Migrant Smuggling Data and Research

possibility of examining the complex and important relationships established
within community contexts and networks that seek to facilitate migration and
improve the living condition of their members.
As this publication seeks to highlight, smuggling journeys are precarious,
and the conditions under which they take place as a result of migrants’ inability –
and not unwillingness – to secure visas or passports have real and documentable
impacts on the physical and emotional well-being of those who travel irregularly,
their families and their communities. As noted, scholarship documenting the
vulnerability of migrants and the roles State and non-State actors play as factors
of said vulnerability is abundant. There is in fact no shortage of data on the
experiences of irregular migrants, whose very accessibility to researchers trying
to map victimization processes merits examinations into the ethics of data
collection processes. Yet the data and research that have to this date been
favoured in analysis of migration have failed to engage with scholars from Latin
America itself in an academic dialogue and in collaborative efforts. Furthermore,
there have been no concerted efforts to systematically and comparatively engage
with the data pertaining to migration processes continentally, what has often
resulted in heavily localized analyses of clandestine migrations that examine
only the most striking, visible or graphic of examples, rendering those that
are less violent or that lack sensationalistic tones irrelevant. A clear example
of this selective process involves the abundance of scholarship on the Mexican
migratory corridors, where what amounts to some of the most extreme examples
of violence associated with irregular migration (mass kidnappings, extortion and
the discovery of mass graves containing migrant remains) have been hugely
documented, while the challenges faced by transcontinental migrants traversing
the Darien Gap or across the Atlantic (less accessible areas for journalists and
scholars) have been largely ignored by investigative inquiries of all kinds.
Smuggling practices are often seen as presenting a specific business
model; many researchers continue to describe them along the lines of supply
and demand where migrants are often depicted as irrational entities, willing to
pay – and lose – what are described as exorbitant fees imposed by smugglers,
who are in turn described as driven by greed and not concerned with the safety
of those travelling with them. The reliance on the business paradigm further
obscures the sociocultural dimensions that are connected to smugglers and
their use as elements of a sophisticated system of protection – a form of human
security from below that is articulated by migrants and their families in an
attempt to improve their chances to succeed in their journeys and reduce the
likelihood of injury or death (Sanchez, 2015 and 2016). Furthermore, until the
reliance on smuggling is not acknowledged as a response to, and as embedded
within a wider system of structural inequality that dictates access to human
Migrant Smuggling Data and Research:
A global review of the emerging evidence base
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