19:03

In the last few years, the face of undocumented immigration to the U.S. has changed and so has the business of human smuggling. Make no mistake, sneaking people across the U.S.-Mexico border is a well established, booming business. Today on the show, we meet a businessman and a client in the evolving industry of human smuggling.

For some context consider the changes in recent years: Mexican immigrants have actually been leaving America. Meanwhile, Central American immigration is on the rise. This shift caused alarm when unaccompanied children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala started showing up at the border seeking shelter. A new wave of people were making their way up through Mexico, trying to cross rivers and deserts to escape nightmarish poverty and gang violence. And many of the people doing this were paying dearly for it.

Between 2012 and 2014, as the Central American immigration crisis began to boil, our reporter for this episode, Jasmine Garsd, was there in both Mexico and Central America. One thing that caught her attention was the complex financial ecosystem that arose from human smuggling. As drug cartels tightened their grip on Mexico, it got harder and harder for anyone to cross the border without hiring a professional who would protect them and pay off local gang-imposed tolls.

The U.S. border got tighter from both sides. When human smugglers caught whiff of how necessary they were becoming and how desperate the migrants were growing, they jacked up their prices to astronomical levels.

You can pay tens of thousands of dollars to get from Honduras to the U.S. these days. The business is intricate, complicated and varied. There are sales pitches and recruitment efforts, There are payment plans, business models, different package deals and, of course, risk.

This week on Planet Money, we cross the border and meet up for lunch in Mexico with a human smuggler, who breaks down his organization’s business model. And, we speak to a woman who tried to be smuggled into the U.S. Her story took a dark, but all too common turn.

Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

2:49

At the end of every year, U.S. meteorologists look back at what the nation’s weather was like, and what they saw in 2015 was weird. The year was hot and beset with all manner of extreme weather events that did a lot of expensive damage.

December, in fact, was a fitting end.

“This is the first time in our 121-year period of record that a month has been both the wettest and the warmest month on record,” says Jake Crouch, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The rest of the year was very wet and hot too, he says — the second-hottest period on record for the U.S.

The cause: a warming climate and a superstrong El Nino. El Nino is a weather phenomenon out of the Pacific Ocean that hits every few years and affects weather globally. It starts with a large body of unusually warm weather in the western Pacific that sloshes eastward; it changes wind and weather patterns as far away as the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Together, climate and a very strong El Nino pushed the average temperature in the U.S. up over its 20th century average by 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

And even when the atmosphere is only that much warmer, it holds more moisture, leading to record snows in the Northeast last February and March, and record rain in the South and Midwest. NOAA’S Deke Arndt says he and other climate scientists expect more of the same.

“The fact is, we live in a warming world,” Arndt says, “and a warming world is bringing more big heat events and more big rain events to the United States.”

All this weather led to 10 extreme events that each did at least $1 billion in damage. These events included drought, flooding, severe rainstorms, big wildfires and winter storms. That’s a wider variety of different types of $1 billion-plus weather events than usual.

Insurance companies are paying for most of the damage. Surprisingly, 2015 payouts were lower than the previous few years, though still high historically. That’s mostly due to luck, says Mark Bove, a meteorologist at Munich Reinsurance America, a firm that insures insurance companies for their losses. No serious hurricanes hit the U.S. in 2015, he explains.

But that luck is not likely to last, Bove says.

Moreover, he is noticing a trend that has been going on for years and is likely to continue: “We seem to be seeing more extreme precipitation events,” Bove says. “When it rains today, it seems to rain harder and heavier.”

But even as the rain gets more intense, Bove says, people don’t seem to be taking notice. “We tend not to build buildings to withstand the storms that we already see,” he says, “let alone how they might change in the future.”

That will mean higher costs in a future where weather becomes even less predictable.

