Smuggling networks play a key role in the migrant crisis currently facing Europe. Combining a review of the literature and interviews with irregular migrants and smugglers, Luigi Achilli, from the Migration Policy Centre, presented an attempt to understand the resilience of these networks active on the three migration routes (Western Mediterranean via Morocco and Spain, Eastern Mediterranean via Turkey and Greece, Central Mediterranean via Italy and Malta).

Smuggling networks are small and highly heterogeneous organisations, largely family-based, that don’t have solid hierarchies and have entered into partnerships with one another for short periods, said Mr Achilli. They do not necessarily exploit their clients and, sometimes, the smuggler and the customer is the same person as asylum seekers may work as recruiters, “passeurs” or intermediaries.

Smuggling networks are thus deeply enmeshed within migratory flows. A truly effective answer to human smuggling would require the EU and its Member States to concentrate on reducing “demand” more than curbing “supply,” Mr Achilli concluded.

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