Entrapping Asylum Seekers by Francesco Vecchio & Alison Gerard

Author:Francesco Vecchio & Alison Gerard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Human Smuggling and the Family

Human smuggling is the legal term used to designate the facilitation, in exchange for a fee or in-kind payment, of a transit or series of transits that allow an individual to travel into a country/countries other than his or her own, while avoiding state controls. These transits are often facilitated by community-based brokers of varied expertise and resource—known colloquially among the migrant community of the Americas as coyotes or polleros. Coyotes generate business on the basis of referrals from former customers who attest to their reputation.

Human smuggling is depicted within contemporary, official narratives of irregular migration as an inherently violent and exploitative activity. Its tragic nature is almost always highlighted in the aftermath of extraordinary tragedies involving mass casualties of vulnerable migrants (e.g., the deaths of thousands of migrants in transit in the Mediterranean in the context of the so-called “Migration Crisis” in Europe have been largely attributed to smugglers). The effectiveness of the smuggling-as-heinous narrative is dependent upon the simultaneous mobilization of three fundamental notions: that migrants and asylum seekers are naïve, ignorant and susceptible to manipulation; that human smugglers take advantage of this vulnerability; and that the flows facilitated by the latter pose grave risks to the security of the nation-state (see Agustin 2014; Weber and Grewcock 2011). All three notions combined obscure the role of the state in creating the very conditions in which these journeys take place, as well as the enforcement mechanisms that compel those on the move into situations of high risk, furthering and justifying immigration criminalization processes (Pickering 2001, 2004).

The levels of vulnerability and risk endured by migrants and asylum seekers in the context of extra-legal journeys cannot be denied—thousands of people die or go missing during their transits, many in fact as a result of their interactions with smuggling facilitators. Yet it is important to emphasize how the rhetoric characterizing the hyper-visible field2 of human smuggling–related tragedies often obscures the fact that those who rely on extra-legal mobility mechanisms do so in an attempt to reduce the occurrence of risk and injury in their journeys. The focus on narratives of catastrophe reduces the likelihood not only that the efforts of those hurt while trying to reach safety will be acknowledged, but also that the lives of those who perish in transit will be accounted for (Weber and Pickering 2011). It also renders invisible the collective efforts involving extended groups of families and friends to provide, despite the structural limitations that surround them, layers of protection from afar—a form of multi-site, transnational care.3

The families of migrants and asylum seekers in transit play a key role in securing extra-legal border crossings—which include smuggling services. Most often it is family members who provide the finance and contacts that allow these journeys to occur (Ayalew 2016). Yet families have most often been ignored by a migration scholarship largely concerned with the transnational experiences of the individual migrant (evidenced by the abundant academic output on migrant labour, remittances, transnational parenting and political involvement).4

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