Over 20 years of counter-smuggling legislation have failed to sustainably reduce irregular migration to Europe or protect migrants.
These measures have only ever had short-term effects. The vast security response that followed the summer of migration in 2015, for example, decreased arrivals. But the effect was only temporary, and numbers have since returned to pre-2015 levels.
A similar story can be told about the number of dead and missing people on Europe’s Mediterranean border. According to the International Organization for Migration, the annual toll peaked in 2016 (5,136 dead and missing) and then began to drop. It reached its lowest point in 2020 (1,450 dead and missing) before climbing again. The new peak it hit in 2023 (3,155 dead and missing) was a shade off the pre-2015 level. Over 30,000 people have died in the Mediterranean since 2014.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people have been arrested, imprisoned, or tied up in legal proceedings across the UK and Europe – simply for crossing a border, or for acting in solidarity with someone who did.
openDemocracy’s recent series on how migration became a criminal offence showed that this shift is not an unintended consequence of border security policies. People are not getting ‘caught in the net’ by accident as British and European governments fight a legitimate enemy. Migrants and solidarity actors are being deliberately targeted.
This campaign is fuelled by two beliefs. First, that with enough force people can be successfully blocked and deterred from crossing borders. This remains the unshakeable core of migration policy, even though the UK Home Office itself admits that there’s no evidence to back this up. And second, that prosecuting more people involved in migration (regardless of who they are) will please voters.
Research and experience both tell us that deterrence doesn’t work. Continuing down that path until we find ourselves surrounded by fences and walls too high to see over isn’t a solution. Western countries, many of whom strongly rely on migrants to sustain their economies, need to radically rethink how to deal with migration and its facilitation.
This work begins with actively challenging the main misconceptions policymakers and the general public have about people smuggling. Only once we have a more realistic view of how people move, can we begin to imagine better policies – ones that respect people’s human rights on the one hand, and respond to economic and security concerns on the other.
Heading for more criminalisation in 2025
As the political outlier of 2024’s lurch to the right in Europe and the US, the new UK Labour government had a chance to move away from its predecessor’s policies on migration across the English Channel migration and chart a different course. It could have trialled safe and legal routes from France and Belgium, for example, to test if they reduce migrant deaths.
Instead, the UK government has chosen to follow the recipe outlined by the 2024 EU Pact on Migration and Asylum: streamline border procedures to screen asylum seekers, bar access to those who don’t qualify for asylum, and conclude agreements with source and transit countries to speed up deportations and deter migration ‘upstream’.
It also plans to set up a new Border Security Command, with a £75 million budget and a mandate to treat smugglers as terrorists. The effectiveness of this new unit, however, will be limited by its ability to communicate effectively with EU counterparts. Treating smugglers like terrorists or mafia clans essentially means delivering intelligence to European authorities and hoping they’ll do something about it, a plan that has raised doubts among Home Office officials.
Counter-smuggling policies fail because they’re not actually trying to stop smuggling. They’re trying to stop migration
Not that the EU is going in a different direction. The EU Council also just agreed on major changes to its counter-smuggling regime that “leave the door open to the criminalisation of migrants and solidarity with migrants,” according to the migrant rights’ organisation PICUM. At the same time, the new Facilitation Directive – due to go through the EU parliament later this year – would expand the remit of states to use criminal law for migration enforcement, and open the door for more unregulated digital surveillance of people on the move.
Counter-smuggling doesn’t counter smuggling
Counter-smuggling policies fail because they’re not actually trying to stop smuggling. They’re trying to stop migration. To equate the two, or to assume that to deter one is to deter the other, is to fundamentally misunderstand the problem.
Evidence from the US-Mexico border, the Sahara routes, the Balkan routes, the Mediterranean and the UK Channel shows that in the long run, counter-smuggling efforts based in enhancing security, detection and deterrence often increase demand for smuggling and increase vulnerability for people on the move. Making movement difficult invites smugglers in.
In a very real way, the ultimate counter-smuggling policy is an open border. Allow migration, and human smuggling will end overnight. But the opposite doesn’t hold nearly as well: ban migration and smugglers come out of the woodwork, fuelling smuggling and continued migration (under more dangerous and expensive circumstances).
Smuggling is also not one thing. The many activities housed under this umbrella term exist on a spectrum, which ranges from sophisticated and sometimes violent, multi-service smuggling groups to small self-organised groups of individuals trying to get from A to B.
Samyar Bani, an Iranian refugee who bought a boat together with fellow asylum seekers so they could cross the Channel, was charged with facilitation for doing the latter. He was first convicted but later acquitted.
Policies that treat everything as a single criminal phenomenon – i.e. that don’t distinguish between different acts and actors – can easily make routes more dangerous. They may have the effect of pushing some smugglers from the market, but they don’t clear the field.
No matter the risks, people still try. The number of drowned bodies in the Mediterranean Sea is testament to that
Instead, those who remain have either a higher tolerance for risk (like the militias managing the trafficking of migrants in Libya); don’t fully understand the risks; or simply have few other options available to them for survival (like the self-organised migrant-led groups facilitating movement on most other borders to Europe).
Counter-smuggling policies make migration routes riskier, smugglers more necessary, and journeys more expensive. But no matter the risks people still try. The number of drowned bodies in the Mediterranean is testament to that. Building walls and increasing surveillance along common routes induce people to take longer and more dangerous journeys, displacing them to less travelled routes, yet failing to stop smuggling and irregular movement.
