Ally or Exploiter? The Smuggler-Migrant Relationship Is a Complex One
February 5, 2020
Feature
By Jasper Gilardi
As highly industrialized countries ramp up their border controls, human smugglers are playing a central role in moving migrants through key migration corridors around the world. Despite the illicit nature of their work and being cast as villains in the public eye, smugglers have complex, multifaceted relationships with their migrant clients. At times, the relationship can be mutually beneficial or even lifesaving; at others, it can be predatory and dangerous. Abandonment, extortion, kidnapping, and even death are common.
Smuggling activities run the gamut in size and sophistication. At the smallest scale, smugglers can be the single individual who guides hiking migrants over rugged border terrain, the taxi driver who moves people from one place to another, or the small-time operation ferrying people across a river. At the larger scale, smugglers may belong to formal or informal networks that produce false papers, bribe officials, and facilitate logistically complex travel across routes that span oceans and continents. Collectively, human smuggling netted operators big and small around the globe an estimated US $5.5 billion to $7 billion in 2016, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated in its first-ever study of migrant smuggling.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ally-or-exploiter-smuggler-migrant-relationship-complex-one
