IngentaConnect Human Smuggling to and through Germany

Abstract:

Human smuggling has recently become an important issue in the migration policy debate almost worldwide. Despite suggestions about how to handle this phenomenon ranging from common border policies to an augmentation of legal migration channels, surprisingly little is known about the mechanisms of human smuggling, particularly its organizational principles.

This paper aims to give both overview and insight into the organizational principles of human smuggling processes. The empirical results are based upon two different kinds of material, expert interviews, and - almost exclusively in this field - copies of 51 complete court proceedings from all over Germany. They consist, apart from police reports and judgments of the courts, of interrogations of smugglers and smuggled persons as well as smugglers' telephone conversations, which were transcribed and translated. All in all, these cases provide information on several hundred human smugglers and approximately 20,000 persons being smuggled. For each case, the essentials were checked, including the socio-economic characteristics of the smugglers and those being smuggled, which consisted of age, gender, origin, education, and social status. With regard to the smuggling process, the details examined included who commissioned the smuggling, which places were used as stages on the journey, which means of transport were employed, whether forged documents or documents obtained by artifice played a role, the method of payment, the fees paid, the influence of the ethnic group, and whether the smugglers had connections to other criminal fields. The combination of these elements then led toward a typology of human smuggling processes.

Three main types of human smuggling processes have been worked out: the first is “individual smuggling with a high degree of self-responsibility”, and although in expert interviews this form of smuggling without pre-organized stages was supposed to be anachronical, in fact it still exists; the second is “covered” smuggling based upon obtaining visa by artifice; the third is “pre-organized stage-to-stage smuggling”, which was divided into three subtypes mainly influenced by the origin of both the smugglers (“stage coordinators”) and the smuggled migrants.

Overall, it can be said that in the absolute majority of the cases there is nobody in control of the whole smuggling process like a leader of a criminal organization. For functional reasons, it would also be inefficient for a huge organization to be responsible for a process that comprises distances of several thousand kilometres. Thus, members of an almost entirely mono-ethnic network function as “stage coordinators” while the smuggling actions themselves are outsourced to local smuggling groups. Such a close network of relatively few stage coordinators hardly ever meeting each other is only conceivable under the pre-condition of existing modern communication systems. The coordination level of human smuggling processes, therefore, seems to be an entire part of the migration network. On the other hand, the actions of the local smugglers on the performing level are completely guided by market conditions.