Migrant influx shifts without slowing
THE migrants pouring into Europe have changed routes: the crossing between Turkey and Greece is almost closed, but ever greater numbers are risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean.
A criminal industry has flourished while the European Union has beefed up its border agency Frontex to try to check the mass migration. Frontex is at once both good cop and bad cop, rescuing migrants from sinking boats but also dropping them off at centres that send them back home.
Frontex head Fabrice Leggeri summed up the situation. On the shores of Greece 80 or 100 people now arrive every day, whereas there were 2 500 a day before the agreement with Turkey, he said.
Among those who arrive in Italy via the Mediterranean and Libya, whose numbers are up by over 40%, most are from west Africa – Senegal, Guinea and Nigeria. In 2016 they totalled 180 000.
They are mainly economic migrants and include many young men, but also families and young women. Nigerian women are often exploited as prostitutes in Europe.
“It’s not the poorest who leave, because they have to pay the smugglers,” said Leggeri. According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), of the over one million who made it to Europe in 2015, 850 000 crossed into Greece via the Aegean Sea. More than half came from Syria and the rest Afghanistan and Iraq.
Following a landmark EU-Turkey accord in March 2016, the total arriving in Europe by sea fell that year to around 363 000, IOM figures show. But as arrivals in Greece dropped, so did those from Africa grow.
By mid-April 2017, some 36 000 migrants had arrived in Italy since the beginning of the year – an increase of 43% over the same 2016 period, according to Frontex.
At the beginning of the most dangerous leg of the trip across the Sahara, migrants are transported by Tuareg or Tebu nomads, for whom it is a traditional commercial activity. The Mediterranean crossing, however, is run by criminal networks, big and small, as well as lone smugglers.
At the bottom of the ladder are petty crooks, sometimes migrants themselves, who become skippers of small, overloaded boats to pay for their own crossing.
Then there are the middlemen who collect the money and organise the trip but do not board. Their bosses are the network chiefs who “likely include people who previously worked in the police force” in Libya, Leggeri said. An estimate is not easy but according to a recent report by Europol, gangs smuggling migrants to or within Europe raked in billion to
billion in 2015. But those profits dropped by two billion euros last year.
The major traffickers use money earned smuggling migrants to undertake other criminal activities that require an initial investment, “be it drug trafficking, arms trafficking, or even terrorism financing – we can’t exclude it”, Leggeri said.
The funds are sometimes moved openly through Western Union, especially in west Africa. In east Africa, traffickers more often use hawala, an informal system of payment based on trust that is far more difficult to trace than bank transfers.
Leggeri has a message for any country with potential migrants to Europe: the paradise expected “is a lie”.
“Either you die in the Mediterranean, or you arrive in Europe under extremely deplorable conditions. And on top of that the EU is reinforcing a return policy, so migrants lose their savings to pay the smugglers and at the end of their journey there’s a plane that takes them back to their country of origin.” — AFP