Smuggling migrants is a growing industry
Sophisticated networks that once moved illegal drugs now carry people, police say
BRUSSELS — Amid the biggest wave of migration to Europe in decades, fast-growing smuggling networks are spiriting Syrians and others to the continent, law enforcement officials say — and there are few limits to the sophistication of their efforts.
The 71 corpses discovered in a truck on an Austrian roadside last week are only a grim glimpse of a fast- expanding wave of human smuggling seizing Europe, said officials who are charged with hunting the smugglers.
Vans that once may have been used to smuggle cigarettes are being used for the much more fragile cargo of humans. On social networks and in person, migrants can pick from a menu of services, ranging from a slippery seat on a rubber dinghy to Greece all the way to a chartered business jet straight to the refugee haven of Sweden.
The long trek across the western Balkans has taken fresh prominence in recent months after years in which Syrians and Iraqis fleeing war favoured a perilous sea route from Libya. Now thousands of migrants set out every day to make the long journey from refugee camps neighbouring Syria to the Western European nations that have offered them safe harbour. They do so hand-in-hand with smugglers, who often advertise their services openly on Facebook and other social media sites.
“There is a growing number of networks that we saw in the past were dealing in the trafficking of illegal drugs and are now shifting to people smuggling,” said Robert Crepinko, the head of the organized crime unit at Europol, the European Union’s policing arm. “The number of criminal activities is growing with the same speed as the number of illegal migrants.”
The criminal boom has been so rapid that Europol’s new online monitoring unit, which on July 1 began monitoring terrorist-related social media activity, has recently expanded to monitor smuggling, Crepinko said.
National law enforcement authorities have struggled to keep up with the influx of migrants, as old criminal rings move into new areas of business.
“As a global criminal enterprise, it is very lucrative,” said Patrik Engstrom, head of the Swedish police’s national border policing section. He has monitored human smuggling and trafficking for years, and saw it take on new life in Europe since early 2014.
Sweden, along with Germany, has become Europe’s top destination for asylum-seekers after the government announced that Syrian refugees would be granted permanent residency and the right to resettle their entire families within the country’s peaceful borders. Engstrom said his agency has uncovered schemes to get to Sweden that are as basic as an RV over a bridge and as complicated as a chartered plane that lifted off from Turkey, charging the Syrian passengers about $10,000 US each for the privilege. When they landed, they claimed asylum, he said.
The wide range of methods reflects the diverse circumstances from which the asylum-seekers are coming. Syria’s conflict, well into its fifth year, has upended the lives of many middle- class families with deep wells of savings. Many of them might have stayed close to Syria for years, hoping to return home before giving up and turning toward Europe.
Asylum- seekers have powerful motivations to make it to wealthy nations such as Germany and Sweden without being detected along the way. If authorities in other EU countries detain them, they can be forced to apply for asylum under far less welcoming circumstances.
Hungary has strung up a razor-wire fence along its frontier with Serbia, and Hungarian leaders this week barred their onward journey to Austria. Germany, meanwhile, expects to take up to 800,000 asylumseekers this year. Critics say that type of patchwork enforcement only fuels the demand for smugglers.
“As it becomes more difficult to move in Europe, the cost for the migrants and the need for smugglers will go up,” said Tuesday Reitano, head of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.
There is a service for every price point, ranging in the hundreds of dollars for a choppy below-deck voyage across the Mediterranean to thousands of dollars for longer, more complex journeys, law enforcement officials said.
In the smartphone era, many of the smuggling services are available on Arabic-language Facebook and other social media sites.
Migrants also communicate with one another along the journey using messaging tools such as WhatsApp to warn about where police coverage is heaviest.
“The Syrians are managing their trips in a much more savvy way than any other group that we’ve seen in the history of migration, that I’m aware of,” Reitano said.