National Threat Assessment 2008. Organised Crime - Politie

The consequences of smuggling of illegal immigrants for Dutch society
depend greatly on the destination: the Netherlands or another country. This
is why we made a distinction between smuggling of illegal immigrants with
the Netherlands as the final destination and smuggling of illegal immigrants
where the Netherlands acts as a transit country.
2.7.2 General context
Roughly speaking, the logistics process regarding smuggling of illegal
immigrants has three stages: the preparations for the journey, the journey itself
and the arrival. The powers of the Dutch investigating authorities are limited
to their own territory, which is why they only provide a limited insight into the
overall smuggling process. The criminal investigations studied, for example,
reveal little about the preparations for the illegal migration, such as the way in
which contact was initiated between illegal migrants and smugglers. If the final
destination is outside of the Netherlands, what happens at the final destination
will also remain unknown.
The journey
Research on criminal investigations showed that smugglers used various
methods to transport their clients to or via the Netherlands. If they used
scheduled flights, suspects would accompany the people being smuggled. They
would then hand out passports to their clients just before they got to the border
inspection point. Other smugglers had their clients climb into a lorry en route to
England at night to hide in the load. Misuse of the Approved Destination Status
(ADS) Agreement was one particular method used. The European Union and the
Chinese government signed the ADS Agreement to speed up the processing of
visas for large groups of Chinese tourists. However, crooked employees working
at a Chinese travel agency enabled entire groups of tourists to disappear once
they had arrived in the Schengen area. The arrangements have since been
changed to prevent future misuse.
Arrival and transit
Almost all the criminal investigations analysed involved transit smuggling,
in other words, smuggling to another country where the Netherlands was used
as a transit country. The Dutch asylum procedure was sometimes abused for
the purposes of transit smuggling. After a stay in temporary reception centres
or elsewhere in the Netherlands, the people being smuggled continued their
journey. England, Italy and the Scandinavian countries were especially popular
destinations. Nevertheless, inspections by the Aliens Police and the Social
Security Information and Investigation Service (SIOD) regularly find immigrants
chapter 2 – Illegal markets
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