1:40

On Monday, the Department of Justice, acting on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, filed a civil complaint in federal court in Detroit against Volkswagen. The DOJ alleges that nearly 600,000 diesel engine vehicles had illegal defeat devices installed that impaired emission control systems and caused emissions to exceed EPA’s standards, resulting in harmful air pollution.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Volkswagen would probably like to start the new year with a clean slate, but that is not going to happen. Today, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against VW for allegedly violating the U.S. Clean Air Act. The company faces billions in penalties. NPR’s Sonari Glinton reports.

SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: The Volkswagen scandal where the company admitted to installing software that cheated during emissions tests? That part of the story may be unprecedented, but it’s a part of a larger industry narrative. General Motors had its ignition scandal, Toyota, unintended acceleration and Takatas, faulty airbags. Carl Tobias with the University of Richmond School of Law says the Justice Department has become expert at dealing with car company misdeeds.

CARL TOBIAS: This is meant to send a message to the company and other companies that the U.S. government takes very seriously these defeat devices, and I think is meant to move VW to some resolution.

GLINTON: Volkswagen says it will continue to cooperate with the various criminal and civil investigations. Tobias says speed is of essence for VW.

TOBIAS: The longer it lingers, the worse it is because it drags the reputation of the company down.

GLINTON: Meanwhile, Steve Byars teaches ethics and corporate communications at the USC Marshall School of Business.

STEVE BYARS: The ethical hit to the company’s reputation will outstrip even billions of dollars in fines or liabilities that might be assessed against the company over the years to come.

GLINTON: And if recent past is prologue, the monetary hit will likely be in the billions. Sonari Glinton, NPR News.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

3:31

The celebrations for the new year also marked a new open-carry gun law taking effect in Texas. Handgun license holders in Texas will now be allowed to carry their guns in visible holsters on their hip or shoulder.

Previously, Texans wanting to carry a handgun had to obtain a concealed handgun license and conceal their weapon. With the new law, the more than 826,000 state license holders will be allowed to openly display their handguns in most public places.

However, the law allows private businesses to ban guns if they choose. And some business owners are concerned about the implications of having openly armed customers.

Dallas restaurant owner Jack Perkins is a gun rights supporter, but he says visible weapons may be bad for business.

“There’s a large amount of the population that guns scare them,” Perkins says. “If there are three or four people in the restaurant all carrying guns then you’re going to be uncomfortable. And I’d just rather people not be uncomfortable.”

Perkins owns Dallas-based The Slow Bone, a barbecue spot, and Maple & Motor, which specializes in burgers. He says his weapon of choice is a Glock 43, and he frequently carries it in his front pocket. He doesn’t object to customers bringing concealed weapons into his restaurants.

“Carrying a concealed weapon is all about eventualities — things that might happen, and protection in that case,” he says. “There’s a lot of cash in my business. I have employees too. Restaurants get robbed, businesses get robbed, and I have employees that I would like to protect.”

But Perkins makes the distinction between carrying a gun underneath clothing and carrying it in the open.

“Carrying a gun outside, on your person where it’s visible, is at least an implied threat,” he says. “If deadly force is your final threat, you’re making it right away, visibly. … I just really don’t want that kind of threat feeling in either of the restaurants.”

The number of people with handgun permits makes up only about 4 percent of Texas’ population of more than 27 million. Out of these, Perkins thinks the number of people who want to openly carry weapons is pretty small.

But open-carry advocates have been a very vocal minority in the past. In 2014, young men showed up at fast food restaurants around Texas carrying tactical long rifles in protest. Groups in Fort Worth have staged weekly walks carrying weapons like the AR-15 and AK-47.

In response, chains including Starbucks, Jack In The Box, Chili’s, Sonic and Chipotle have asked customers to leave weapons at home.

If private businesses want to prevent people from bringing weapons inside, they are required by the law to display a sign with 1-inch block lettering. Separate signs are required for banning open carry and concealed carry. Perkins says he plans to put one up, but he doesn’t foresee it causing any issues.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a problem for us,” Perkins says. “I don’t think we’re going to have confrontations.”

