smuggling

Starmer’s counter-terror plan for migration woefully misses the mark

Spread the love

Original article by Ruben Andersson republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer take a walk after meeting to discuss migration in Rome | Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images. All rights reserved

There’s no smuggling ‘kingpin’ to take down. Instead, Labour’s security rhetoric risks putting more people in danger

Labour lost no time burying the Conservatives’ tawdry Rwanda plan in favour of something a little more, well, Churchillian. In July, as he welcomed European leaders to Winston’s birthplace of Blenheim Palace, Keir Starmer framed border security not as some nationalist vote-fishing expedition but rather as a pragmatic British undertaking “at the heart of the Government’s reset with Europe”.

It would also involve fighting them on the beaches. Gangs would be suitably smashed, he told his guests, by a new Border Security Command armed with “counter terrorism-style powers”. Elsewhere Starmer has also enthused over Giorgia Meloni’s ‘upstream’ fight against irregular migration — including offshoring asylum processing to Albania and outsourcing crackdowns to Tunisia.

So far, so familiar. If there’s anything European political leaders of different stripes and nationalities have united around since the 1990s, it’s more border security. But what will a counterterror-style crackdown actually achieve this time around?

Is Labour offering anything new on migration?

For some of those relieved to see Rishi Sunak exit stage right, his meaningless “stop the boats” sign tucked under his arm, there are grounds for optimism. The counterterror rhetoric, they say, hides humane openings elsewhere, especially when it comes to breaking the massive backlog of asylum cases. Respecting the European Court of Human Rights also looks like a welcome return to normality – and legality.

Starmer has further promised that his approach will be more cost-efficient. That’s easy enough to believe, as it’s hard to imagine anything more wasteful than spending “£700m to persuade four volunteers to go to Rwanda,” as Starmer himself described it. Supporters will add that smuggling is a rapacious business. Going after its economics is key, as is respectful collaboration with partner states rather than grandstanding. Reinstating EU returns (lost after Brexit), cracking down on smugglers, and expediting asylum cases will work where ‘invasion’ rhetoric failed.

In this take, Starmer offers strategic “competence with compassion” that also helps placate the tabloids. It’s a method that, if it works out, means everybody wins except the cold-hearted smugglers.

Not so fast. A brief look at the past decades’ border dynamics suggests that Starmer’s initiatives may well end up being as gimmicky as those they replace. If politicians genuinely want to stop profiteering as people drown in the English Channel or the Mediterranean Sea, they must first understand the drivers of migration and the smuggling business. Otherwise they will simply fail again – with more lives lost, and even harder rhetoric to come from the hard right.

Smuggling 101: supply and demand

It’s peculiar how difficult it is for mainstream politicians, who are otherwise so keen on market economics, to learn that human smuggling is a market driven by demand. It responds to incentives, and its strongest incentive by far is the disappearance of legal routes. The market is further buoyed by crackdowns of the kind seen around the Channel Tunnel in recent years. The displacement of routes has predictably increased danger and desperation – and thus reliance on professional smugglers. The border security system perversely feeds on the very problem it ostensibly combats.

True, deterrence-signalling measures may put a damper on the market – for a while. Cue Starmer’s nod towards Italy, where Meloni and her authoritarian Tunisian partner claim credit for bringing down maritime migration this past year. But sooner or later, the market will re-emerge unless the underlying dynamics and drivers are addressed.

Ever-tougher approaches targeting the supposed ‘kingpins’ have merely shifted the modus operandi

Reproducing new versions of the same threat and then combating them again is bad enough. But Starmer’s reference to counterterrorism — now accompanied by a doubling of the funding for the new Border Security Command — raises additional red flags.

Consider the US Homeland Security behemoth spawned by the George W. Bush administration after 9/11. Rather than changing dynamics at the US-Mexico border – the stage of spectacular enforcement all through the 1990s – it worsened it.

The cartels started playing an unpaid role in ‘prevention through deterrence’. At the same time, border crackdowns and technology imported from the war on terror pushed migrants away from smaller smuggling operations and into the hands of larger, more predatory players with the necessary economic margins.

Yet that inconvenient reality was never really acknowledged. As I heard some years ago, Customs and Border Protection bureaucrats repeatedly magicked up models showing their method ‘works’ by denting the revenue of smugglers and ramping up deterrence. It didn’t. Instead it reproduced a deadly dynamic and spawned fresh political crises.

