How to Become a Human Smuggler: A Guide for Beginners

Guest post by Luigi Achilli, research associate in the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute. His research and writing focus on everyday forms of political engagement and disengagement, citizenship, nationalism, the Palestinian issue, refugees and refugee camps, and the politics of space. This post is the fifth installment of Border Criminologies themed series on Human Smuggling organised by Gabriella Sanchez.

I met Abu Rami in a small town on the Aegean coast of Turkey, one of the many human smuggling hubs across the Turkish territory. Although Abu Rami was indeed a smuggler when we first met, he was a refugee too. As with many others like him, he left Syria taking the route to Italy via Libya. However, his journey abruptly stopped in Egypt, where local authorities detained him for a few months before sending him to Lebanon. He tried again. The second time he took the route of the Balkans: Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary. Yet again, he didn’t make it.

While waiting on the western shores of Turkey to be smuggled into Europe, Abu Rami had a revelation: ‘I could not stay there any longer watching my fellow countrymates suffering in Syria or being exploited by smugglers and locals in Turkey. I decided to do something for them.’ Abu Rami became a smuggler, ‘an ethical one,’ according to him. ‘I help

Amed and Abu Rami’s experiences are far from unique. In my research I often highlight similarities between being a refugee and a smuggler. But what these two vignettes ultimately show is the criminalization of refugees’ mobility and the inherent fragility of their lives. Amed’s story demonstrates how refugees live in a situation of protracted illegality. Abu Rami framed his involvement in a smuggling organization as a way of helping his countrymates, even if others could argue he used moralistic undertones to justify a rather unsavoury business. It was however evident that a considerable and growing number of refugees turned to him looking for help, disregarding official channels of resettlement, which they perceived as ineffective and arbitrary.

Irregular immigration in Europe has generated a widespread range of opinions around the world. Political leaders 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 war cause worthy? Human smugglers certainly bear responsibility for many of the tragedies we are currently witnessing in the Mediterranean. However, popular representations of the smuggler tend to oversimplify both the clandestine traveller and the smuggler: a process of abstraction that overlooks the ambiguities and nuances of the phenomenon of illegal immigration. What my findings suggest is that the relationship between smugglers and their costumers is far more complex than media and popular accounts suggest, and that both migrant and smuggler trajectories are weaved together by conditions of illegality. Against this backdrop, media and authorities’ obsession with smuggling and smugglers stands out as a defensive rhetorical measure to conceal the EU’s incapacity to manage the current migrant ‘crisis.’ We should instead revisit the criminalization of clandestine migration and the concomitant increasing militarization of borders. Those with little choice to come legally will always turn to smugglers.

Any comments about this post? Get in touch with us! Send us an email, or post a comment here or on Facebook. You can also tweet us.

__________

How to cite this blog post (Harvard style):

Achilli, L. (2015) How to Become a Human smuggler: A Guide for Beginners. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2015/11/how-become-human (Accessed [date]).