This has been documented in numerous places: since the pandemic, routes from West Africa to the Canary Islands have re-emerged, and smugglers have shifted to operating on the longer and more dangerous Mediterranean routes from Turkey and Lebanon directly to Italy, rather than to Cyprus or the Greek islands. And after the Belarus-Poland border crisis in the summer of 2021, smugglers swiftly switched to organise crossings at the Russia-Finland border.
Counter-smuggling policies are counterintuitively turning smuggling into an ever-necessary service, while at the same time making it more dangerous, expensive and exploitative. Yet for 20 years, states’ inevitable response has been to call for further securitisation.
European enforcement agencies have grown exponentially. Frontex, the EU border and coastguards agency, has expanded its budget from €6 million in 2006 to over €800 million today, the largest growth of any EU agency. The prime beneficiary of this stubborn narrowmindedness is the growing security and surveillance industry, including private contractors trying to get a piece of the pie.
It is undeniable that people on the move face violence and risks of exploitation and trafficking at the hands of violent smugglers and criminal gangs. But the short-sighted logic of countering immigration through criminalisation is creating more crime than it prevents.
We should – and we can – do things differently. Highly securitised and rights-violating migration policies should not be inevitable. They consume valuable resources that could be redirected towards ensuring safe migration pathways, as well as meeting the security concerns of states.
But for any of this to change, we must take the first step of acknowledging that smuggling becomes a necessary phenomenon in a world where movement has been criminalised. Asylum seekers escaping war, famines and persecution are not able to reach safety without smugglers. And no matter how dangerous the path before them is, they will try.
A complex and global issue requires a nuanced and multi-layered response.
Alternatives: a three-way approach
- Safe and legal routes
Alternatives already exist in various forms and in various places. Sponsorship programmes, such as those created by organisations like Caritas and Sant’Egidio Community in Italy, France, and Belgium can be studied as models.
The EU’s Temporary Protection Directive and UK’s humanitarian visa schemes for people from Ukraine and Hong Kong are other examples of effective alternatives to smuggling routes. They’re not perfect but these have helped keep people safe. No Ukrainian refugee has drowned in the Channel, and more than 120,000 people moved safely from Hong Kong to the UK since 2021 without anyone warning of an invasion.
The UK and EU should consider using similar schemes to offer safe passage to people stuck in limbo at the bloc’s bottleneck areas in Bosnia, Libya, Turkey and Calais.
While safe passage would offer some respite, it would be no silver bullet. As is the case with the Emergency Transit Mechanism and UN sponsored resettlement programs, humanitarian visas from origin and transit countries still have incredibly long waiting times and high refusal rates. Stuck in that limbo, many would still resort to using smuggling services.
Humanitarian visas cannot be the one solution, but they could be an ingredient within a wider recipe – one that includes decriminalisation and bringing back migration opportunities through functioning visa systems.
- Decriminalisation
As with the call for the decriminalisation of drug use and sex work, pushing for the decriminalisation of people smuggling may be an effective tool for scrutiny, while centring a harm-reduction approach.
The focus of limited police and security resources should be placed on the prevention and prosecution of the actual crimes committed when smuggling is pushed underground and turned profitable
Decriminalisation doesn’t mean giving amnesty to well-known criminals – like Giorgia Meloni’s government did last week when returning alleged police chief torturer Osama Najim to Libya on an Italian government plane, ignoring an international arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
Decriminalising the facilitation of border crossing means shifting the focus away from asylum seekers caught with their hand on the tiller. People smuggling, understood as the facilitation of someone’s entry into a state without formal authorisation, should be treated as an administrative matter of civil law, rather than a concern for national security.
The focus of limited police and security resources should be placed on the prevention and prosecution of those actual crimes that get committed when smuggling is pushed underground and turned profitable for criminal groups: the use of violence, coertion, torture and rape in detention centers and ‘safe-houses’, human trafficking, kidnapping and extortion, abandonment at sea and fail to rescue.
These are all crimes against which most states already have specific legislation in place. Tackling the more aggravated forms of smuggling means focusing away from cases where border crossing is an action consented to by migrants, and focusing instead on cases when it causes physical or psychological harm.
- Immigration to fill labour shortages
The third step would be to reconfigure a rights-based immigration system as a vital asset for Europe’s democratic and economic future. Rather than being a threat, immigration can (and already does) play a vital role in addressing labour shortages in Europe’s labour markets. It would also go some way to addressing the low-birth rates that soon risk upending the EU and UK’s welfare and pension systems.
Most of the world’s population has no legal way to reach Europe or the UK – only a privileged few may enter, reside, and work here. That’s what creates the real demand for smugglers. The first step for a programme that actually sought to counter smugglers would be to make visa systems accessible to people on the move and create working visas for migrants wanting to access legal employment opportunities in Europe.
Working visa schemes should prioritise legal work and the human rights of the recipient rather than tie them to specific employers and leave them vulnerable to exploitation, as most seasonal worker visa schemes currently do.
European and British politicians say they are desperate to counter smuggling and ‘smash the gangs’. The only way to do that is to grant migrants rights and enable their passage. Let’s hold them to their word.
