People smuggling
People smuggling, under U.S. law, is "the facilitation, transportation, attempted transportation or illegal entry of a person or persons across an international border, in violation of one or more countries' laws, either clandestinely or through deception, such as the use of fraudulent documents".
Internationally, the term is understood as and often used interchangeably with migrant smuggling, which is defined in the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime as "...the procurement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a state party of which the person is not a national".
The practice of people smuggling has seen a rise over the past few decades and now accounts for a significant portion of illegal immigration in countries around the world. People smuggling generally takes place with the consent of the person or persons being smuggled, and common reasons for individuals seeking to be smuggled include employment and economic opportunity, personal and/or familial betterment, and escape from persecution, violence or conflict.
In 2015, the ongoing civil war in Syria has led to massive displacement and reliance on people smugglers to assist people to seek sanctuary in Europe. This has also led to unprecedented movements – and deaths – across the Mediterranean. According to UNHCR statistics, there have been almost one million arrivals by sea in Europe in 2015, and more than 2900 dead or missing migrants. According to the IOM Missing Migrants Project, there have been more than 3800 deaths during migration around the world in 2015, and over 70,000 from 2014 to 2024: some 10,000 of these in the Americas and 30,000 of these in the Mediterranean. However, a 2024 UNHCR report revealed that deaths in the Sahara desert are estimated to be double those occurring in the Mediterranean Sea, with land route fatalities being significantly under-documented due to the remoteness of desert crossings.
Unlike human trafficking, people smuggling is characterized by the consent between customer and smuggler – a contractual agreement that typically terminates upon arrival in the destination location. However, smuggling situations can nonetheless in reality descend into situations that can best be described as extreme human rights abuses, with smuggled migrants subject to threats, abuse, exploitation and torture, and even death at the hands of smugglers. People involved in smuggling operations may also be victims of trafficking, for example when they are tricked about the terms and conditions of their role for the purpose of exploiting their labour in the operation.
Smuggling operations are complex, working within networks of many individual players. As smuggling operations and its underlying infrastructure becomes increasingly intricate, so do the issues surrounding the matter of people smuggling. With major and minor players spanning the globe, people smuggling poses a significant economic and legal impact on society, and solutions to the problem of people smuggling remain contested and under continued debate and development. Smuggling has been described as the classic "wicked problem: one that is hard to define, keeps changing, and does not present a clear solution because of pre-existing factors that are themselves highly resistant to change – in this case the very existence of States, gross inequalities among them, and strong motivations on the part of some to keep them out." Because every state has different economics and governments, this problem cannot be universally defined, and this makes it more difficult for law enforcement to stop smuggling of people, as they have to adapt to the conditions in different states.
Reasons
Many individuals who consent to being smuggled are escaping poverty and hardship, seeking opportunities and better conditions abroad, or seeking asylum from natural disaster, conflict, or persecution, but aren't able to legally immigrate due to a weak passport, or fear of being deported or imprisoned. While many who are smuggled are poor and uneducated, there are also others who belong to the educated middle class.Operations
People smuggling operations range from small to large-scale actors operating in a transnational market. Small-scale smugglers generally arrange all aspects of the smuggling operations themselves. However, more commonly, smugglers engage and do business within a larger smuggling network where there is a division of work among the actors involved. In the past, smuggling rings tended to be more obscure, amateurish, and limited. As people smuggling has continued to grow, however, smuggling rings are far more extensive and organized. In Mexico, as Jim Chaparro – head of the anti-smuggling office at the US Immigration and Naturalization Service – puts it, the once small and informal smuggling business has evolved into a powerful web of "literally hundreds of syndicates, some at a low level and some at the kingpin level".A Lebanese-Mexican Symbiotic smuggling network involved in human smuggling into the United States of America that came to the attention of law enforcement and counterintelligence has been described in the literature.
Over the years, smuggling has evolved into a sophisticated service industry, with certain routes and enclaves used by smugglers becoming practically institutionalized; for example: from Mexico and Central America to the United States, from West Asia through Greece and Turkey to Western Europe, and within East and Southeast Asia. Responsible for the flourishing business of people smuggling are a combination of interacting factors, from weak legislation and lax border controls to corrupt officials and the power of organized crime.
The complexity of the smuggling network is dependent upon the route to be taken and the nature of the journey. For routes that are well-known and tested, smugglers may function more as family enterprises and utilize fairly contained operations. The more complex the route, however, the more members of the smuggling network must be recruited. In general, the infrastructure of the people smuggling business is nontraditional, with no clearly identifiable organization and no rigid structure. The network of smugglers is diffused and decentralized. Smugglers form temporary business alliances, and the organization of smugglers can best be understood and described as ad hoc task forces, in which activities are specialized and controlled by individuals that deal with each other on a one-to-one basis. In the business of people smuggling, there is no single "godfather" figure who commands the activities of subordinates; rather, individuals conduct business on equal grounds and tend to consider themselves free agents. In fact, according to a Los Angeles-based smuggler, "The division of labor is really clear and refined. Everyone involved is useful in his own way and does his own thing only. There is no leadership in any smuggling rings. Leadership will not emerge because the work involved is so specialized".
According to Frontex, people smugglers give detailed descriptions of benefits of individual EU countries so they can compare the available benefits of for instance Sweden, Denmark and Germany before applying for asylum.
Smuggling vs. trafficking
A concerted international focus on defining and responding to migrant smuggling only occurred in the 1990s. This focus followed sharp rises in irregular migration to the United States, and to Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. A focus on those who facilitate irregular migration – rather than migrants themselves – was seen as a critical element of any response. The resulting legal framework was the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, that supplements the parent instrument, the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.The Migrant Smuggling Protocol does not provide a complete or self-contained legal regime. It exists as part of a "dense web of rights, obligations and responsibilities drawn not just from the Protocol and Convention but also from the law of the sea, human rights law, and refugee law".
An important distinction to make is that between human smuggling and human trafficking. Given the complex nature of human smuggling and trafficking operations, the difference between these two criminal operations is not always readily apparent. Delineating between the two involves taking closer look at the subtle differences between each.
Generally speaking, human trafficking involves transporting individuals from one place to another either against their will or under some sort of false pretense. With smuggling, on the other hand, there is understood to be an agreement between smuggler and customer, a meeting of the minds and a contract between the two. These differences can similarly be detected in the Trafficking and Smuggling Protocols passed by the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime. The Palermo Protocols frame the difference between smuggling and trafficking around the dichotomy of coercion and consent: whereas people who are trafficked are considered "victims" or "survivors", individuals who are smuggled are seen as having engaged willingly in an enterprise that one or both of the bordering countries consider illegal..
More specifically, below are three main technical differences between smuggling and trafficking, which are as follows:
- Consent – trafficking victims are those who have been subjected to coercive, deceptive, or abusive action by traffickers. These victims either never consented, or if they did, their initial consent is rendered meaningless by the subsequent actions of the traffickers.
- Exploitation – smuggling operations and interaction between smuggler and customer usually terminate upon payment and arrival at destination; trafficking victims, on the other hand, are often involved in a cycle of ongoing exploitation.
- Source of Profits – primary profits from smuggling operations are derived from transportation and facilitation of illegal entry or stay in another country, whereas trafficking operations profit largely from the exploitation of victims.
Sometimes there is a gender dimension to the distinction between smuggling and trafficking: those who are smuggled are often assumed to be mostly men, whereas victims of trafficking are more commonly assumed to be women and children.