Migrant Smuggling Data and Research

Next to the lack of comparable and comprehensive data, the accuracy
of the available information is hard to assess, as little is also known about the
data collection and registration processes themselves. National authorities in
Europe provide little – if any at all – information about the tools and procedures
employed mainly at the operational level to register the data. Standardized
procedures, for instance, and indicators are normally absent. Some insights on
the circumstances under which information is retrieved can be found within
the judicial files, once a suspected smuggler is brought before a court and a
public hearing takes place. The court records reveal that more often than not,
the identification process and collection of evidence is carried out within a
particularly difficult context, for instance, at a remote border location, in the
open sea at night, during a rescue operation or in the face of multiple arrivals.
Individual police testimonies on observed events are frequently the primary
or even only source of information. The extent to which information gets lost
or personal biases and presumptions may further obscure the assessment of a
situation is a gap in the authors’ knowledge (Shelley, 2014; Salt, 2000; Carrera et
al., 2016; European Commission, 2015).
A review of the Greek statistics helps illustrates the concern. Figure
5.2 illustrates the number of irregular migrants and the number of suspected
smugglers apprehended between 2006 and 2015. Interestingly, while the
flows of irregular arrivals have significantly fluctuated, the number of arrested
smugglers has remained relatively stable. What is probably most surprising is
that despite the dramatic increase of irregular arrivals in 2015 – from 77,000 to
800,000 – the number of detected smugglers hardly changed.
In addition, and independent of the dramatic shifts in the flows through
the land and sea borders over the past five years, each year more than half of all
suspected smugglers were arrested at the Greek–Turkish land borders (Hellenic
Police, 2016). Although, as noted earlier, smugglers reportedly do not travel
with the refugee boats, this only partly answers the quest. In the absence of any
additional information, verifying what proportion of the overall phenomenon
the above data represents becomes almost impossible.
Collecting consistent data on migrant smuggling in the European context
presents the additional difficulty that there is little consensus across the national
jurisdictions on the definition of migrant smuggling itself. In practice, this means
that different situations may qualify as migrant smuggling across the region, as
each authority follows its own definition and rules (Salt, 2000). Nonetheless,
collecting national data would allow at least for checking trends within each
jurisdiction even if comparison would have to be done with caution.
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5. Europe