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Using Bigo's (2002) notion of “the governmentality of unease” this article reveals a shift in popular discourse around human smuggling in Western Europe and Canada since the 1990s towards increasing criminalization. To analyze this process of criminalization we have identified three recurring elements: boat arrivals; high fees and “bogus” asylum seekers; and the involvement of organized crime. The finding that smugglers today are generally perceived as “evil criminals” who undermine states’ ability to manage migration and who need to be punished is contrasted with data derived from interviews with smuggled migrants in the Netherlands and Canada that offer an alternative, more socially embedded understanding of human smuggling. We posit that this reality check and a more nuanced understanding of human smuggling are needed for the protection of international migrants.
The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling
Migrant smuggling and the social organisation of cross-border mobility2021 •
Migrant smugglers occupy a special place in the European “migration crisis” discourse. They are depicted as the facilitators of irregular migrants’ journeys, and as perpetrators that take advantage of people’s vulnerability and naïveté. Stories of ruthless smugglers who abuse, abandon or even murder those who rely on their services are common in popular media, as well as in mainstream academic, policy and law enforcement narratives of migration. These characterizations are not unique to Europe: around the world, smugglers are systematically depicted as criminal figures who organized in networks have hijacked border controls worldwide. While it is true that migrants do face victimization and violence in the context of their journeys, research and data on the interactions between migrants and those behind their journeys is limited. This has often led to the proliferation of inaccurate claims concerning smuggling, its organization and its actors. This policy note addresses five of the most common misconceptions connected with smuggling. It seeks to improve our collective understanding of irregular migration facilitation practices but also the implications of the actions developed to counter them.
This paper discusses the ways in which the UN Protocol against Smuggling and its reception by UNHCR reinforce a certain image of the ‘smuggled migrant’ that emerges simultaneously as a ‘victim’ of smuggling and a ‘threat’ to the states’ authority over border crossings. The paper further claims that such seemingly contradictory images in fact complement one another and provide the legal and institutional basis to ‘manage’ migration by securitising it.
The facilitation of irregular migration – labelled by the state as migrant, people or human smuggling – has been primarily articulated as a violent, exploitative practice under the control of transnational crime. It has also been tied to often problematic articulations of class, race, gender, informal forms of labour and sex work. Furthermore, the language of crisis, crime, violence and humanitarianism often associated with references to smuggling has reified specific geographic locations and their people as inherently dangerous and in need of surveillance and control. Amid this context, the explosive militarization of border control practices and stricter immigration criminalisation policies have been articulated as the only effective measures to fight the alleged spread of smuggling, depicted as a global security threat under the control of networks of vast, dark reach. The migratory flows in the Mediterranean, the Horn and the North of Africa, the Pacific, the Middle East, the US Mexico Border and Central and South America; the punitive efforts to control human mobility and the narratives pertaining to transits and their facilitation are clear examples of this approach. More often than not unintended outcomes have ultimately outweighed national security and border protection policy. The vast border and immigration enforcement systems have prompted spiraling financial costs. Attempts to block or contain migration routes have only redirected unauthorized migration flows into more dangerous and remote routes, leading to the injury, death and disappearance of thousands of people on the move. Furthermore, border enforcement has played a role in the very reliance of migrants and refugees on often dubious facilitators of migration services or criminally-organized entities that engage in specific forms of violence. Amid the panic caused by the overly-simplistic, fear-driven narratives of smuggling and those behind their facilitation, the social, economic, cultural, moral and affective significance of smuggling to and from the perspective of its actors (facilitators, clients, their families and communities) has remained vastly unexplored. To this date, narratives of tragedy, death, graphic violence, and transnational crime have continued to obscure the basic realization that the facilitation of irregular migration is ultimately a response to the lack of channels for legal entry and transit to which so many yet specific few are subjected. Building on the experience at the European University Institute in Florence in the Spring of 2016, this second edition of the Smuggling Workshop seeks to continue the conversation towards empirically grounded smuggling research, a field often silenced by the onslaught of anecdotal evidence or technocratic-legalistic perspectives concerning the facilitation of irregular migration. This time around the workshop will have a particular focus on collectively building the theory and documenting the praxis of human smuggling, relying on the empirically documented perspectives of its actors. This workshop is a collective effort to comprehend the ways in which migrants, refugees, their families and communities along with those facilitating their transits perceive, talk about, and partake in the phenomenon. The workshop takes place at a critical time in migration studies, when despite the vast abundance of scholarship on the lives of migrants and refugees, grounded empirical work on the processes involving their journeys and the effects and affects in them interwoven is still scant and scattered across the disciplines. A gathering of innovative and critical voices in smuggling from academic and policy circles, the workshop seeks to consolidate the creation of an interdisciplinary and global collective of professionals engaged in the empirical study of migration facilitation that integrates perspectives from the global north and south. With this goal in mind, we invite abstracts on the theme of irregular migration/human mobility facilitation for an international workshop to be held on April 6, 7 and 8, 2017 at the University of Texas at El Paso. We seek to bring together critical, empirical engagements on the facilitation and brokerage of irregular migration as witnessed locally, regionally and comparatively.
