Smuggling vessel meaning professional#

But people forced to move are creative, resourceful and anything but stupid. Our politicians keep talking about “unscrupulous traffickers,” insinuating that migrants and refugees are passive victims. The problem is not the vessel, nor the person piloting it rather, it is why the market exists in the first place. If you destroy their delivery mechanism, they will simply find another, more fragile kind. This is what our leaders do not want to admit: that smugglers live off Europe’s closure of all legal routes into the continent. In Morocco, the better and faster boats were invariably provided by smugglers.

As those put in charge of the thankless task of closing the border know, destroying one type of vessel will immediately generate a market for another. I met migrants who had come across the Strait in “toy” boats of the kind used by children in pools – “any buoyant artefact, really,” as one hardened sea rescue chief told me. Around the Strait of Gibraltar I would see the gamut on offer on border guards’ picture galleries or in rescue workers’ storage rooms: inflatable boats, hydropedals, fibreglass vessels, even jetskis and paddles sculpted out of a single piece of wood. Senegal’s boats are themselves but one type of vessel in an ever-changing range used by migrants since the 1990s, when the European Union first started closing its common external borders. At least the European border agents at work in West Africa knew that destroying the thousands of small fishing boats there was nonsensical not only would they immediately be replaced with new ones, but the local economy – based on fishing – would take even further hits, increasing not diminishing the need to migrate.

Smuggling vessel meaning professional#

This was well understood by Senegal’s resourceful trip organisers – usually fishermen out of work rather than professional smugglers – at the time of Spain’s 2006 “boat crisis.” As Spanish border guards confiscated their Yamaha motors, new ones could always be found and as their long wooden fishing boats were wrecked in the 1,500-kilometre crossing to the Canaries, new ones were easily built.

For what is the point of taking out a few individuals or destroying their vessels – difficult as this will be in practice – if the demand driving their trade remains in place? Yet they are utterly failing to understand the nature of the smuggling business. In launching a full-frontal assault on smugglers and their boats, our leaders may politically succeed in shifting blame onto a reviled group. Stop the boats destroy them and attack the smugglers and so halt the refugees for their own good – this is now one of our politicians’ main messages, faced with the mass deaths resulting from their refusal to continue Italy’s sea rescue campaign of 2014. Looking back from our death-stricken present, I now see these migrant motors as souvenirs from a more innocent era in Europe’s futile “fight against illegal migration” – and as keys to understanding why the latest desperate bid to stop it is doomed to fail. It was springtime five years ago when my humanitarian host showed off row after row of gleaming red 40-horsepower Yamahas, confiscated from the large wooden fishing canoes that once brought willing workers from faraway West Africa to the Canary Islands. Migration loot lined the wall of the Red Cross hangar on Gran Canaria.

LONDON, 24 April 2015 (IRIN) - Anthropologist and author of 'Illegality, Inc.' Ruben Andersson of the London School of Economics explains why an EU plan to destroy migrant smugglers' boats is doomed to fail.