People Trafficking versus People Smuggling.

On Sunday (19/4/15) a boat carrying irregular migrants from Libya capsized off the coast of Italy drowning at least 800. That afternoon Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi gave an impassioned speech in which he railed against the scourge of people trafficking which he likened to modern day slavery and described as a plague on the European continent.

Obviously no leader wants to receive the 4AM phonecall telling them that hundreds of people have died and it is their job to recover the bodies and bring them to shore. So I'm inclined to give Prime Minister Renzi a lot of leeway at this point. However I don't think he is quite correct on this issue.

Human trafficking is most certainly just the slave trade. It didn't end with Abraham Lincoln and it hasn't changed much since the days of William Wilberforce. In a worrying number of cases people are just kidnapped off the streets as shown in the film "Taken"* before being sold for profit. What is more common though is that people traffickers will set up fake employment agencies in poorer countries promising to arrange well paid jobs in richer countries close by. All the victim needs to do is pay an administration fee and for their travel which the agent will organise.

However when they arrive in the new country the victim discovers that there is no job, their passport has been taken from them and they can't call the police for help because they're in the country illegally. They are then sold on to people who force them to work often in the sex industry but also in traditional slave industries such as picking crops on farms. Victims can be sold multiple times and are often moved around the same country to go where they're needed for work. Therefore people trafficking can occur without international borders being crossed. In fact recently in the Rochdale and Rotherham grooming scandals it emerged that underage British girls were being tricked into prostitution in these northern towns and then trafficked across the UK to be forced to have sex with much older men.

This model of human trafficking is a particular problem within the European Union (EU) but tends to be focused towards the east in the former Soviet bloc nations such as Albania, Ukraine etc that are just outside of the EU. It is in those states that the victims are recruited and smuggled into the EU but it is from within the EU that the slavery and trafficking begins.

The situation is slightly different in South America and South East Asia. Here traffickers don't bother with the deceit of providing legal jobs. Instead they present an open proposition that for a huge fee they will smuggle a migrant across multiple international borders to a final destination of a rich country or either the US or Australia. However every time they cross an international border the migrant will discover that the price has suddenly increased and they are effectively held to ransom until their relatives back home pay another huge fee to allow them to continue their journey. If the migrant can't pay the extra fee in time they are often then sold off into the same types of slavery that you see in the EU.

It is this difference in the model which is why I fully support Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot's controversial policy of not allowing irregular migrants to set foot in Australia. By taking such as hard line he is removing the main selling point that traffickers use to lure migrants into their clutches. Unfortunately it is not possible to apply this solution to the EU because there is simply a lack of neutral countries between the EU and where the migrants are coming from.

It is also why I find US President Barack Obama's proposed immigration actions extremely distasteful from a humanitarian perspective. In his rush to grub votes Obama appears to be fully prepared to reinforce the main selling point - a new life in the US - that the traffickers use to trap their victims into this cycle of human misery.

The migration from Libya across the Mediterranean to the EU is different though. What tends to happen there is that migrants from across sub-Saharan Africa will pay nomadic tribes - such as the Tuaregs - to guide them across the vast expanse of the Sahara into Libya. Once they arrive in Libya the migrants are free to do as they please with many taking up jobs locally.

However others are willing to pay another set of people to help them cross into the EU. This essentially involves someone chartering a boat and then selling tickets for that boat. Once enough tickets have been sold the boat is cast off into the sea almost with the assumption that the EU's Frontex border force will pick them up and after that the migrants will be left to their own devices.

Therefore I don't think the groups operating in Libya are people traffickers so much as irregular travel agents. As such I don't think that targeting them as the EU has suggested will do much good because the process is so simple and so profitable that as soon as one person has been put out of business two more will step forward to take their place. In fact I'm a bit surprised that the migrants haven't decided to cut out the middlemen and started clubbing together to buy their own boats.

16:30 on 21/4/15 (UK date).





*Did you never wonder how such a small but enlightening film became such a worldwide smash hit?