Out of West Africa: Human Smuggling as a Social Enterprise

Background, Methods, and Theoretical Contributions

Since the end of the twentieth century, a wide range of scholars and policy-makers have defined human smuggling in different ways. ⁵ Some have articulated smuggling as part of a global “migration business” or “industry” (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2013; Hernández-León 2005; Salt and Stein 1997; Zhang 2007). Echoing the language of commerce, some have defined smugglers as “migration merchants” who attempt to profit “legally or illegally, from the commodification of the international migration process” (Kyle 2000, 67). The business of smuggling has frequently been articulated as hierarchical and organized (Kyle and Koslowski 2001; Salt and Stein 1997; Schloenhardt 2003). Policy-makers and media outlets continue to frame smuggling operations as fundamentally exploitative and criminal (Europol 2016), even though empirical research suggests that migration facilitation is based, to some degree, on relations of trust and reciprocity (Kyle and Liang 2001). Others have argued that focusing too heavily on the business model of smuggling ignores the internal social dynamics within family and community networks that participate in the movement of people across borders (Herman 2006). Moreover, some suggest that defining the human smuggler as distinct from the migrant may be inaccurate, as “many ‘smugglers’ are in fact migrants who facilitate illegal travel” (Baird and van Liempt 2016, 402; see also Ahmad 2011; Lucht 2012). Though the human smuggler in media and policy discourses often calls on tropes of the unscrupulous criminal (Pastore, Monzini, and Sciortino 2006), many of my participants saw their handlers as people with the connections and expertise to help them access a sure path out of Senegal. As Ilse van Liempt argues, “Migrants may have fewer stigmas attached to the smuggling business and more positive views on smugglers than the media and policy-makers” (van Liempt 2007, 128). ⁶

I use the word handler to refer to a broad category of actors whose identities often overlapped. These include recruiters, intermediaries, middlemen, boat captains, boat crew, and, at times, boat owners. I translate the word passeur as handler instead of smuggler for several reasons. First, smuggler carries strong overtones of impersonal organized crime, a feature I did not find in migrants’ accounts. Instead, journeys were frequently negotiated within close-knit communities among people who already knew each other. Most migrants were familiar with their handlers and were more likely to call them sama guy (my friend) rather than criminal. Also, the young men I met would not see themselves as smuggled, which implies victimhood. Rather, they saw themselves as actively staking claims to reciprocity and obligation from people they knew to access passage out of Senegal.

Additionally, migration intermediaries in West Africa in the mid-2000s did in fact “handle” everything from the purchasing of essential provisions to arranging transport to protecting passengers while at sea. Frequently, such preparations and protections were described as part of a moral obligation to ensure safe arrival. Using handler thus disrupts the popular “one-dimensional portraits of human behaviour [as] dictated by narrow agendas of economic utility” (Ahmad 2011, 7). Perhaps more importantly, uncritically adopting the legalistic definition of human smuggler risks reifying the socio-legal system that produced it, and the people within its definitional scope, without interrogating its inherent assumptions. As Theodore Baird has argued, “The growth of the category of human smuggling [is] a device of social control of undesirable populations and extra-state markets” (Baird 2016, 6–7). Using the trope of smuggler is thus neither neutral nor apolitical. Central to the goal of this article, then, is to disrupt such stereotypes and offer a nuanced picture of migration facilitation.

This article is based on an ethnographic study of the social and political lives of forcibly returned migrants in Senegal who attempted to reach the Canary Islands via pirogue between 2006 and 2008 but were repatriated by the state. Fieldwork was conducted over 18 months between 2011 and 2014 in multiple sites across Senegal, which yielded interviews with 170 repatriated migrants, as well as their families, marabouts (spiritual guides), and community members. Principal respondents were located through snowball sampling, and initial interviews typically consisted of collecting basic demographic data, such as age, marital status, family size, migration attempts and costs, and dates of deportation. Follow-up interviews were semistructured or unstructured and, in several cases, entailed multiple meetings over the course of many months. Focus groups were conducted with larger groups, with later follow-up interviews taking place with particular individuals. I also interviewed twenty state officials, local activists, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers operating in the domain of migration management in Senegal. It is important to note that of the 170 repatriated migrants I interviewed, 87 percent reported personally knowing their handler before 2006 when the exodus began. The remaining 13 percent accessed their handlers through other intermediaries such as friends or relatives.