Perkins is one of the large majority — 85 percent according to one study — of gun owners who support requiring background checks for all gun sales. He thinks laws like this exist because the gun lobby “wants to push its agenda as far as it can just in case it gets pushed back.” He says gun opponents do the same thing.

President Obama is preparing to take executive action on gun control, after an effort to get legislation through Congress failed three years ago following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.

“I believe completely in responsible gun ownership, and I believe completely in a dialogue that gets us to that point without rhetoric and venom,” Perkins says.

“There’s nothing in the Constitution, especially in the Second Amendment, that says we can’t be smart about this. I’m all for an open dialogue. I think if we check backgrounds, if we sell guns to people who are going to operate them responsibly and own them responsibly, I just don’t understand why we can’t think about it more than just feel about it.”

3:52

Slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants throughout the country employ a lot of people. About a quarter of a million Americans prepare the beef, pork and chicken that ends up on dinner tables. But some of those jobs could eventually be replaced by robots. The world’s largest meatpacking company is looking at ways to automate the art of butchery.

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

About a quarter of a million people work in slaughterhouses to prepare the beef, pork and chicken that ends up in America’s dinner tables. Some of those jobs could eventually be replaced by robots. Luke Runyon from member station KUNC reports the world largest meatpacking company is looking at ways to automate the art of butchery.

LUKE RUNYON, BYLINE: We’re walking through a meat-cutting line and through JBS here in Greeley, Colo. There are workers in white frocks and white hats using hooks and knives to trim up some of the meat and get rid of the fat.

BILL DANLEY: There’s right now 850 people right out in this building alone. We’re go down through some of the tables. We won’t go in between them, but you’ll get a good view of what we do out here on the floor.

RUNYON: That’s the plant’s manager, Bill Danley. He’s on the floor – short for fabrication floor – where whole cattle carcasses become the neat and trim cuts of beef you get at the grocery store. Hundreds of workers in blood-spattered white jackets and protective chain mail stand along conveyor belts. Carcasses inch along, hanging from a track above.

DANLEY: That is a split carcass – that’s a whole beef. And then we start the disassemble process out here on the fab (ph) floor.

RUNYON: The plant is a far cry from your grandfather’s butcher shop, where a single person needed to know how to turn an entire animal into cuts of meat. Large beef companies, like JBS, Cargill and Tyson, have turned each minute step of the process into a job. Danley lists some of the titles – a chuck boner, tender puller, back splitter, a knuckle dropper.

DANLEY: There’s a lot of jobs out here that prep for the other person.

RUNYON: Each year, this one plant pays out more than $100 million in paychecks to its 3,000 employees. It’s a huge chunk of the company’s operating costs. And while robots have revolutionized the manufacturing industry, meatpackers have stubbornly held on to workers. But that could be changing. Late this fall, JBS bought a controlling share of Scott Technology, a New Zealand-based robotics firm.

CAMERON BRUETT: This is a very innovative and exciting company that we invested in, and we’re excited to see what they come up with.

RUNYON: That’s JBS spokesman Cameron Bruett. He says the world’s largest meatpacker is looking at how robots could fit into their lamb and pork plants first. Sheep and pigs tend to be more uniform than beef cattle.

BRUETT: Now, when it comes to beef packing, beef processing, the fabrication of the animal, it’s very difficult to automate beef processing.

RUNYON: The meatpacking robots of today use vision technology to slice and dice. But the key to butchery is touch, not sight. And the company’s beef division president, Bill Rupp, says right now, robots just can’t feel how deep a bone is, or expertly remove a filet mignon.

BILL RUPP: When you get into that detailed, skilled cutting, robots aren’t there yet. Someday, I’m sure they will be.

DON STULL: Workers are really cheaper than machines.

RUNYON: Don Stull studied the cultures of Midwest meatpacking towns at the University of Kansas for 30 years.

STULL: Machines have to be maintained; they have to be taken good care of. And that’s not really true of workers. As long as there is a steady supply, the workers are relatively inexpensive.

