Trafficking Migrants an Attractive Crime

The European Police Office has just opened the European Migrant Smuggling Centre (EMSC), not to help smugglers, as the name might falsely suggest, but to actually obstruct their efforts and help EU member states to dismantle such networks. According to Europol 90 percent of the more than a million migrants that arrived in the EU in 2015 were facilitated. Meaning they paid money to criminals in order to or them to facilitate their way into and then around Europe.

Europol calls the people smuggling business a very attractive crime, because of high profit margins and a very low risk of detection. In 2015 this business had an estimated turnover of €3 to €6 billion. The illicit industry is multifaceted with transportation, accommodation and fraudulent documents on offer. In total Europol has identified around 40,000 suspects from 100 nations. Most of them come from and operate in Bulgaria, Hungary, Iraq, Kosovo, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Syria, Sweden and Turkey.

The United Nations estimate that the global refugee total has for the first time since 1992 surpassed the 20 million threshold, this does not include people internally displaced, refugees in their own country, who number 34 Million according to the U.N. “Overall, the lion’s share of hosting refugees continues to be carried by countries immediately bordering zones of conflict, many of them in the developing world.”