Using this ethnographic data, and drawing on the economic anthropology of Jane Guyer (2004), this article proposes using a theoretical model based on economies of proximity rather than business or social network models to describe the relationship between migrants and their handlers. For one, commercial models are fundamentally Eurocentric and do not account for how exchange, risk, and speculation may work in other cultural contexts. In other words, such approaches do not always account for how “the economic weaves together social relations” (Mbow 2008, 17). In the words of Ibrahima, who attempted passage in 2006, “Money buys more than rice.” ⁷ It creates and sustains social worlds of reciprocity and obligation. Seeing migration facilitation as primarily an economic, or business, enterprise privileges profit as the prime motivator of smuggling and thus ignores the possibility that social relations could be embedded within economies of proximity.

Additionally, social network models often do not adequately accommodate actors outside the family unit. Using a social proximity approach underlines how the value of a handler is contingent, manifold, and flexible. Modern liberal notions of value, or what Guyer calls “progressive monetary reductionism” (2004, 171), see quantitative value as a linear progression beginning at zero and numerically increasing to infinity. And yet, as Georg Simmel elaborated in The Philosophy of Money (1978/2011), “Value is never a ‘quality’ of the objects, but a judgment upon them which remains inherent in the subject” (p. 65). Thus, migrants and handlers actively and dialectically generate value through their interactions. Understanding how value is negotiated, both in terms of pricing and protection, reveals how migration facilitation is not always a simple predatory or even purely monetary transaction but is embedded in socio-spatial economies. Such economies are not without tension and conflict; nor are they purely based on ideal and normative notions of solidarity. Rather, they are the modality through which particular claims are lodged and subsequently negotiated depending on degrees of proximity. As the following will reveal, most prices, either for boat fare or other assistance, were negotiated, sometimes uneasily. Handler fees and services were often evaluated based on spatial, proportional, and relational scales rather than strictly tied to standardized indices of equivalence. In other words, a migrant may ask a handler for something he technically cannot “afford”; but because the handler is his cousin’s wife’s brother, or because they grew up in the same village, the migrant may make a claim based on their social proximity to one another. As one migrant, Mas, explains below, he was able to negotiate a reduced fare because he and his handler followed the same religious fraternity. Such a scenario challenges the idea that “smuggler networks” are hierarchically organized criminal consortiums based on profit-seeking business models.

This article begins with an examination of migrant-handler relations through the lens of waxhaalé. In Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal, waxhaalé means to bargain or negotiate. Most prices, either for boat fare or other assistance, such as transportation to the departure point or accommodations prior to setting out, were negotiated rather than fixed. I argue that this flexibility in price reflects a larger convertibility of value in West Africa and maps onto speculations of investment and return that surround the unpredictable nature of life. While the notion of bargaining has long been studied by sociologists, economists, and political scientists as a game of competition and self-interest (Brams 2003; Bacharach and Lawler 1981; Nash 1950), it has been less explored in relation to migration facilitation. This article redirects our attention to the ways that bargaining and negotiation are inherent to clandestine migration out of West Africa. Using waxhaalé as an analytical lens to examine notions of value highlights how relations and negotiations between handlers and migrants are not always structured by exploitation and coercion, but are also shaped by notions of social proximity. The spheres of exchange that govern handler prices and services are spatial, proportional, and relational rather than strictly tied to notions of equivalence. As such smuggling itself calls on relationships that are, frequently, already in place, or are part of larger social, ethical, and religious constellations, which is at least one reason why many of my participants referred to their handlers as friends or kin.

Although migration facilitation from Africa to Europe is widely regarded as a criminal enterprise populated by a host of unscrupulous human smugglers whose disregard for the people they are presumably hired to help is surpassed only by their appetite for quick profits, the handlers and boat captains who I interviewed in Senegal considered it a moral and religious duty to ensure that their passengers arrived sain et sauf (safe and sound). Rather than being hardened criminals, handlers are often bound by moral and ethical norms to protect the people in their charge. The second section of this article explores precisely the ways in which handlers conceived of and ensured protection during transit across the Atlantic.