In contemporary mainstream narratives of migration, the human smuggler has earned a privileged if infamous spot as one of the most widely recognized and despised global predators. Smugglers are often referred to as orchestrators of senseless human tragedies along migration corridors, masterminds behind sexual exploitation rings, or amassers of untold riches made at the expense of asylum seekers, migrants and their families –in turn often narrowly portrayed as infantile and ignorant. Constructed as racialized, hypersexual and greedy males from the global South, facilitators of irregular migration have earned widespread notoriety in narratives of human and national security, particularly in the context of migration control efforts. Media and authorities conceive the fight against clandestine migration as a war, a war where the evil is represented by the smuggler. The question is: is this a worthy war? Human smugglers certainly bear responsibility for many of the tragedies we are currently witnessing in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. However, our knowledge of irregular migration facilitation is often plagued with fragmented perspectives on the socio-cultural dynamics of the migratory journey, the facilitator-traveller relationship and their community dimensions. This is hardly surprising. Scholarship on the facilitation of irregular migration often draws exclusively from the experiences of government or law enforcement entities, or of the migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who were the unfortunate target of threats, scams or violence during their clandestine journeys, further obscuring the perspectives of those playing a role in their transits. In light of the necessity of elaborating an adequate policy response to human smuggling, a better comprehension of the phenomenon is pivotal to ensuring the stability of the receiving state and the security of the migrant/refugee. With this task in mind, this workshop aims to problematize the figure of the smugglers beyond overly simplistic generalizations and representations. There is a growing corpus of empirical and critical work on the facilitation or brokerage of irregular migration within migration regimes that deserves to be fostered and strengthened. We are proposing critical and empirical engagements on the topic of the facilitation and brokerage of irregular migration as witnessed regionally and comparatively. The workshop is co-organised by the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, and the National Security Studies Institute, University of Texas in El Paso.
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Migrant Smuggling: Novel Insights and Implications for Migration Control Policies2018 •
This article offers a critical review of how migrant smuggling arises out of restrictive migration policies and how it has become increasingly sophisticated and professionalized. Reflecting on the innovative empirical findings presented in the contributions to this volume of The ANNALS, I highlight how migration control has hardened borders, disrupted cross-border flows of goods and people, and transformed local economies. Understanding better the relationship between migration control policies and migrant smuggling and the social and moral nature of the agent-customer transactions has important implications for the policies adopted to address irregular migration and migrant smuggling on both sides of the Atlantic.
2021 •
This paper focuses on migrants who have been smuggled to the Netherlands from three regions: Iraq, Horn of Africa, and the former Soviet Union. The central questions are: to what extent do smugglers give direction to migration; and how much autonomy do migrants themselves have in deciding where they want to travel? The common assumption is that smuggled migrants are recruited by criminals and have little to say within the migration process. But the relationship between the smugglers and the smuggled seems more diverse. Three different types of interactions between the smuggler and the migrant are identified. Subsequently the question is addressed how this process is related to, and interacts with, the context of Dutch migration policies. The increased crackdown of the past decade on unsolicited migration in the Netherlands has not reduced the number of irregular entries. Moreover, what we see is that the involvement of human smugglers has been on the increase, and this involvement has shaped the migration process substantially.
Download the special issue for FREE here: http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/anna/current In this volume of The ANNALS, we present a collection of empirically based research projects on migrant smuggling, seeking to create a more nuanced understanding of the topic that supersedes perspectives that are often found in mainstream narratives of unscrupulous and ruthless criminal gangs preying on vulnerable and desperate migrants. The contributing authors rely on field data to reveal the complex and often symbiotic relationships between migrants and the people behind their journeys. Often misunderstood in juxtaposition to narratives of security and control, the lived experiences of migrants describe smuggling facilitators as relatives or close friends, acquaintances or distant operators—all members of a social net- work of varying relational proximity. Vulnerability in migration grows as the travel distance and transit points increase and the density of one’s own community ties decreases. The procurement of smuggling services is always situated within the collective wisdom and lived experiences of the migrants and their communities, and the strategies to increase the odds of success and to reduce the hazards and uncertainty of traversing foreign terrains.
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2016 •
Deconstructing the Myth of the Migrant Smuggler
Deconstructing the Myth of the Migrant Smuggler2020 •
2019 •
2021 •
2021 •
Euromesco Joint Policy Studies Series
Beyond Networks, Militias and Tribes: Rethinking EU Counter-Smuggling Policy and Response2021 •
International journal of migration and border studies
Policing the mobility society: the effects of EU anti-migrant smuggling policies on humanitarianism2018 •
International Journal of Migration and Border Studies 2018 Vol.4 No.4
The Criminalisation of Migration and Asylum: A Comparative Analysis of Policy Consequences and Human Rights Impact2018 •
Irregular Migration, Trafficking and Smuggling of Human Beings: Policy Dilemmas in the EU
The EU Anti-Smuggling Framework: Direct and Indirect Effects on the Provision of Humanitarian Assistance to Irregular Migrants2016 •
2006 •
International Journal of The Sociology of Law
Human trade and the criminalization of irregular migration2005 •
European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research
How useful is the concept of transit migration in an intra-Schengen mobility context? Diving into the migrant smuggling and human trafficking nexus in search for answers2021 •
European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research
Choosing a Smuggler: Decision-making Amongst Migrants Smuggled to EuropeEuropean Law Journal
Smuggling of Migrants, Trafficking in Human Beings and Irregular Migration on a Comparative Perspective2006 •
IMISCOE Research Series
Methodological and Ethical Dilemmas in Research Among Smuggled Migrants2018 •
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
The missing link: the role of criminal groups in migration governance2024 •
Third World Quarterly
Criminalisation of kindness: narratives of legality in the European politics of migration containment2020 •
2014 •