Or consider Italy itself. Rome has deployed anti-mafia methods against smugglers, but it has little to show for these efforts except perverse results such as jailing a presumed “Al Capone of the desert”, who was later released in a case of mistaken identity. As the man’s lawyer said, “After three years, finally the judge confirmed what we have been saying: we had a farmer in jail and a smuggler at large.” The prosecutors kept insisting they had the right man, waging a war less on smugglers than on reality.

Fighting an elusive enemy

For years, ever-tougher approaches targeting the supposed ‘kingpins’ have merely shifted the modus operandi, in Libya and elsewhere. Instead of piloting a boat, the smugglers make passengers steer it. The latter then bear the legal — or lethal — consequences when it is seized or sinks.

People on the move, of course, also adapt their behaviour to crackdowns. As one Senegalese man explained to me 15 years ago, before his wooden fishing boat approached the Canary Islands, he threw “food, GPS and the compass into the sea”. The shift in tactics in response to enforcement has hugely increased the risk, pushing responsibility of the vessels onto migrants who cannot navigate or do not want to be seen doing so.

It is possible that Labour’s smuggling crackdown will not get stuck either in the bureaucratic swamp of ‘Homeland Security’, or get distracted by the catch-the-small-fry fracas. But its own alarmist rhetoric, combined with tabloid and Tory pressure, feed bureaucratic incentives to produce ‘results’ – and these are the easiest ways of showing such results. So beware the hyperbole: it makes meaningful ‘results’ more difficult to achieve.

Underneath all the tactics and rhetoric, however, a more fundamental analytical problem is lurking. Unless the threat has been correctly diagnosed, there’s little chance the remedy will work.

Starmer’s approach is based on the idea that smuggling is in the hands of very well-organised, transnational crime. That there is, somewhere, a kingpin to take down. But while it is true that human smuggling has become more predatory, profitable and professional as the market has grown with each short-sighted crackdown, that model is, at absolute best, extraordinarily incomplete.

The outsourcing of draconian migration controls has benefited repressive state and para-statal actors, while increasing the very dangers that drive people to move

Precision is needed, not alarmism. On the Spanish borders, for instance, politicians, police and reporters for years talked of ‘mafias’, even while small operators and migrants themselves kept organising crossings.

‘Upstream’, in North Africa and the Sahel, the authorities themselves are involved. They benefit from the security largesse provided by their European ‘partners’ in fighting irregular migration, and from the ever-increasing bribes needed to evade their own controls. Rather than a straightforward ‘battle’ between clear adversaries, we see here more of a symbiosis between the border security and smuggling businesses.

The outsourcing of draconian migration controls has benefited repressive state and para-statal actors, such as Libya’s militias, while increasing the very dangers that are driving people to move with the aid of smugglers. If we account for this political dynamic, Meloni’s ‘success’ looks fragile indeed. It is based on a drop of arrivals in 2024 from the previous year. Yet the chaos in Italian ports in 2023 was, to no small extent, the result of Tunisia’s president using African migrants as a bargaining chip with Europe.

Kelly Greenhill has called it “weapons of mass migration”. It’s something the EU says it wants to combat. Instead, European leaders seem to be rewarding it.

The smuggler factory

A ‘counterterror’ approach to smuggling, combined with further reliance on non-European buffer states, risks further skewing the border-crossing market from smaller players to more organised and rapacious ones while shifting the risks from smugglers to their increasingly desperate passengers. This, in turn, risks fuelling the trend towards captive markets that we see today from Libya to northern Mexico.

It’s been said many times that a ‘war on smugglers’ swiftly turns into a war on migrants. As David Keen and I show in our book Wreckonomics, politicians have kept learning the wrong lessons from their various short-sighted ‘wars’ against smuggling, terror, crime and drugs.

They keep choosing to go in hard with the security theatre and target the symptoms not the causes, hoping to reap short-term electoral rewards. They keep producing figures showing that the ‘fight’ is succeeding – and numbers may even really go down for a bit. But they don’t create sustained change. Look at the long term and we see above all a displacement of routes and methods – whether in the Channel, the Mediterranean or across the Rio Grande – with a corresponding boost for the smuggling market.

