̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - human smuggling

Human smugglers operate as ‘independent traders’, study finds

fpjl2 — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:59:42 +0000

Latest research shows a lack of overarching coordination or the involvement of any “kingpin”-style monopolies in the criminal operations illegally transporting people from the Horn of Africa into Northern Europe via Libya.

Instead, transnational smuggling routes were found to be highly segmented: each stage a competitive marketplace of “independent and autonomous” smugglers – as well as militias and kidnappers – that must be negotiated by migrants fighting for a life beyond the Mediterranean Sea.

̽��ֱ��first “network analysis” of this booming criminal enterprise suggests that successful smugglers need a reputation among migrants – and that removing any individual smuggler will only result in rivals immediately seizing their “market share”.

Dr Paolo Campana from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Institute of Criminology conducted the research using evidence from the 18-month investigation by Italian prosecutors that followed the Lampedusa shipwreck, in which 366 people lost their lives.

̽��ֱ��work included data from wiretapped telephone conversations between smugglers at all stages, testimonies collected from migrants, interviews with police task force members, and background information on offenders.

“ ̽��ֱ��smuggling ring moving migrants from the Horn of Africa to Northern Europe via Libya does not appear to have the thread of any single organisation running through it,” said Campana, whose findings are published today in the European Journal of Criminology.

“This is a far cry from how Mafia-like organisations operate, and a major departure from media reports claiming that shadowy kingpins monopolise certain routes.”

In fact, it was the Anti-Mafia unit with the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office initially tasked with investigating smuggling operations on both sides of the Mediterranean in the wake of the Lampedusa disaster in October 2013.

Campana points out that they found no evidence of any involvement from the Sicilian Mafia at the time, even through payment of protection money – despite Sicily being a key stage in the smuggling route.

̽��ֱ��two indictments prepared by the Palermo unit – totalling some 800 pages – formed a major part of the dataset Campana combed through to code all possible data points: references to times, names, events, exchanges, locations and so on.

Overall, 292 actors (not including migrants) were identified as part of the Lampedusa smuggling ring. 95% were male smugglers operating along the main route, from the Horn of Africa to the Nordic nations in northern Europe – where many migrants hoped to find refuge – via Libya and Italy.

However, the network also extended to Dubai, Israel, Canada, Turkey, Germany and the UK, and included those who kidnap for ransom in the deserts of Libya, and Tripoli militiamen who take bribes to let migrants out of detention centres.

“People specialise,” said Campana. “There was a clear separation between those providing smuggling services, those kidnapping for ransom, and those, like the militias, ‘governing’ spaces and supplying protection.”

He also detected signs of rudimentary hierarchy among smugglers in some stages of the route, which roughly divide into ‘organiser’ and ‘aide’.

“Organisers are individuals who give orders but don’t receive them, while aides are highly dependent on organisers for their activities. Organisers make up some 15% of the smuggling network and the remaining 85% occupy a lower ranking aide position.”

̽��ֱ��network models built by Campana show that those who operate in the same stage of the journey are almost seven times more likely to have some link with each other. “Even in a network that traverses the hemispheres, it is the local dimension that is still crucial,” he said.

Moreover, Campana found that those who share the same network position as either organiser or aide are three times less likely to have any tie. “There is little contact between fellow organisers, reinforcing the impression of smugglers as free-trading independents. Business opportunities tear coordination apart,” he said.

Indeed, a focused analysis of a sub-network of 28 smugglers revealed that those based in Italy who tapped directly into the Libyan ‘marketplace’ had very little contact with each other.

Wiretaps and testimonials suggest that migrants have to pay separate vendors for each leg of the journey. Payment was often done in advance though Hawala, an informal money transfer system based on trust.

One wiretap reveals a charge of $3600 for a couple to cross the Mediterranean. Another wiretapped smuggler charges €150 per person for a car trip from Sicily to Rome.

“Reputation is crucial in a competitive market, and the wiretaps show how much value smugglers place on their reputation,” said Campana.

One smuggler was recorded reproaching another for overcrowding a boat, comparing it to the way a dirty bathroom reflects badly on everyone who shares the house.

In fact, the wiretaps reveal that the loss of life in the Lampedusa disaster led to compensation being paid to families by smugglers scared of losing future business.

“Authorities may wish to deliberately tarnish the reputation of smugglers in order to shut down their business,” said Campana.

“Criminal justice responses require the adoption of coordinated tactics involving all countries along the route to target these localised clusters of offenders simultaneously.

“This is a market driven by exponential demand, and it is that demand which should be targeted. Land-based policies such as refugee resettlement schemes are politically difficult, but might ultimately prove more fruitful in stemming the smuggling tide than naval operations.”

First study to model the organisation behind trade in illegal border crossings shows no “Mafia-like” monopoly of routes from Africa into Europe via Mediterranean. Instead, myriad independent smugglers compete in open markets that have emerged at every stage of the journey.

This is a far cry from how Mafia-like organisations operate

Paolo Campana

Noborder Network

Migrants arriving on the island of Lampedusa.

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Trading on human tides – the 'free market' of people smuggling

fpjl2 — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 13:30:47 +0000

A wiretapped telephone records a human smuggler in Sudan asking a human smuggler in Libya how many were his. ̽��ֱ��response is 109, of whom 68 are now dead.

̽��ֱ��boat had capsized within sight of the Italian island of Lampedusa, killing 366 people. At the time, autumn 2013, it was the single largest loss of life to result from the booming black market in Mediterranean crossings. Worse would follow.

