0000000000130359

AUTHOR

Eileen Quinn

Migrant Smuggling Across the Mediterranean: An Economic Analysis

In this chapter we provide an analysis of migrant smuggling across the Central Mediterranean Route. The analysis will be carried out through the lenses of economic analysis and of organized crime studies. Our work is based on in-depth interviews conducted with smuggled migrants, and immigration and anti-smuggling operators, with particular focus on land smuggling in West Africa, i.e. from Agadez in Niger into Libya. We will extrapolate the stylized facts of smuggling from the demand side for such ‘service’, i.e. from the migrants, and propose an economic interpretation. In particular our main findings are: i) the distinction between smuggling and trafficking is not clear-cut, as African mig…

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The market of migrant smuggling through Libya to Southern Italy since 2011: filling the knowledge gap as a human rights' strategy

The first formal distinction between human smuggling and trafficking in international law was made with the signing in December 2000 of the Palermo Protocols. These definitions have influenced and shaped most of the academic research, discourse, methodology and language on human smuggling and trafficking. In turn, an understanding of the formal definitions of these crimes is necessary to appreciate their influence on policies and therefore their effects on the individuals and institutions involved (Campana and Varese, 2015). The argument at the basis of this thesis is that academic research on especially migrant smuggling has often blindly adopted the above-mentioned definitions as a given-…

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