Archive Article: People Smuggling – A Case Study. 22 Nov 02.
December 27, 2008

The mass movement of peoples is going to be one of the most important problems for the 21st Century.

I was in Turkey last month for a meeting of The Club of Rome. I met Professor Nilufer Narh, a professor of international relations at Marmara University, Istanbul. She is the author the article “Transit Migration and Human Smuggling in Turkey” which appears in the current edition of the journal Insight Turkey.

Until the 1980s, Turkey was recognized as “sending” country in terms of people leaving Turkey to seek a better life elsewhere, such as the “guest workers” who do the menial work in Germany. But that status changed in the 1980s. First, the conflicts in the Middle East meant that people have fled intro Turkey to avoid the violence. Second, Turkey is a bridge between Europe and Asia and so it became a transit zone for people seeking to enter Europe.

In some years, more people have fled into Turkey than Australia has received in a whole decade. For example, 3 million Iranians fled the country after the conservative Islamic religious leaders came to power in 1979. Some of them were resettled overseas (including in Australia) but as many as half a million still reside in Turkey. Over 600,000 Iraqis fled into Turkey with the onset of the Iraq-Iran War. Then about 25,000 Bosnians fled into Turkey when the fighting began in the Balkans.

On top of the refugee crisis, there is also the problem of people smuggling. This is now big business around the globe, with over 50 per cent of illegal migrants now being assisted by smugglers. This is a highly profitable trade that poses a relatively low risk compared with the trades in drugs or guns. For example, unlike drug smuggling, the principal investors do not have to accompany the commodity (the smuggled people) physically across the border. The traders get paid up front, and not when the exercise is completed.

Professor Narh notes the failure in standard economic theory when it comes to explaining migration. According to the theory, the liberalization of international markets and investment should reduce migration. In other words, economic globalization should work so well that people will want to stay at home and make money at home. After all, their own countries should now have booming economies.

But the economists have got it wrong. She notes that in China a large proportion of the Chinese who are smuggled into the US are from Fujian Province, a coastal region with one of China’s fastest-growing regional economies. Smuggled Chinese are often from middle class families who can afford cash-down payments. In other words, economic development and rapidly advancing information technologies all raise the expectations of the new middle classes. Sure these people are doing well – but they now expect do even better in developed countries.

To conclude, economic globalization fosters both migration and transnational crime. These two aspects of globalization then come together in people smuggling. Professor Nahr sets out in some detail what is now known about people smuggling into Turkey and this is a fine overview of the situation.

The Turkish government is trying to stop this problem. But there are no easy solutions.

Broadcast On Friday 22nd November 2002 On Radio 2GB’s “Brian Wilshire Programme” At 9pm.