Starmer may still play smart and prioritise reinstating European returns, speeding up processing, and going after the big players and the money. The UK does not have Italy’s Mediterranean border, after all, and its main ‘outsourcing’ partner is France not Libya.

But in this context, it’s all the more worrying that we hear the language of counterterror and ‘upstream’ controls dominate the messaging. If the measures don’t match the problem, and if the relevant actors themselves remain poorly understood, the problem will simply keep being reproduced — as indicated by the past two decades of Labour and Tory enforcement efforts around the Channel.

For a more visionary political figure there is surely a chance here to offer a different kind of security

To Starmer’s supporters — eyeing tabloids and Faragists on the warpath — the gambit may still look appealing, or at least like some kind of lesser evil. Yet here awaits one further fallacy. For if there’s one other group besides smugglers that has predictably and consistently gained from ‘securitisation’ over the past decades, it is the far right.

Offering a lighter version of hard-right securitisation simply increases voter appetite for the full-fat version. The political appeal of repeatedly announcing an ‘emergency’ or ‘invasion’ is not based on numbers. Channel crossings, we know, are vanishingly small relative to overall immigration into the UK. But if the big politics of ‘small boats’ is not driven by numbers, the corollary is that even if Starmer were to get numbers down temporarily, the appetite for more border security would remain.

Starmer’s problem today is that of the left in general, which increasingly finds itself trapped in security logics — something we’ve equally seen in the recent US elections. This is unfortunate, since for a more visionary political figure there is surely a chance here to offer a different kind of security.

Instead of dismissing legal pathways, for instance, these could be reframed as bringing humanity, control and predictability to migration policy — while fundamentally creating a disincentive to use smugglers, as border guards themselves often insist.

Instead of trumpeting ‘counterterror’, there is scope for a sophisticated overarching strategy against organised crime and exploitative actors that targets the regulations and loopholes that these actors feed upon. This means working inland, where the exploitation of migrant labour, for instance, is a huge and neglected problem. Waiting in the wings is also a much wider conversation about how politicians’ economic choices and foreign policy fuel migration and displacement.

But all this involves open democratic debate and oversight. Counterterror approaches have tended to do the opposite: fuel a fear-based politics, increase secrecy, sidestep audits, benefit the big criminal players and corrupt partner authorities. They also unfailingly feed the very crises forcing people to leave countries such as Afghanistan in the first place.

A Churchillian rhetoric of unity-through-security is tempting. So is the language of counterterror. But to end with a warning from the failed war on terror, let’s perhaps listen to Richard C. Holbrooke, the US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who said: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.”

Starmer may at least be in the right country. But if he insists on misunderstanding the problem he will confront the wrong enemy yet again.

Explore the rest of the series

This series looks at how the UK, EU and bordering countries are increasingly treating migration as a criminal offence, and targeting migrants and solidarity actors in the name of ‘anti-smuggling’ and ‘border control’.

Original article by Ruben Andersson republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

Continue ReadingStarmer’s counter-terror plan for migration woefully misses the mark

Caught in the net: how migration became a criminal offence

Spread the love

Original article by Vicky Taylor Melissa Pawson republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

People board an inflatable dinghy in an attempt to cross the Channel from France to the UK in July 2022
 | Denis Charlet/AFP/Getty Images. All rights reserved

New series: UK and EU governments are targeting people crossing borders in the name of ‘counter-smuggling’

On 1 June 2019, Samyar Bani boarded a small dinghy with five other people. Looking out at the expanse of the English Channel, he said he felt afraid, but knew he had to continue. Just a few miles more and he would be in the UK. At that point, he never expected to still be journeying, still seeking safety, two years after fleeing persecution in his hometown of Shiraz, Iran.

Bani and his companions had purchased the dinghy together to avoid smugglers’ fees. He hoped the boat would keep them safe as they crossed the water, because he didn’t know how to swim. It was a dangerous last step, he knew that. But, given the limits of the UK’s resettlement routes and the tightness of its visa regimes, he saw this as his best chance for reaching sanctuary.

Bani hoped he’d be welcomed on the other side of the Channel, and that his request for asylum would be accepted. He had no idea that placing his hand on the tiller of the boat would land him in prison, cause him to plead his case before a jury at trial, and tie him up in an appeal process for two and a half years.

He never expected to lose contact with his wife and daughter, or for them to spend three years mourning the death of their husband and father. He never expected to have his picture put online, or to be branded as a ‘dangerous people smuggler’.

