The smuggling of migrants is indeed an international problem, with a considerable number of countries impacted by it as origin, transit or destination points.
Profit-seeking criminals smuggle migrants across borders and between continents, and assessing the actual size of this crime is a complicated matter, owing to its covert nature and the difficulty of identifying when irregular migration is being facilitated by smugglers.
The smugglers take advantage of the enormous number of migrants willing to take risks in pursuit of a better life when they can’t access legal channels of migration. Therefore, smuggled migrants are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
Their safety and even their lives are constantly put at risk because many have suffocated in containers, died in deserts or drowned at sea while being smuggled by profit-seeking lawbreakers who treat them as goods, and as the crime is a clandestine one, accurate global figures are hard to come by.
However, it’s estimated that two of the main smuggling routes, leading from East, North and West Africa to Europe and from South America to North America, generate around $6.75 billion a year for criminals, although the global figure is likely to be much higher.
The smuggling of migrants is the facilitation of crossing borders illegally or living illegally in another country with the aim of making a monetary or another material gain.
This crime is usually committed by organised criminal networks, which take the opportunity to make enormous profits from an illegal activity involving little risk of detection.
The profits of the smugglers vary widely, and full-time professional criminals are involved in smuggling migrants around the globe – some of those criminals are specialised in smuggling people and some are not.
There’s evidence of both smaller and larger, more organised groups and networks operating as smugglers in all areas, although this differs by region and route.
There are also many smugglers who operate legitimate businesses and are involved in the smuggling of migrants as opportunistic carriers or hospitality providers who prefer to look the other way in order to make some additional cash. Crooked officials and other people may also be involved in the process.
Human trafficking and migrant smuggling are low-risk, high-profit criminal enterprises that utilise increasingly sophisticated methods and technological means to expand their reach.
They’re also linked to other crimes including illegal money flows, corruption, document fraud, trafficking in illegal goods, cybercrime and terrorism, and human trafficking and migrant smuggling are two different crimes yet they can overlap as they both profit from vulnerable people.
Victims of this widespread form of trafficking come mainly from developing nations, and some are forced to work in labour-intensive jobs such as agriculture, mining, fisheries or construction work, or kept in domestic captivity.
Some victims are even forced to carry out a range of criminal activities, which in turn yield more revenue for criminal organisations.
Those activities can include theft, drug cultivation, selling fake goods, and recently also fraud which is usually conducted through the misuse of technology. The victims often have quotas and can face harsh punishment if they don’t perform satisfactorily.
In numerous countries, waiting lists for transplants are extremely long, and criminals have taken this opportunity to manipulate the distress of patients and potential victim donors.
In the last decade, the process of globalisation, and the multiple crises affecting other parts of the world through, economic hardships, armed conflict, terrorism and climate change, have caused the most vulnerable people to migrate to look for safer living conditions.
And with this, we’ve seen an upsurge in the activities of organised criminal networks that facilitate irregular migration, by supplying fraudulent travel documents, organising transportation and circumventing official border controls because criminals like to make an enormous profit.
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