Extortion, money laundering, racketeering, human trafficking, illicit organ selling, slavery, gun running, piracy (Somalia not Napster), poaching, assassinations, political violence for hire, etc. are all independently profitable. There will be profit incentive for bad behavior as long as laws exist that people don't want to abide by. People are terrible to each other on a daily basis, the world over.
> Rationalizing immigration laws eliminates most of the rest.
This is indicative of what I'm taking about, approaching these problems in an extremely reductive way. Did you know there's an estimated 21 million slaves in the world today?
> You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations.
I'm not convinced this is true, there's lots of ways to make a big profit illegally, drugs are just comparatively easy. I'm a proponent of full drug legalization (it's a space where I have large amounts of first hand experience that won't be discussed on HN), but it's still important to separate an ideological position from reality. The international drug trade is directly tied to human trafficking. Turning a blind eye to one is turning a blind eye to both.
And 'small time' drug dealers get their supply from the bigger fish. The value in prosecuting them isn't in stopping end users or sales that max out at like $200, it's in working towards shutting down large international suppliers. Because they don't just ship drugs, they ship people and weapons too. Regardless of how one feels about drug use, the realities of the trade are grim.
I think there's also value in defining what people mean by 'small time dealer' in this context. To me, that connotes someone selling a bit of pot to their friends so they can smoke for free or something. People who ship misc. substances internationally and in some cases earn six figures plus annually don't fit that definition in my eyes.
Nobody on SoundCloud is profiting from other people's copyright works as well, at least not through that service. To date there's no royalty or revenue sharing model for artists there. Should every DJ who's ever performed be subject to takedown requests because they play other people's music publicly?
> Rationalizing immigration laws eliminates most of the rest.
This is indicative of what I'm taking about, approaching these problems in an extremely reductive way. Did you know there's an estimated 21 million slaves in the world today?
http://www.endslaverynow.org/learn/slavery-today