All of this happened to Bani because he helped to buy a boat, and helped to steer it to safety.

A new normal has crept in. Over the last few decades, crossing borders without permission – sometimes called ‘irregular migration’ – has become a criminal offence in many countries. Among those prosecuted are people in search of asylum, fleeing war and persecution.

These migrants and refugees, as well as solidarity actors like rescue workers, are also increasingly at risk of being labelled as ‘smugglers’ for the purposes of prosecution.

Governments are widening the nets of who they consider criminal as they respond to calls from the far-right to crack down on immigration. In doing so, states justify measures which racially profile, control and contain people on the move. These measures have been shown to make no tangible difference to immigration numbers, and instead cause immense harm to the very people they purport to protect.

In this new series, 12 authors do a deep dive into the criminalisation of migration and solidarity in the UK and Europe. Some of the contributors to this series have been accused of espionage, people smuggling, and facilitating ‘illegal entry/ arrival’. Some were crossing borders, and others were acting in solidarity with those crossing borders. Contributors also include policy experts and journalists working to expose those injustices.

Over the next two weeks, we’ll examine the hidden corners of global anti-migration structures set up in the name of ‘anti-smuggling’. We’ll be looking at: the detention of rescue workers in Italy; the imprisonment of children under ‘smuggling’ charges in the UK; the repeal of EU-enforced smuggling laws in Niger; how the EU is putting pressure on migrants’ rights groups in North Africa; the lucrative policing contracts in the ‘digital fight’ against smuggling; and the far-reaching influence of anti-mafia and counter-terror policies on counter-smuggling.

Widening the definition of ‘smuggling’

People fleeing wars, occupations or persecution often have no choice but to travel without documents or visas. Many must leave quickly and under dangerous circumstances, and in any case most countries of destination don’t make any practical legal routes available to them.

In recognition of these circumstances, refugees are protected from “penalties on account of their illegal entry or presence” by the 1951 Refugee Convention, which the UK and all EU countries are party to. But their protected status has, in recent years, been eroded by anti-immigration and counter-smuggling policies. What used to be considered ‘irregular’ movement for asylum has increasingly been redefined as ‘illegal’.

Many countries, for example, now target the people steering the boats carrying people on the move – people like Samyar Bani – regardless of whether they were involved further in ‘smuggling’ activities or not. Organisations and researchers have documented this practice in Greece, Italy, Spain, Indonesia, and, most recently, in the UK.

Soon after people started arriving in the UK in ‘small boats’ in greater numbers in late 2018, the Conservative government began to arrest, charge, and convict those identified as steering the dinghies. These arrests were accompanied by media briefings labelling the people arrested as ‘smugglers’ responsible for crossings.

Yet even those tasked with identifying the ‘smugglers’ questioned the logic. Border Force officers told inspectors, “there were no organised crime group members onboard the boats, although one of the migrants might have agreed with the facilitators to act as a ‘chaperone’ for a reduced fee.”

A series of successful appeals in 2021 overturned these early convictions. Lawyers argued that people intending to arrive at ports and claim asylum are not guilty of the offence of ‘illegal entry’, since they are simply arriving irregularly, and then entering as an ‘asylum seeker’.

The legislation effectively made all irregular arrival, even for the purposes of claiming asylum, a criminal offence in the UK

In response, the UK government used the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act to expand the criminal offences that can be applied against people crossing borders irregularly. This legislation introduced a new offence of ‘illegal arrival’ and increased the maximum sentence to four years imprisonment. For the crime of ‘facilitation’ – in other words, assisting arrival or ‘smuggling’ – the maximum sentence was increased to life in prison.

This legislation effectively made all irregular arrival, even for the purposes of claiming asylum, a criminal offence in the UK.

Across Europe, states are also working on expanding the definition of ‘smuggling’ to increase the number of prosecutions. Member states can currently charge people for offences relating to crossing borders, or for defending the rights of those crossing borders through the EU’s 2002 Facilitation Directive.

Just like in the UK, the directive has allowed states to prosecute people for steering boats even if no other evidence of ‘smuggling’ activities is presented. In 2021, a Greek court sentenced M. Hanad Abdi to 142 years in prison for “transporting” 33 people to the country. The decision was made despite Abdi having been forced “at gunpoint” to helm the boat, and despite him saving 31 of his co-passengers’ lives on the way.

