Syrian Kurdish refugees walk to Turkey in 2014. EC-ECHO/Flickr (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd).
Politicians, border authorities, and journalists usually portray the smuggler as a cruel and reckless criminal driven exclusively by profit. Unsurprisingly, smugglers perceive themselves differently. I’ve spent much of the past year speaking with them as part of my work at the European University Institute, and in conversations they represented themselves as service providers who met a need that cannot be satisfied through legal channels. They showed clear awareness that they were part of a highly unstable and dangerous market, and they used that precarity to justify taking high fees from their clients. They did not perceive their activities as being immoral. Instead, they claimed to operate a moral economy by helping people to escape situations of misery or danger.
Remarkably, accounts of the callousness of smugglers are also often dismissed by migrants: those very people who risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean. The large majority of the migrants I spoke with were quite vocal in their criticism of the EU’s collective failure to honour its promises by taking in those arriving at Europe's borders.
