Migrant Smuggling Data and Research

smuggler once in the destination country. Such practices often lead to situations
of bonded labour, highlighting a fine line between smuggling and trafficking. It
is also common for smugglers to direct female migrants travelling from West to
North Africa, and who are out of money, to Arlit (Niger) to work in prostitution,
as a way to generate income for the next phase of their journey. This makes
them particularly vulnerable to being trafficked.
Review of data on migrant smuggling
While no overall estimate has been made of the number of migrants
being smuggled into and through North Africa, data on migrant smuggling
at the country level is also limited and hampered by a number of challenges.
First and foremost, the phenomena of irregular migration in general, and
migrant smuggling specifically, are hard to quantify given the fact that they are
clandestine in nature. In North Africa, there is also the added complication of
unstable environments, particularly in the case of Libya, which makes it difficult
to conduct ongoing data collection. The current political crisis in Libya, and
the consequent lack of one universally recognized national government, also
prevents national government-led data collection exercises. Finally, the fact that
migration flows in the region are so dynamic also makes it difficult to produce a
snapshot of the scope and magnitude of the flows at any given moment. Most
data in this area is based on estimates at best.
Estimating the number of migrants smuggled into the region usually
occurs within the broader task of estimating the number of irregular migrants
travelling into the region – irregular migration flows. There have also been some
attempts to quantify the number of irregular migrants in the region in the past –
irregular migrant stocks. This has been particularly so for Libya.
In 2004, for example, Libyan authorities estimated the presence of
600,000 regular foreign workers and between 750,000 and 1.2 million irregular
foreign workers living in Libya (MPC, 2013c). In 2011, IOM estimated the
total number of migrants who had been residing in Libya prior to the 2011
revolution at 2.5 million, including 1 million Egyptians, 80,000 Pakistanis, 59,000
Sudanese, 63,000 Bangladeshis, 26,000 Filipinos, 10,500 Vietnamese and a large
population of sub-Saharan Africans mainly from Chad, Ghana, Mali, Niger and
Nigeria (IOM, 2011). Considering that regular economic migrants in Libya tend
to be Asian or Arab (Malakooti, 2013a), it is likely that 1 to 1.5 million of the 2.5
million were irregular migrants. The International Centre for Migration Policy
Development attempted to estimate the number of irregular migrants in Libya
for its 2010 study through interviews with Libyan authorities, and estimated
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4. North Africa