ORGANISATION, COOPERATION AND REDUCTION: A SOCIO-ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF ILLEGAL MARKET ACTORS FACILITATING IRREGULAR MIGRATION AT EU-INTERNAL TRANSIT POINTS

The facilitation of irregular migration by organised criminal groups [OCGs] at EU-internal transit points represents a specific illegal market type. This PhD thesis uses a mixed methodology approach to study this market with a focus on Italy, one of the main entry and transit countries for irregular migrants aiming to reach Central and Northern Europe, as well as the pulsating heart of intense EU-public and political debate around issues of mismanaged, undocumented immigration. While the debate has concentrated on the organised smuggling of irregular migrants via sea routes, less attention has been paid to EU-inland routes. What is known about the latter is mainly restricted to sporadic cases in which smuggling journeys have ended tragically. This has led to the rather uninformed and sensationalist notion that the market for human smuggling is monopolised by highly structured and sophisticated transnational OCGs. However, existing empirical evidence rather suggests OCGs to be weakly-tied and fragmented in structure. Considering that these OCGs operate on a highly uncertain market, which lacks in institutional control and formal contracts, it becomes not only interesting, but vital to understand how these OCGs nevertheless execute their business successfully. The purpose of this thesis is to shed light on the organisational structure of OCGs operating on this illegal market type, to elucidate how its decentralised structure influences the market’s operation, and to analyse relational mechanisms that induce cooperative rather than opportunistic behaviour by illegal market actors. In doing so, the specificities and parallels of this distinct illegal market actor are compared to human smuggling organisations operating at EU-external borders. On the basis of these results, novel market reduction measures are pointed out, which are context-tailored, as well as more generally applicable to countering human smuggling into and within the EU. The study aims to achieve its purpose through a context-specific socio-economic analysis of organised human smuggling at transit points internally to the EU by means of: (i) a critical review of the literature on EU-related human smuggling; (ii) a thematic analysis of secondary sources as well as expert interviews on EU-internal organised human smuggling, and finally, (iii) a social network analysis of a selected, large-scale human smuggling organisation in Northern Italy. Together, these three different analyses lead to significant conclusions. OCGs involved in EU-internal human smuggling exhibit a decentralised organsational structure, which includes at most a two-tier level, including resourceful smugglers at the top and precarious individuals at the bottom. These OCGs are constituted not only by foreign- but also largely by European actors. Common ethnicity appears to facilitate cooperation between smugglers, as well as the criminal experience of a few. Compared to increasingly structured OCGs operating at the borders of Europe, the EU-internal human smuggling market appears still less organised and less violent and/or life-threatening for migrants. The latter is exhibited by a shift from physical transport to the progressive use of fraudulent documents on the EU-internal human smuggling market, which however might indicate increased involvement of resourcesful smugglers. It is argued that such a highly resilient illegal market structure can only be countered through (i) the improved targeting of high-tier smugglers but more importantly, necessitates (ii) recruitment prevention strategies that target the marginalisation and socio-economic precarity of smugglers, which are measures that notably overlap with the aim to reduce the demand of irregular migrants for smuggling services in the first place.