Far from being the neutral result of simple misinformation or overly dramatic journalistic fervor, discourses on the criminality of human smugglers produce a particular view of “irregular” migration and legitimize increasingly militarized border enforcement strategies. Ironically, such strategies and interventions only make migration more difficult and thus the need for facilitators more acute (Maher 2017). The case of Senegal is exemplary. With the implementation of Frontex-led joint patrols off the Senegalese coast in 2005 and 2006, Atlantic migration routes were effectively crippled, leading migrants to redirect their journeys across the Sahara to departure points in North Africa. ⁸ Such trajectories are not only longer, more expensive, and more dangerous, they are also more socially remote. Language barriers, foreign territories, and unfamiliar cultural hierarchies all further necessitate the need for migration facilitation. In this way, European border securitization has effectively rendered African borders more insecure to cross (Lemberg-Pedersen 2017). As the final section of this article reveals, military operations in the mid-2000s both reshaped clandestine migration across the Atlantic and inspired new patterns of migration across the Mediterranean that we see today.

Negotiated Beginnings

The journey begins with a price—a price that is not fixed, but is subject to debate and concession. Migrants frequently used the verb waxhaalé to describe the process of deciding on a fare. To waxhaalé is to bargain—a performance that governs nearly every sphere of exchange in Senegal. Most goods and services are subject to waxhaalé: taxi fares, food, textiles, bride wealth, land. Waxhaalé informs and reflects the sociality of consumption and exchange. Unlike Western notions of pricing that are linked to regulated or standardized indices of valuation, in Senegal value depends on, and is measured by, social proximity and distance. Such proximities and distances are displayed and performed through waxhaalé.

Jane Guyer has argued that in contrast to the West, where markets are presumably disciplined by state institutions such as federal reserves and exchange commissions, in West Africa, exchange has historically been mediated through “popular conventions rather than formal regulation” (Guyer 2004, 4). For Guyer, value in West Africa is ordered not by a fixed currency but instead by relational indices and performative transactions that allow people to respond flexibly to persistent volatility. When economies are formally regulated, the cost of a good or service is pegged to a currency; when economies are based on relational transactions, the cost of a good or service depends on who is asking (e.g., where they come from, who they know, where their family lives). A price is the result of calculative flexibilities, which require both the consumer and producer to be fluent in “orders of magnitude [and] possible thresholds of relative value” (Guyer 2004, 92). If value is not monetized in any strictly formal way, it becomes open to flexibility. Such flexibilities weigh consumer goods and services based not on currency and labor power, but on spatial and relational spheres. Being able to improvise in response to unpredictable situations calls on shared logics that govern exchange in volatile circumstances. As such, bargaining is social labor because it relies on a consensus of value and thus brings the volatile market, where prices fluctuate too wildly for people to control, into the domestic realm.

Because value in transactions of goods and services is spatially and relationally determined in West Africa, it should not be surprising that prices for boat passage fluctuate. Even within the same vessel, there were differences in what passengers were charged. Handlers and boat owners quickly and efficiently sized up candidates, depreciating costs for friends and charging more from those who seemed to possess the means and less from those who did not. For migrants, knowing someone was crucial. Khadim, a migrant from 2006, described how his failed first attempt bought him the sympathy of a boat captain who let him try a second time for free. “When the handler knows you, he has sympathy for you. He can trust you, so he will give you another chance,” he said.

If a migrant knew the handler, he could petition for a reduced fare. Migrants could, and often did, try to claim social proximity by referring to common origins, distant relations, or religious fraternity. Making successful waxhaalé meant summoning all the connections at one’s disposal no matter how remote. Some described how they were able to negotiate lower fares because their handlers were from the same or neighboring villages. Others described how their handlers were distantly related, often by several degrees of separation. When no direct connection to a handler could be found, an intermediary was used. Mas explained his consultations this way:

I asked my friend how much the fare was and he told me I needed at least one million CFA [$2,000]. But we both follow the same marabout [spiritual guide], so I said, “That’s too much! He is my brother [belonging to the same Sufi brotherhood], and so there is solidarity between us. … Afterwards, he said, “If you have 500,000CFA [$1,000], I could negotiate for you with the handler.” I told him okay. And later, he arranged everything.

In some cases, migrants were able to address the boat owner directly, though this was less common. Typically, arrangements were negotiated through a handler or other intermediary. In this case, Mas made waxhaalé with his “spiritual brother,” a middleman who had a personal connection to the handler. This linked Mas to the handler through a kind of “social vouching.”

In Senegal, as in much of West Africa, strangers—people who cannot be linked to a particular community—are potentially dangerous. Without friends or family members, strangers float outside the normal order of things; they are fundamentally asocial because they occupy no space in the relational cosmology. Social vouching fixes the problem of strangeness by locating a person in a moral universe that binds them together with others, thus providing a value-indexed social proximity and its concomitant benefits. As Guyer makes clear, vouching stabilizes a potentially unpredictable social field by calling on “particular logics already in place and shared at the cognitive level” (Guyer 2004, 114). In this way, some migrants managed the “turbulence” of not personally knowing their handlers by using other intermediaries and facilitators as bridges or social connectors across thresholds of remoteness.

