Abstract
Human smuggling towards Europe has reached an unprecedented level in the last years. The past decade has seen an intensification of the demand for irregular migration services, which increased the role of smuggling rings as service providers to assist irregular migrants in evading national border controls, migration regulations and visa requirements. These criminal organizations feature an entrepreneurial, rent-seeking behaviour using methods such as corruption, deceit, violence, and threats. Literature observes a number of elements which are essential for the establishment and development of any criminal organisation (capital collection, profit maximisation, differentiation of tasks, systems to conceal criminal money flows), but their actual presence within the human smuggling rings has never been verified. Using secondary sources, this contribution aims at verifying the presence of these entrepreneurial elements in the case of human smuggling rings by using a multiple case-study analysis.
Highlights
Human smuggling1 towards Europe has reached an unprecedented level in the last years
The Italian police dismantled a smuggling ring controlled by an Ethiopian smuggler organizing the passage of several irregular migrants from Sudan to Libya
The analysis shows that in all the cases observed the human smuggling rings featured a system for capital collection
Summary
Human smuggling towards Europe has reached an unprecedented level in the last years. The progressive national and supranational restrictions on migration generated a demand from migrants to irregularly cross international borders with the assistance of organized smugglers (Antonopoulos and Winterdyck 2006; Scholenhardt 1999). Smuggling rings provide services to assist irregular migrants in avoiding national border controls, visa requirements, and migration regulations (Siegel 2005). The number of smuggled people from West Africa to Europe is estimated to vary between 25,000 and 84,000 per year (UNODC 2011). The turnover of criminal rings operating in the Mediterranean in the irregular migrant business is estimated between €233 and €781 million per year, making these criminal activities the second transnational crime after drug smuggling for the amount of money generated (ibid.)
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