̽��ֱ��wiretap later records the smuggler in Sudan reproaching the smuggler in Libya for overcrowding the boat. He has since felt obliged to personally notify families. He has shelled out $5,000 in compensation in a bid to save his reputation and stop potential customers turning to one of his many rivals.

Human smuggling is different to human trafficking: the smugglers’ commodity is the crossing of borders rather than control over people – and war, poverty and globalisation have caused demand for this commodity to explode.

Between 2014 and 2015, illegal border crossings along the East Mediterranean route increased by an astonishing 1,641%: from around 50,000 to over 885,000. As with any market, let alone one of the fastest growing on the planet, where fortunes are to be made competition is ferocious.

Dr Paolo Campana, an expert in criminal networks, joined Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology in early 2015. He describes the commerce of smuggling humans into Europe as a “quintessential free market”, with little intervention and no regulation beyond the market’s own mechanisms.

“Some smugglers cheat, some overcharge, some care about safety, some don’t care who lives or dies. Some offer ‘premium’ services, fast-tracking migrants through smuggling routes. Some don’t protect people from kidnappers, others help buy them back from militias,” he says.

“ ̽��ֱ��law struggles to apprehend smugglers, and when they do manage it, any void created is likely to be immediately filled. ̽��ֱ��main things that stop smugglers defrauding many more migrants, or drowning them in unseaworthy boats, are individual morality and maintaining a reputation that attracts more business.”

No 'Mr Big'

Importantly for a pure free market such as human smuggling, there are no monopolies, says Campana. While newspaper headlines will often describe ‘Mr Big’ figures or talk of Mafia involvement, his research shows that smuggling networks are fragmented: small groups with rudimentary hierarchies jostling for trade in crowded marketplaces.

“Despite smuggling routes traversing the globe, from the Horn of Africa to Scandinavia, individual operations are stunted and localised – nobody is in control of all stages of the journey. Smugglers operate as independent actors in various stages of an overall journey, whether it’s a sea or a desert crossing, or temporary city accommodation, or car trips over European borders.”

“While some smuggling groups make arrangements with each other, there seem to be no exclusivity agreements and – despite the localisation of smuggling networks – very little territorial control,” says Campana.

This absence of monopolies is radically different to other black markets such as Mafia-like protection rackets. Even in Sicily, where both human smuggling and the Mafia are major problems, Campana observed no connection between the two.

Almost anyone can set themselves up as a smuggler: from street vendors who sell border crossings as a sideline, to tour guides who switch to smuggling, to fishermen who are already equipped with boats for the sea crossings. It is the free-for-all nature of this marketplace that gives it the flexibility to expand quickly and accommodate soaring demand.

“Human smuggling is an enterprise with low barriers to entry, low skills and relatively low capital requirements – yet it has the potential to be far more lucrative than most other occupations available to people on the smuggling routes.”

As one operational analyst from the European border agency Frontex told Campana: “If you carry 20 people in a boat, that could be the equivalent of five years’ bad fishing.”

In the wake of the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck, a rescue operation, initially called Operation Mare Nostrum, was set up to patrol the Mediterranean, and resources from the highly skilled anti-Mafia prosecution unit in Palermo were allocated to tracking human smuggling operations for the first time.

Campana combed through and coded the smuggling court cases and wiretapped evidence that resulted from this shift, and has created quantitative databases to model smuggling networks.

As well as interviewing the Frontex analysts in Warsaw, he has also travelled to small towns in Greece and some of the Italian islands to speak to migrants, the police and the local communities.

He has just started to publish the findings from this research, including an overview of the new smuggling markets. He hopes that the first quantitative network analysis of a human smuggling operation – the one involved in the Lampedusa disaster – will also be public later this year.

Attracting customers online

Campana is also working with his Institute of Criminology colleague Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe, who has worked for many years with victims of trafficking, to conduct further interviews to capture the voices and experiences of migrants and smugglers. Gelsthorpe is co-founder of the Cambridge Migration Research Network, CAMMIGRES, which aims to improve understanding of migration.

“Professor Gelsthorpe and I are taking a genuinely holistic approach by combining the data-driven with the experiential,” says Campana.

One of the key areas the researchers are exploring is how migrants choose who to trust in such a busy and dangerous marketplace. This comes back to reputation.

While some smuggling networks are organised around ethnic lines, and word of mouth is important, digital forums have become increasingly influential in establishing trustworthiness, so part of the research involves analysing social media.

Smugglers often advertise their services in Facebook groups, where they try to attract ‘customers’ by responding to queries, competing through prices, and promoting credentials in the form of recommendations from other migrants.

Payment happens in advance, often through hawala, a traditional honour system that now functions through text messaging and a vast network of brokers. In some ways these platforms and processes are not that different to using eBay, for example, but with far more at stake.

Online networks are particularly significant in Syrian communities, where there is on average a higher level of education and digital literacy. “As everywhere, education matters,” says Campana. “Accessing and evaluating information through channels such as Facebook could mean the difference between life and death.”

Campana’s research has led him to question the European Union’s focus on policing and naval operations in the Mediterranean to control human smuggling. “Naval operations are very noble; however, they have the unintended consequence of assisting the smugglers by taking the refugees off their hands very close to the Libyan coast – making the ‘product’ more attractive and, ultimately, increasing the number of journeys.

Inset: Syrian and Iraqi immigrants getting off a boat from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos. Credit: Ggia (CC: BY-SA)

Cambridge criminologists are using emerging sources of information – from court records to Facebook groups – to analyse the networks behind one of the fastest-growing black markets on the planet: the smuggling of people into Europe.

Some smugglers cheat, some overcharge, some care about safety, some don’t care who lives or dies

Paolo Campana

Mstyslav Chernov

Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean sea, heading from Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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