Achilli, L. 2019, Waiting for the smuggler

The ANNALS of American Academy of Social and Political Science, 2018

This article challenges the categorization of smugglers as wicked villains by exploring smuggling’s moral economy. I present findings from two years of ethnographic field research on Syrian refugees and smugglers in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Italy, and along the so-called Balkan route (Greece, Macedonia, and Serbia). The relationship between the smugglers and the migrants appeared to be rich in solidarity and reciprocity and grounded in local notions of morality. Far from the dominant official narrative in the West of reckless criminals driven only by profit, smugglers sought and often found moral legitimation by using long-held notions of morality and religious duties when confronting the risky realities of their illicit enterprise.

In contemporary mainstream narratives of migration, the human smuggler has earned a privileged if infamous spot as one of the most widely recognized and despised global predators. Smugglers are often referred to as orchestrators of senseless human tragedies along migration corridors, masterminds behind sexual exploitation rings, or amassers of untold riches made at the expense of asylum seekers, migrants and their families –in turn often narrowly portrayed as infantile and ignorant. Constructed as racialized, hypersexual and greedy males from the global South, facilitators of irregular migration have earned widespread notoriety in narratives of human and national security, particularly in the context of migration control efforts. Media and authorities conceive the fight against clandestine migration as a war, a war where the evil is represented by the smuggler. The question is: is this a worthy war? Human smugglers certainly bear responsibility for many of the tragedies we are currently witnessing in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. However, our knowledge of irregular migration facilitation is often plagued with fragmented perspectives on the socio-cultural dynamics of the migratory journey, the facilitator-traveller relationship and their community dimensions. This is hardly surprising. Scholarship on the facilitation of irregular migration often draws exclusively from the experiences of government or law enforcement entities, or of the migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who were the unfortunate target of threats, scams or violence during their clandestine journeys, further obscuring the perspectives of those playing a role in their transits. In light of the necessity of elaborating an adequate policy response to human smuggling, a better comprehension of the phenomenon is pivotal to ensuring the stability of the receiving state and the security of the migrant/refugee. With this task in mind, this workshop aims to problematize the figure of the smugglers beyond overly simplistic generalizations and representations. There is a growing corpus of empirical and critical work on the facilitation or brokerage of irregular migration within migration regimes that deserves to be fostered and strengthened. We are proposing critical and empirical engagements on the topic of the facilitation and brokerage of irregular migration as witnessed regionally and comparatively. The workshop is co-organised by the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, and the National Security Studies Institute, University of Texas in El Paso.

Deconstructing the Myth of the Migrant Smuggler, 2020

Migrant smugglers are often considered unscrupulous criminals who exploit people in helpless situations. However, empirical evidence shows a more complicated picture, shaped by inequality, structural violence, racialized and gendered stereotypes, and the reduced availability to legal, safe, dignified paths to migration for many. The present contribution is an attempt to shed light on the complexity of migration facilitation.

Most counter-smuggling efforts have relied on law enforcement, policymakers, and journalistic documentation and analysis of the experiences of migrants who endured negative, tragic experiences along their journeys. While fundamental at understanding smuggling operations, these perspectives only constitute a piece of the puzzle. In this contribution, we argue that in order to identify abusive, unethical and dangerous practices in human smuggling, we need to question the dominant assumptions surrounding the practice through empirical research. Rather than investigating human smuggling from a criminal perspective that defines the practice as an underground, hidden activity, we must also identify its everyday social and public dimensions. Furthermore, we argue that improved understanding of human smuggling must reevaluate the notion that smugglers obey only a business-oriented logic (another dominant angle in smuggling analyses). In what follows, we narrate our experiences conducting ethnographic work in the Mediterranean and the Mexico–United States migration corridors alongside smuggling facilitators and their communities, and share some of our common findings. We argue that improved understanding into the facilitation of irregular migration come from building research relationships to the inside of migrant communities, and can benefit from the inclusion of a largely ostracized interlocutor: the smuggling facilitator.

The facilitation of irregular migration – labelled by the state as migrant, people or human smuggling – has been primarily articulated as a violent, exploitative practice under the control of transnational crime. It has also been tied to often problematic articulations of class, race, gender, informal forms of labour and sex work. Furthermore, the language of crisis, crime, violence and humanitarianism often associated with references to smuggling has reified specific geographic locations and their people as inherently dangerous and in need of surveillance and control. Amid this context, the explosive militarization of border control practices and stricter immigration criminalisation policies have been articulated as the only effective measures to fight the alleged spread of smuggling, depicted as a global security threat under the control of networks of vast, dark reach. The migratory flows in the Mediterranean, the Horn and the North of Africa, the Pacific, the Middle East, the US Mexico Border and Central and South America; the punitive efforts to control human mobility and the narratives pertaining to transits and their facilitation are clear examples of this approach. More often than not unintended outcomes have ultimately outweighed national security and border protection policy. The vast border and immigration enforcement systems have prompted spiraling financial costs. Attempts to block or contain migration routes have only redirected unauthorized migration flows into more dangerous and remote routes, leading to the injury, death and disappearance of thousands of people on the move. Furthermore, border enforcement has played a role in the very reliance of migrants and refugees on often dubious facilitators of migration services or criminally-organized entities that engage in specific forms of violence. Amid the panic caused by the overly-simplistic, fear-driven narratives of smuggling and those behind their facilitation, the social, economic, cultural, moral and affective significance of smuggling to and from the perspective of its actors (facilitators, clients, their families and communities) has remained vastly unexplored. To this date, narratives of tragedy, death, graphic violence, and transnational crime have continued to obscure the basic realization that the facilitation of irregular migration is ultimately a response to the lack of channels for legal entry and transit to which so many yet specific few are subjected. Building on the experience at the European University Institute in Florence in the Spring of 2016, this second edition of the Smuggling Workshop seeks to continue the conversation towards empirically grounded smuggling research, a field often silenced by the onslaught of anecdotal evidence or technocratic-legalistic perspectives concerning the facilitation of irregular migration. This time around the workshop will have a particular focus on collectively building the theory and documenting the praxis of human smuggling, relying on the empirically documented perspectives of its actors. This workshop is a collective effort to comprehend the ways in which migrants, refugees, their families and communities along with those facilitating their transits perceive, talk about, and partake in the phenomenon. The workshop takes place at a critical time in migration studies, when despite the vast abundance of scholarship on the lives of migrants and refugees, grounded empirical work on the processes involving their journeys and the effects and affects in them interwoven is still scant and scattered across the disciplines. A gathering of innovative and critical voices in smuggling from academic and policy circles, the workshop seeks to consolidate the creation of an interdisciplinary and global collective of professionals engaged in the empirical study of migration facilitation that integrates perspectives from the global north and south. With this goal in mind, we invite abstracts on the theme of irregular migration/human mobility facilitation for an international workshop to be held on April 6, 7 and 8, 2017 at the University of Texas at El Paso. We seek to bring together critical, empirical engagements on the facilitation and brokerage of irregular migration as witnessed locally, regionally and comparatively.