Knowing what a voyage is worth is of critical importance in a world where the price is not set in stone but instead shifts across a spectrum of value. As Guyer observes with respect to volatile West African markets, where fakes, authentic fakes, counterfeits, and originals are pegged to various gradients of quality, “Access to a helper who can provide sound advice … is a valuable resource” (Guyer 2004, 92). What is important to note is that even if these “helpers” were friends, they still attempted to make a small profit from their connections. For Iran, his helper could not be blamed for trying to seize an opportunity. “Like me,” he said, “my friend was struggling to get by.”

He told me there was a boat leaving for Spain. I asked how much, and he said 500,000CFA. I told him, “I don’t have 500,000CFA. I have only 300,000CFA.” Because he was attaching himself to me, you see? He is my friend, but he wanted to earn something [from the transaction]. … Still I only proposed 300,000CFA, and he said, “Okay.”

As Iran recounted the interaction to me, I was left with the distinct feeling that the negotiations were in themselves valuable as performances. Echoing Simmel above, Michael Ralph argues that value is not merely inhered in objects but can “assume the shape of a public performance” (Ralph 2008, 17). If Iran’s performative waxahaalé was good enough, this helper could bridge the gap between Iran and the boat owner. As such, Iran’s degree of social proximity, and his understanding of how local spheres of exchange operated, were key to his access.

In addition, notions of friendship neither prohibit nor exist outside spheres of economic exchange. It was understandable, even expected, that Iran’s friend would attempt to turn a profit from a chance encounter. Most migrants described the negotiation process as one that required caution, even if the people guiding and mediating on their behalf were trusted allies. “Everyone must make an effort in life,” Iran explained. “But it’s God who sets the price.” For Iran, bargaining for pirogue fare was part and parcel of the larger struggle of life whose architecture was divinely ordered. As other scholars have pointed out, people can and often do interpret empirical evidence through religious idioms, whereby God is seen as a “primary actor” in the unfolding of events (Heiß 2003). To make his case for entry into a pirogue was, for Iran, not to usurp this divine ordering, but to work within in it. The recognition that ultimately the final price was not up to him endowed Iran with spiritual maturity. Waxhaalé was thus nested in a broader constellation of social forces, wherein travel, piety, and adulthood were consubstantial. Waxhaalé not only signified the variability of value, it was also a performance of pious labor.

A paid fare did not necessarily mean an expedited departure. For many migrants, waiting was inherent in the act of transit (Brigden and Mainwaring 2016; Hagen-Zanker and Mallett 2016, 19–21; Vogt 2016). No longer at home but not yet at sea, migrants were frequently housed in remote villages while awaiting departure. Domestic compounds in rural villages were transformed into warehouses where as many as “ninety clandestine candidates waited in one room,” Youssoupha said. Other times, groups were partitioned off to various compounds, suggesting that organizing clandestine journeys was something of a village undertaking in some cases. The longer it took to amass enough passengers, the lower the price fell. Frequently, boats only left when all the “seats” had been filled, which could sometimes take weeks.

Other passengers, such as captains and crew, were not required to pay at all. Moustapha, a captain from 2006, explained that normally he would be compensated for conducting a pirogue to the Canary Islands. Instead, he declined payment and brought his brothers as crewmates to help him because, as he said, “The journey is long, and no one knows what can happen in the ocean. I needed them to maintain the security.” As a longtime fisherman, Moustapha understood that the journey could present serious challenges.

Protective Transits

In contrast to depictions of smugglers who routinely abuse and abandon their passengers, the handlers and captains I met were committed to protecting people from the vagaries of passage. Many of them linked their professional obligations as handlers to their religious obligations as Muslims to ensure that passengers arrived sain et sauf (safe and sound) (Hagan 2011; Sarat 2013). If the condition of the boat was sound and the weather remained calm, the journey would take roughly eight days. According to Abdoulaye, a boat captain in 2006, it was exactly 1,647 kilometers from Kayar, in Senegal, to Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. “Good boats” were the ones where the captain had purchased plenty of rice, cooking oil, and bottled water. Many also brought vitamins and medication for those too seasick to eat.

