Another story that Rico's already written

Randal Archibold has an article about people-smuggling in The New York Times:

They move north in rickety fishing boats, often overloaded and barely seaworthy, slipping through the darkness and hidden from the watchful radar of American patrols. Along beaches north of San Diego, the migrants from Mexico and beyond scramble ashore, in groups of a dozen or two, and dash past stunned beachgoers, sometimes even leaving behind their boats, known as pangas. Drug smugglers, too, take this sea route, including one last month found paddling a surfboard north with a duffel bag full of marijuana on it.
As the land border with Mexico tightens with new fencing and technology, the authorities are seeing a sharp spike in the number of people and drugs being moved into the United States by sea off the San Diego coast. Law enforcement authorities in the United States said the shift demonstrated the resolve of smugglers to exploit the vastness of the sea, the difficulty in monitoring it, and the desperation of migrants willing to risk crossing it. “It’s like spillover from a dam,” said Cmdr. Guy Pearce, who oversees the antismuggling effort for the Coast Guard in San Diego.
For generations, people have tried to swim, surf and ride boats, sometimes carrying contraband, into the United States from south of the border. But Commander Pearce and other officials in the Department of Homeland Security say those sporadic efforts have accelerated to unprecedented levels recently— a doubling in the number of illegal immigrants— more than 300 in the last two years— caught on boats or beaches, and a sevenfold increase in maritime drug seizures, principally several thousand pounds of marijuana.
The authorities have taken note that the increase coincides with the near completion of new, more fortified border fencing along a fourteen-mile stretch from the ocean inland.
New smuggling rings have also emerged, operating out of beach towns south of the border and islands off the Mexican coast, convincing migrants that the passage is safe and the ocean too wide open for maritime law enforcement to catch them. A recent patrol with the Coast Guard showed they may have a point. All night and into the morning, the Coast Guard cutter Petrel dashed across the seas looking for suspect boats. A tip that a suspect boat was due to pass miles off the coast around 1 a.m. sent the cutter, nearly all of its lights off to avoid detection, searching by the faint glow of a half moon. The boat was not found. Later, just after 4 a.m., a radar sweep picked up two boats moving quickly south, prompting the crew to cut off the classical music wafting from overhead speakers on a bridge lighted only by navigation monitors. As the roaring engines sent the cutter crashing over swells for more than twenty minutes after the boats were first noticed, the crew could see the boats speeding without their lights on.
A boarding team mobilized with body armor and rifles and raced in a small craft from the cutter to check out the boats. Just early-morning fishing, said the people on the boats, who insisted they did not realize their lights were off. With no evidence of contraband, they were let go. But Chief Petty Officer Gary Auslam, in charge on this watch, had his doubts as he watched the boats quickly motor on. Gunrunners bringing weapons from the United States move swiftly. “Boy, they got out of here pretty quick, didn’t they?” Chief Auslam said, gazing out the bridge.
It falls mainly to the Coast Guard and the Customs and Border Protection division of the Department of Homeland Security to patrol the seas with a mix of cutters, aircraft, and a few small high-speed boats.
The authorities arrested 136 illegal immigrants sneaking in by sea in the fiscal year that ended on 30 October, double the 66 marine arrests in 2007. Since October, more than one hundred illegal immigrants have been arrested, bringing the marine arrests of illegal immigrants in the past couple of years to unprecedented levels, said Michael Carney, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in San Diego who oversees a task force on marine smuggling.
The seizure of drugs, principally marijuana, has similarly skyrocketed. In the fiscal year that ended in October, the authorities seized 6,300 pounds of marijuana in the coastal waters north of the border, a sevenfold increase from the 906 pounds confiscated in 2007. This fiscal year, 6,100 pounds have been found. “This is somewhat of an alarming trend,” Mr. Carney said. “It has opened our eyes. There is still a lot we need to learn about how these organizations operate.”
The Department of Homeland Security is responding to this surge with orders for more boats and equipment. Generally, the flow of migrants north has slowed as the economy here has withered and the United States has bolstered patrols and fencing. But people still make the journey and the desire for drugs keeps smugglers busy. Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana, Mexico, who has studied smuggling, said he doubted the fence was causing the spike. Instead, Mr. Clark Alfaro said, “a new generation” of smugglers have simply had success ferrying people over the seas and are encouraging migrants to go their way. The charge is more than $4,000, roughly double what a smuggling guide would charge to lead somebody over land, he said. Marijuana smugglers, likewise, have gotten wise to the sea route. “It’s always,” Mr. Clark Alfaro said, “a fight between technology and the ingenuity of smugglers.”
Coast Guard officials said they knew of no boats that had sunk but they worry about that prospect. In March they seized a 25-foot boat with 22 people aboard. The biggest adversary at times, though, is the darkness. Petty Officer First Class Pablo Mendoza picked up night-vision binoculars and scanned the horizon. When it was suggested that the equipment might offer an advantage, Petty Officer Mendoza replied, “Yeah, the problem is they have these, too.” Crew members said they did not believe the Guard or Customs and Border Protection had enough fast boats to get to suspected smuggling boats in time, though the agencies, as well as the Navy and civilian law enforcement, are making an effort to coordinate their patrols.
In the end, said Petty Officer First Class Jason Tessier, another supervisor on the Petrel, “it is a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”

Rico says his book Skeleton Cay, is about illegal emigrants, but it's just as topical; go here and buy a copy.