Human Smuggling Demands a Human Solution

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- There are many possible responses to the tragic deaths of 39 undocumented migrants found in a refrigerated truck container in Essex. The one from the U.K. government should serve as an example of how to make human smuggling even more dangerous and inhumane.

It’s not clear yet how exactly the immigrants, apparently mostly Vietnamese, died. The relatives of one woman who could have been in the container received panicked text messages from her saying she was suffocating. The family had paid thousands of dollars to send her to the U.K. bypassing the official immigration channels. The truck arrived in the U.K. from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge. Clearly, a smuggling operation went horribly wrong.

U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel outlined the government’s response in remarks to parliament on Monday. There’s an intelligence-led operation to “to disrupt and deter organized crime gangs using refrigerated and hard-sided lorries to smuggle clandestine migrants.” Extra U.K. immigration enforcement officers have been dispatched to Zeebrugge. The driver of the truck was charged with manslaughter and human trafficking, and three more people have been questioned on suspicion of the latter offense.

“We must be ruthless now in our response,” Patel said.

In fact, so much more is required from the British and other European governments: They ought to be more humane. They also should understand that people smuggling is essentially a transportation business based on demand from the “passengers.” What makes it work are the economic realities of migration. Ignoring the economics and stressing the criminality of people trafficking — a specific variety of smuggling that feeds slavery and cruel exploitation, including in the sex industry — are tactics hard-line politicians such as Patel use to justify replacing reasonable immigration policies with ever tougher enforcement.

According to Patel, “the motivations that lead people to try to cross borders illegally are broad and complex.” For policy purposes, however, it might be useful to consider the motives as something as simple as the wage disparity among countries. A large-scale study of irregular African migrants in Europe published by the United Nations Development Program this month revealed that 60% of these immigrants, from different countries and circumstances, cite the intention to work and send money home as their primary reason for traveling to Europe. For a further 21%, that’s a secondary reason.

According to the UN study, 39% of irregular migrants with primary and secondary education who have arrived in Europe since 2005 are earning an income; this goes up to about half for people with vocational training or a college degree. Of those with an income, 78% are sending money home, which amounts to on average one-third of their European income. The study puts the irregular migrants’ average income at $1,020 a month.

The average cost of traveling to Europe — including, of course, payments to smugglers — was, for the study’s respondents, $2,710. This implies that those who managed to find a source of regular income on arrival pay back that cost to their families and friends, who usually help put the money together, within just nine months. That’s a powerful economic proposition, which, apart from fueling irregular migration, helps supply the poorer nations with remittances.

According to the UN, remittances from both documented and irregular migrants to their families in “remittance-reliant countries” around the world reached $689 billion last year, three times the combined amount of official development aid and foreign direct investment to these nations.

The U.K. has a target to spend 0.7% of its gross national income on international development aid. It spent 14.5 billion pounds ($18.7 billion) last year. Using World Bank data from the U.K.’s 2017 bilateral remittances matrix, I calculate U.K.-based migrants from developing countries transferred about $17 billion home that year. Of that amount, $147 million went to Vietnam, the apparent country of origin of the migrants found dead in that truck in Essex.

The U.K. would need at least to double its development aid budget, and make sure 100% of the additional money would reach ordinary people, to eliminate the economic incentives to migration.

That, of course, would be absolutely unrealistic — and so are expectations that tougher enforcement or a war on people smugglers will significantly reduce irregular migration. A recent University of Chicago study calculated that Italy’s major, European Union-backed 2017 anti-smuggler operation that involved funding the Libyan coast guard reduced migrant arrivals by 343 per week in the second half of 2017 — a time when between 5,000 and 12,000 of them arrived every month.

The same study pointed out that tougher border enforcement can actually incentivize smuggling, since migrants count on the smugglers to mitigate their risk. It’s the smugglers’ job to find the routes of less resistance and bribe officials; migrants would find it hard to do that on their own. And no matter how Western governments see the smugglers, their clients will often consider them legitimate, even morally and religiously motivated helpers who only charge them because they face big personal risks and expenses.

A reasonable policy aimed at preventing episodes like the mass death in Essex — and, more generally, the 4,000 deaths a year recorded on migratory routs worldwide — should contain elements of both enforcement and a better immigration policy.

The enforcement part should consist of punishing actual trafficking — the kind of smuggling that involves burdening migrants with debts they can’t repay by working the exploitative jobs they’re forced to take upon arrival. That’s a form of slavery that can’t be tolerated in the civilized world. More information is needed to know whether the people who died in the Essex truck were victims of that kind of scheme. One family of a possible victim reported mortgaging its land to pay upfront for the woman’s journey, which suggests the person wasn’t going to be beholden to the smugglers on arrival. Either way, the family is now deeply indebted and mourning a loved one.

The economic part of the reasonable policy would have allowed the woman to come to the U.K. legally to seek work. The UN study of irregular African migrants shows that a large number are able to find work in receiving countries that pays enough for them to live on and send money home. These people should have had a legitimate opportunity to immigrate, since they contribute to the receiving country’s economy and, with their remittances, reduce the need for development aid. Meanwhile, current immigration policies, not just in the U.K. but in all of Europe, are pushing these people away.

Shrinking quotas don’t keep the migrants out — they just lead to more smuggling and more deaths. Governments could only displace the smugglers by offering the same services to work-seeking migrants, only risk-free. They could even charge for directing people to unfilled, relatively low-paying jobs that would enable them to send money home.

This may sound insensitive and certainly the politics in Brexit Britain and other countries make it hard to envisage. But it’s still better than Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hollow concern for “innocent people who were hoping for a better life in this country.” His country did its best to keep them out, after all, and is trying to make the inevitable journeys of others even riskier.

To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Melissa Pozsgay at mpozsgay@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

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