His lawyers appealed the sentence, and it was reduced to eight years in 2023. Responding to the decision, Abdi’s lawyer, Alexandros Georgoulis wrote: “The law is completely obsolete. We now know that smugglers no longer approach the Greek coast to avoid arrest, and let the migrants guide the boats on their own.”

And yet, the European Commission is seeking to strengthen its powers even further through a new, expanded facilitation directive. This is despite migrants’ rights groups and the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders raising concerns about the implications this will have.

The new EU directive is likely to “dramatically increase” the criminalisation of migration and solidarity in Europe, according to migrants’ rights organisation PICUM. It will introduce longer prison sentences, broaden provisions for criminalising NGO workers, and continue to allow smuggling charges to be brought against people simply for crossing borders with their children.

Hundreds already serving sentences

As the UK and EU expand the legislation which allows them to criminalise those crossing borders or those standing in solidarity with them, hundreds are already caught in the web of the system.

According to PICUM, 117 people were subject to criminal proceedings for their solidarity work with people crossing borders in Europe, and 76 people were charged for crossing borders in 2023. Most of them faced charges of migrant smuggling or facilitation of entry, transit or stay, allowed under the 2002 EU directive. These numbers are most likely an undercount, since charges across the entire bloc are hard to track.

In the UK, 189 people were arrested for their ‘illegal arrival’ in dinghies in 2022, 109 of them for their role in steering the boats. In 2023, 244 people were charged for ‘illegal arrival’, 86 of whom were alleged to have steered the boat. The latest data obtained from the Home Office indicated that 38 people were charged with ‘illegal arrival’ for steering dinghies in the first six months of 2024.

Those branded as ‘smugglers’ are made convenient scapegoats for the real, unaddressed failures of UK and EU governments

The vast majority of these people were crossing borders to seek sanctuary and a better life. Some were victims of trafficking and torture. And at least 22 of those charged in the UK are age disputed, meaning that they were charged as an adult despite stating their age as under 18.

In courts across Europe and the UK, those arrested often explain how they drove the boats under duress, or because they could not otherwise afford the passage. Individuals – some of them teenagers like Ibrahima Bah or the El Hiblu 3 – explain how they were only seeking a place of safety.

Yet they have been declared ‘smugglers’ and labelled as solely responsible for any harms that occurred at sea. This placement of blame entirely obscures the structural responsibility of states who close alternative routes to safety while continuing to invest in border security infrastructure.

And Europe isn’t only criminalising people on its own shores. Years of policies to offshore its border control, for example to countries on the other side of the Mediterranean, have resulted in people being targeted for migrating or for solidarity work before they even reach European soil.

EU countries have handed billions to Turkey, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Mauritania and Morocco in deals to control and curb migration. Many of those deals hand funds to authoritarian regimes – and, in Libya’s case, facilitate human rights abuses on and off its shores.

Erosion of rights for everyone

Criminalisation policies cause immense harm to people. NGO workers are targeted for supporting people on the move and are forced to uproot their work and their lives. People migrating are forced to take even more dangerous routes to evade arrests, through deserts and in unseaworthy boats – and if they do make it to safety, they face spending years or decades in prison.

All the while, those branded as ‘smugglers’ are made convenient scapegoats for the real, unaddressed failures of UK and EU governments: soaring poverty and homelessness, declining public services, a rising cost of living and crises in the healthcare systems.

Experts have long called for safe routes to be made available to people seeking sanctuary. But governments seem intent to plough on with harmful criminalisation policies instead, all the while increasing the risks people are forced to take at borders.

Since being released from prison, Samyar Bani has been granted leave to remain in the UK. The scars of his experiences are far from healed: he still suffers flashbacks from his time in prison, is still struggling to get a job due to his criminal record, and has had his application to bring his wife and daughter to the UK rejected.

But he’s not giving up on building a life in safety. He’s working on his English so he can go back to work, and he’s appealing the decision on his family reunification application. “Humans need life,” said Bani at the end of our interview together. “My country wasn’t safe for me, so I came to the UK.”

He paused. “Police understand who a smuggler is, and they don’t sit in the boat. They just do this so they can close the border to refugees.”

Original article by Vicky Taylor Melissa Pawson republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

Continue ReadingCaught in the net: how migration became a criminal offence