RUNYON: Stull says turnover in the industry is high because of the physical demands. And there’s a stream of immigrants and refugees to put on the chain mail and pick up the knife. Meatpacking jobs consistently rank among the most hazardous in the country. Increased automation could ease some of those injuries. But until technology catches up, meatpacking companies will continue hiring low-skill workers to cut meat. For NPR News, I’m Luke Runyon in Greeley, Colo.

CORNISH: That story came to us from Harvest Public Media, a reporting collaboration that focuses on agriculture and food.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

3:56

NPR’s Robert Siegel talks with Puerto Rico Rep. Luis Vega Ramos about what will happen when the commonwealth defaults on its nearly $37 million worth of debt.

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Puerto Rico’s future largely depends on what Congress decides to do to help the U.S. territory. It’s about to default on yet another bond payment in January – this time, $37 million. Puerto Rico’s total debt stands at about $72 billion. And without some kind of help, further defaults are all but certain.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Politicians on the island say the U.S. government should allow the commonwealth to access Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Puerto Rico’s ability to do that was written out of the bankruptcy code back in 1984. I talked about that demand to change that with Luis Vega Ramos. He’s a member of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives. He joined us in the middle of his vacation at Disney World.

LUIS VEGA RAMOS: What we’re asking is what any business, what any town, what any municipality in the United States has available – the ability to orderly restructure its debt, the chance to have our case heard and that we can sit down and get an agreement that permits an orderly payment of our debts, but, at the same time, that doesn’t break down Puerto Rico.

SIEGEL: Unemployment in Puerto Rico is measured at about 12.5 percent. Since 2004, the population of Puerto Rico has declined by about 10 percent – largely people moving to Florida. What’s it like? I mean, do you have relatives who’ve decided, I can no longer support my family here on the island, I’m moving to Kissimmee or to New York?

RAMOS: There are a lot of Puerto Ricans who have moved in the last five to 10 years. And that’s a problem for Puerto Rico and the United States because some of the most productive, useful persons are moving. And that’s not helping our economy.

SIEGEL: The people who can find good jobs in Florida, you’d say?

RAMOS: Right. And the key to fixing the whole problem is to jumpstart the Puerto Rico economy and to ease the enormous burden that the current structure of the debt has over Puerto Rico. So instead of positioning ourselves for a bitter fight, whether it’s Puerto Rico and creditors, or whether it’s the creditors amongst themselves because if we start litigating, it’s going to end up – everybody suing everybody else, probably including the federal government because some may argue that being Puerto Rico – a territory of the United States – the territorial debt is also federal debt. So what I’m advocating strongly is let’s sit down, let’s structure a deal that is good for us. And the first step in that deal will be take measures that ease the current burden of the debt so that we can restart our economy. And when that happens, everything else will fall into place.

SIEGEL: Here’s something that skeptical creditors of Puerto Rico say – they say, we’d like to see an audit. They just gave out an annual bonus of 13 months paid to civil servants on the island. That’s not something you do when you’re broke and you have no cash reserves. What do you say to that?

RAMOS: I agree that we have to get our audit out, and that’s something that us in the legislature are also clamoring. All of us are in agreement that those numbers have to be out and they have to be certified and audited.

SIEGEL: Why hasn’t that happened already? Why hasn’t that taken place?

RAMOS: Well, we’ve had a problem for the last two years, and that’s something that – probably that the government – the Development Bank of Puerto Rico and its president have to explain in a clearer fashion. And I’m not satisfied with that. And that’s a part of the equation that I understand is very important in order to finalize a deal. But that shouldn’t be an impediment for talks to start because, quite frankly, Puerto Rico cannot make those payments how they are structured. So instead of going into the abyss together, let’s, you know, halt a moment, create conditions to have a restructuring and let’s get on doing that.

SIEGEL: Representative Vega Ramos, thanks a lot for talking with us today.

RAMOS: Thank you very much.

