People smuggling

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People smuggling (also called human 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".^[1]

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.^[2] According to the IOM Missing Migrants Project, there have been more than 3800 deaths during migration around the world in 2015.^[3]

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.^[4] 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.^[5]

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.^[6]