Like other captains I met, Abdoulaye undertook several additional protective measures before departing. He consulted with his marabout who gave him special ablutions to use on the day of departure, several prayers to recite before stepping in the boat, and gris-gris (protective amulets) to wear during the journey. As Abdoulaye described it, these devices would ultimately protect both him and the passengers under his watch. Because his relationship with his marabout was one of spiritual education and enlightenment it was also necessarily centered on managing risk and insecurity. As he described it, though the journey was indeed dangerous, not going to see his spiritual elder beforehand would have been unthinkable, and could have provoked risks “worse than any ocean,” he said.

Like Abdoulaye, other captains and handlers used their own money to protect their boats before setting out. Ouseynou, a captain in 2007, described how his marabout recommended killing a sheep and donating the meat to the poor families in his village. “This protects your journey and your passengers because God will see that you have sacrificed something of yourself. Yes, 100 lives may be worth more than a single sheep, but God makes calculations you cannot understand. The point is to bring your soul close to Him. That way he will recognize you.” As Simmel argues, value is a judgment that “we experience [as] a sentiment … [which] demands recognition” (Simmel 1978/2011, 70–71). Reflecting the notion that value is not necessarily tied to standard equivalence, Ouseynou’s comment reveals how one’s social proximity to God determines what the sheep is “worth.”

Several of the handlers I met also traveled to Mauritania to purchase the correct “programs” to input into their GPS devices, which would then guide their pirogues on a sure path to the Canaries. That migration facilitators invested their own time and resources into such preparations counteracts the image of “human smugglers” as nefarious criminals, and underscores the degree to which facilitators felt responsible for the lives on board. For Abdoulaye, it was “no small thing to be charged with ensuring the safe arrival of roughly 100 souls across a dangerous ocean.”

In an effort to avoid crossing paths with maritime patrols, the grande pirogue would frequently wait offshore, while smaller pirogues would go back and forth, hauling goods and loading passengers in groups. The threat of exposure was always present, whether by local police or border control vessels patrolling offshore. Another captain, Mamadou, recounted his departure in 2006 this way:

I left Mbour around 4 PM and took the pirogue to Kayar. When I arrived, I told the boat owner that I wouldn’t wait around given the fact that the patrols were everywhere. I could see their boats morning and night going back and forth along the coast hoping to catch migrants. So I told the owner we needed to leave no later than 2 AM because otherwise it wasn’t safe; otherwise, I would leave and go back home if it got too late. So, we started loading the bags around 8PM until midnight. And then we loaded the passengers until 1 AM, and cast off at 2 in the morning.

Even experienced boat captains knew that unexpected circumstances could arise. Maritime patrols could catch them before they even embarked on their trip. Storms could come out of nowhere and immobilize the pirogue at best or sink it at worst. People could “lose their head” and create destabilizing disturbances on the boat. Abdoulaye’s pirogue was incapacitated for two days during a violent squall. Being a man of the sea, Abdoulaye knew how to read the ocean itself as a fluid landscape of risk. His fluency in managing this risk required positioning the pirogue to avoid oncoming waves while not exhausting the limited fuel supplies.

Many captains quickly realized that their passengers were ultimately ignorant of what it would mean to sit in a boat for seven to eight days. Moustapha described how it was his job to teach the passengers how to behave while aboard the pirogue.

We are fishermen. We’ve been out there [at sea] for a long time. We figure things out as we go because we’re habituated to it. For example, if we need to use the bathroom, we know what to do. But for many clandestins, they had no sense. Some would sit there in their own filth and then fights would break out with their neighbors. We had to give them a bucket and show them how to empty it when they were done.

Directing the passengers in proper comportment, Moustapha and his crewmates were ultimately able to keep the peace. Moustapha delegated different social tasks on board, such as bailing water, cooking, and looking after sick passengers. “I made sure the passengers participated in the functioning of the pirogue. That way, they would cooperate and we could arrive safely,” he said. Meals were taken together, in classic Senegalese style, with groups of people kneeling around stainless-steel bowls of cooked rice. The image of communal meals and “teams,” each performing their tasks, paints a portrait of transit that was, at least in part, a convivial experience.

At the same time, arguments among the passengers would often break out, and handlers and captains had to step in to quell the fighting. “There were nights when no one slept because of all the quarrels,” Abdoulaye said. He described how the canvas tent that his crew had constructed for cooking during inclement weather became a zone of contention as people jostled and shoved each other for shelter during the cold nights. Other times, people simply “lost their head” after several days at sea.

