Defining Human Smuggling in Migration Research: An Appraisal and Critique

Abstract

The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), created in 1992 and directed by Professor Brigid Laffan, aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research on the major issues facing the process of European integration, European societies and Europe's place in 21 st century global politics. The Centre is home to a large post-doctoral programme and hosts major research programmes, projects and data sets, in addition to a range of working groups and ad hoc initiatives. The research agenda is organised around a set of core themes and is continuously evolving, reflecting the changing agenda of European integration, the expanding membership of the European Union, developments in Europe's neighbourhood and the wider world.

Out of West Africa: Human Smuggling as a Social Enterprise

“…Such a hybrid approach would also contextualize migration facilitation within a larger political economy and global governance regime that creates the conditions necessary for “human smuggling” to flourish. As Baird points out, “critical research on migrant smuggling is to turn the focus from supporting states in their efforts to police and prohibit migration, towards a focus on ending harms and reducing suffering of those who have felt the most brutal effects of the regimes of prohibition” (Baird 2016, 8). More than trying to define who the migration facilitator is in terms of marked identity, critical research should focus on trying to understand such actors as “embedded in the complex interplay of systemic forces that lead to migration” (Baird and van Liempt 2016, 409).…”

“…Perhaps more importantly, uncritically adopting the legalistic definition of human smuggler risks reifying the socio-legal system that produced it, and the people within its definitional scope, without interrogating its inherent assumptions. As Theodore Baird has argued, “The growth of the category of human smuggling [is] a device of social control of undesirable populations and extra-state markets” (Baird 2016, 6–7). Using the trope of smuggler is thus neither neutral nor apolitical.…”

How useful is the concept of transit migration in an intra-Schengen mobility context? Diving into the migrant smuggling and human trafficking nexus in search for answers

“…Following the urgent call of Baird (2016), it is certain that further empirically grounded and critical research on the nexus between human trafficking and migrant smuggling, also in the Intra-Schengen border mobility context, is of vital importance in order to have a better grasp of the situation on the ground. Empirical data about the "law in action" on these hidden phenomena must be brought to the front in order to improve the "law in the books."…”

“…While the majority of academic, media and governmental outputs fit exclusively within one of these two categories, a growing fringe of the scholarship questions the operability of the definitions and the extent to which they reflect the reality (e.g., Baird 2016; Dandurand and Jahn 2020;Munro 2006). According to Baird (2016), the study of human trafficking and migrant smuggling has been uncritically and problematically aligned with the strict legal categories established since 2000. The distinction overlooks the empirical evidence showing that both can be intertwined in a gray area and prevents a thorough understanding and comprehension of the phenomena and the dynamics in play between them.…”

“…The adoption of the United Nation Convention against Transnational Crime (UNTOC) and its two additional protocols (hereafter Palermo Protocols) 1 in 2000 produced a strict legal dichotomy between migrant smuggling and human trafficking (see Gallagher 2001;Hathaway 2008). The established legal categories trigger substantially distinctive protective regimes to either the "worthy" human trafficking (ideal) victim or the undeserving "culprit" smuggled individual (Dauvergne 2008;Kemp 2017;Baird 2016).…”