HUMAN SMUGGLING

Human Smuggling

Human Smuggling

Introduction

International migration is a fact of life for liberal states as people leave, enter or pass through them, but migratory phenomena in their many and various forms possess the potential to make a relatively sudden impact on public consciousness and to ascend swiftly the political agenda, as has been the case in Britain with asylum, people smuggling and human trafficking. This is because international migration and its analysis are necessarily about borders. They are about the relationships between forms of population mobility and their encounter with the territorial, organisational and conceptual borders of states. Territorial borders are those sites at which the sovereign capacity to include or exclude from the state territory are exercised. Organisational borders are those of institutions such as the labour market, welfare state and citizenship. Conceptual borders comprise more nebulous but no less important ideas about who 'belongs' and the basis for belonging to some given political community. These borders give meaning to international migration

Human Smuggling

Human smuggling is the facilitation, transportation, attempted transportation or illegal entry of a person(s) across an international border, in violation of one or more countries laws, either clandestinely or through deception, such as the use of fraudulent documents. Often, human smuggling is conducted in order to obtain a financial or other material benefit for the smuggler, although financial gain or material benefit are not necessarily elements of the crime. For instance, sometimes people engage in smuggling to reunite their families. Human smuggling is generally with the consent of the person(s) being smuggled, who often pay large sums of money. The vast majority of people who are assisted in illegally entering the United States are smuggled, rather than trafficked.

Smuggled persons may become victims of other crimes. In addition to being subjected to unsafe conditions on the smuggling journeys, smuggled aliens may be subjected to physical and sexual violence. Frequently, at the end of the journey, smuggled aliens are held hostage until their debt is paid off by family members or others. It is also possible that a person being smuggled may at any point become a trafficking victim.

The Immigration and Nationalization Act, Section 274(a) (1), (2), provides for criminal penalties under Title 8, United States Code, Section 1324, for acts or attempts to bring unauthorized aliens to or into the United States, transport them within the U.S., harbor unlawful aliens, encourage entry of illegal aliens, or conspire to commit these violations, knowingly or in reckless disregard of illegal status.

Discussion

Terms and Concepts

Irregular migration flows have been described by G8 leaders as the 'dark side' of globalisation or, alternatively, as 'Europe's other market' (Twomey 2000, 7). This was once more demonstrated to tragic effect in the UK in February 2004 when the bodies of 23 Chinese workers were discovered in Morecambe Bay in north-west England. Apparently most had been smuggled into the UK by Chinese 'snakehead' gangs and had then found work as cockle-pickers, an economic activity where labour market regulation was lax to ...