Migrant Smuggling Data and Research

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EUROPE
Danai Angeli and Anna Triandafyllidou
Introduction
Since the 1980s, irregular migration to Europe has rapidly expanded. The
perceived economic advantages, particularly in Western European countries,
large-scale conflicts in Asia and the Middle East, the effects of global poverty
especially in the south but also increasingly restrictive migration policies barring
access to the labour market are some of the many converging factors behind
the growth of this rather complex phenomenon. Over the past few years, the
political turmoil in the Arab world and in particular the ongoing crisis in the
Syrian Arab Republic have further exacerbated the number of undocumented
migrants reaching Europe (Triandafyllidou and Maroukis, 2012; Shelley,
2014; Kuschminder, de Bresser and Siegel, 2015; McAuliffe, 2013; Salt, 2000).
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in 2015, over
1 million irregular migrants and refugees arrived in Europe (IOM, 2015) from
developing countries in Africa and Asia – the highest migration flow since the
Second World War. Frontex, the European Agency for the Management of the
European Union’s External Borders reported an unprecedented number of over
1.5 million irregular border crossings, the overwhelming majority of which took
place at the Greek–Turkish sea border (Frontex, 2016a). In response to these
developments, countries in Europe have kept their eyes fixed on their borders;
managing the growing numbers of migrants entering into the continent and
discouraging the influx of irregular flows has nowadays evolved into a primary
policy objective (Fargues and Fandrich, 2012; Fargues, 2014).
The connection between irregular migration and migrant smuggling as
a violent and ruthless business is relatively recent and was mainly established
in Europe during the first major refugee crisis in the mid-1990s. Up until then,
migrant smuggling was neither punished nor treated as an important act of
crime as it is today. It even had a positive connotation; a legacy of the heroic
acts of smuggling Jews to safety during the Second World War. There was also
no common policy to combat migrant smuggling (van Liempt, 2016; Doomernik,
2013). In 2000, the preparation of a proposal for a Council on the Framework
Decision on Strengthening the Penal Framework for Preventing the Facilitation
Migrant Smuggling Data and Research:
A global review of the emerging evidence base
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