Migrant Smuggling: A Social Business

Abstract

This chapter attempts to provide an overview of migrant smuggling across the Mediterranean both as a business that involves actors that are in it only for profit and as a social process, in other words an analysis of the social and cultural aspects of the phenomenon: for instance, the role of kinship and co-ethnic networks, the organization of the smuggling along racial or ethnic lines and the gendered nature of the experience. Since the journey is experienced in different ways by men and women, this last is an aspect worth exploring, even if women are overall under-represented in migrant smuggling across the Mediterranean. This chapter discusses critically the usefulness of the concept of transit migration, the dividing line between migrant smuggling and labourtrafficking and, last but not least, the ways in which policies at receiving countries shape the migrant-smuggling ‘business’ and the processes of irregular migration.