SIEGEL: Luis Vega Ramos is a member of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives. He spoke to us while on vacation in Orlando.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

3:55

For classical musicians, it’s difficult to sell their work online because of how the music is tagged on apps like Spotify. A tech startup in Nashville is trying to change that.

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Classical musicians have had a problem in the digital age. It isn’t easy for them to put their work online. Classical makes up 2 percent of all album sales and less than half a percent of all online streaming. But the founders of a technology startup in Nashville say that they’ve hit upon a solution. As Emily Siner of member station WPLN reports, if successful, Darts Music’s concept could help artists in other genres, too.

EMILY SINER, BYLINE: The word to know in this story is metadata. That’s the information that’s attached to every digital audio file.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WE USED TO WAIT”)

WIN BUTLER: I used to write. I used to write letters. I used to sign my name.

SINER: Song name, “We Used To Wait” – artist, Arcade Fire – album, “The Suburbs.” That’s the metadata. But what about on a track like this?

(SOUNDBITE OF BEETHOVEN SONG, “SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN E-FLAT MAJOR, OPUS 55”)

SINER: It’s Beethoven’s third symphony, but the standard song name on Spotify, for example, is, technically…

CHRIS MCMURTRY: “Symphony No. 3 In E-flat Major, Opus Number 55, the Eroica.”

SINER: That’s Chris McMurtry, a classical music enthusiast who deals with stuff like this a lot. But there’s no composer field on Spotify, so you have to put Beethoven as an artist. Although, the symphony that plays it might also be an artist, or maybe the artist is the conductor.

MCMURTRY: And the things is, is in order to get into iTunes or Apple Music or Spotify, there is a specific way that they want to see that.

SINER: Itunes has a metadata style guide, and it dedicates an entire section to explaining the precise details of how to properly tag classical music. It doesn’t do that for any other genre. What this means is that independent classical musicians who want to sell their work online have a harder time of it than your typical rock band or singer-songwriter. Take Chris McMurtry. When he wrote his first chamber choir piece a few years ago, he tried to distribute it on a site called TuneCore, which lets you sell music on iTunes and Amazon.

MCMURTRY: Only to find than you could not choose classical as an option.

SINER: McMurtry then looked at some traditional classical music labels, but he didn’t like that business model.

MCMURTRY: If they accepted us, it was going to be at least 20, 35 to even 50 percent of our royalties, depending on the deal.

SINER: So he thought, a-ha – a business idea. Thus Dart Music was born. This is how it works or how it should work. It’s still in beta. You, a classical musician, upload your piece to Dart’s website.

(SOUNDBITE OF BEETHOVEN SONG, “STRING QUARTER NO. 1 IN F MAJOR, OPUS 18”)

SINER: Then the software asks you a series of simple questions, like…

MCMURTRY: What type of piece are you uploading?

SINER: You arranged a string quartet.

MCMURTRY: Oh, it’s a string quartet. Who composed this string quartet?

SINER: Ludwig, of course.

MCMURTRY: Beethoven – well, awesome. These are all the string quartets that Beethoven composed. Which one is it?

SINER: It’s like Turbo Tax for musicians.

ANDY DOE: They’re doing something that I’ve been saying somebody should do for years.

SINER: Andy Doe used to run iTunes’ classical music division. He says Dart’s trying to do what no one else does really well. It doesn’t ask you to understand the minutia of how to tag your music. Instead…

DOE: They ask you questions about the recording you want to publish and, from that, use the computer to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

SINER: He says Dart’s software is something that could help other genres, too. Think hip-hop, which also often has multiple versions and lots of contributors.

DOE: Very few people working in classical music realize that they share any distribution problems with hip-hop.

MCMURTRY: It’s awesome that we are helping classical and non-classical alike.

SINER: In fact, Chris McMurtry, the founder, says half of Dart’s clientele so far are not in classical. But he says his mission is to help classical artists. He wants to take care of them, even if bigger genres come calling. For NPR News, I’m Emily Siner in Nashville.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.