Migrant Smuggling from Africa to Spain, Italy and Malta: A Comparative Overview

Abstract

The migrant-smuggling routes from Africa to southern European countries are in the result of the wider development of trans-Saharan and trans-Mediterranean migration routes (de Haas, 2008). Since the late 1990s, North African countries (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) have witnessed an increase in migrants coming from Sub-Saharan countries, with the intention of either working in North Africa (in Libya in particular) or moving on to Europe. It was around 2000 when Sub-Saharan Africans joined people from the Maghreb in their efforts to cross illegally the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain or from Tunisia to Italy (Lampedusa, Pantelleria or Sicily) in fishing boats (Barros et al., 2002; Boubakri, 2004, 2006). This change in the patterns of migration from Sub-Saharan Africa was notable, as Sub Saharan Africans took over from North Africans as the largest group intercepted by European border guards in the first half of the 2000s (de Haas, 2006).