption as well as the racial and ethnic diversity of underworld and upperworld criminal networks inherent to both narcotics and human trafficking.

Narcotics trafficking is addressed in this article and human trafficking:

Jeffrey McIllwain, "An Equal Opportunity Employer: Opium Smuggling in-and-around San Diego during the Early Twentieth Century," Transnational Organized Crime 4:2 (1998): 31-54.

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Though not assigned for this class, here is my sister article to the above. It addresses the origins of the human trafficking business in the region. I only provide it for those of you who may be interested in the subject, our region's history, or a career in US Customs and Border Protection.

Jeffrey McIllwain, "Bureaucracy Corruption and Organized Crime: Enforcing Exclusion in San Diego, 1897-1902," Western Legal History 17:1 (2004): 83-128.