Sometimes we had to tie them up because you had to protect them. Listen, the ocean is deep. Géeg, dafa dé war [The ocean is mystical]. As fishermen, we understand that there are things in the water, things like djinns who try to trick you. In my boat, people would scream at night because they had visions. Sometimes, people would go crazy and try to jump overboard. Me, on my boat? I couldn’t afford to have anyone drown in the ocean. A death like that would follow me to my own grave.

Other captains reported the same circumstances. As Djibril recounted to me, “Sometimes restraining passengers was the only way to make sure they wouldn’t disturb the boat.” Such disturbances could be lethal, as vessels filled with people could easily capsize.

As a fisherman who had spent his life in a boat, Abdoulaye had more personal knowledge of the vagaries of the sea than many of his passengers. He knew the journey would be long and dangerous. Conducting a pirogue across the open Atlantic would not be easy no matter what the circumstances. But with so many souls aboard, it would be an especially serious, and potentially grave, challenge. As Abdoulaye said, “We were like brothers because we all had the same goal in mind: to arrive safely in Spain. ⁹ I had to make sure we arrived safely. I was the captain, and if anything happened to the pirogue I would have suffered the consequences [in the afterlife].” Being the captain meant that Abdoulaye was responsible for the passengers arriving unharmed, so much so that his own existential fate was hanging in the balance. Safe arrival was thus both a spiritual and a practical imperative.

Uneasy Futures

In 2006, media coverage of clandestine migration to Europe exploded in the press and filled the pages of the BBC, The New York Times, and The Guardian. Images of overcrowded pirogues descending on Spanish shores were frequently accompanied by descriptive metaphors, such as a “wave” or “flood,” which suggested that Europe was indeed being “invaded” by African migrants. Such media representations effectively summoned an atmosphere of panic (Andersson 2015b), and a consequent call to immediate action on the part of European nations (Erjavec 2003; Horsti 2012; Maher 2015). ¹⁰

The European Union and individual Member States swiftly adopted and expanded several strategic responses. One of these responses was border management. Beginning with Operation Hera in 2005, Frontex, the external border management arm of the European Union, began coordinating operations with African states to expand maritime patrols and surveillance systems in the Mediterranean and off the Senegalese coast. Such operations played a major role in crippling clandestine naval routes to Europe by stopping journeys before they began in Senegal and by policing the North African coast. ¹¹ Like Frontex, Spain’s Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia Exterior (SIVE) was another effective border control mechanism. By positioning highly sophisticated infrared technologies off the Spanish coast, boats were detected and intercepted earlier and thus fewer pirogues were able to make it to European shores (Carling 2007). ¹²

A second strategy focused on developmental diplomacy. Bilateral and multilateral partnership agreements with African states such as Senegal, Mauritania, and Morocco required African nations to police European borders from the other side of the Mediterranean in exchange for foreign aid. Such a policy transfer dynamic has been described as “border externalization” by some scholars (Lavenex 2006). The 2007 Country Strategy Paper (CSP) and National Indicative Programme (NIP) signed by the EU and Senegal are cases in point. Citing the “unprecedented wave of clandestine emigration coming from Senegal [which] descended on the Canary Islands” in 2006 (Senegal-European Commission 2008, Part I, 19), the NIP provided significant “financial instruments” for, among other things, the control of clandestine migration (Senegal-European Commission 2008, Part II, 2). ¹³

The mobilization of both Frontex and SIVE contributed to a significant drop in irregular migration from West Africa. Whereas approximately forty thousand migrants arrived in 2006, a little more than two thousand arrived in 2009. While significant, these numbers obscure how clandestine migration has not disappeared, but has shifted in response to the militarization of border controls in the Atlantic. The dismantling of the trans-Atlantic route meant that clandestine journeys out of Senegal would necessitate travel over the Sahara Desert and embarking from points along the North African coast. Consequently, migration from Africa to Europe is becoming longer, more fragmented, and more dangerous (Collyer 2007). Past routes that took weeks now sometimes extend to months or years, with migrants spending significant periods in one of the several “transit nodes” trying to earn money for the next leg of the journey (Gnisci and Trémolières 2006, 9). Intended to reduce clandestine migration, militarized controls instead often make such travel riskier and more protracted.

One consequence of this increased militarization is that migrants and handlers are sometimes several degrees removed in social proximity, which can lead to increased risk. As Moustapha put it, “It used to be that we put everyone in a boat. Passengers were with us from start to finish. Now there are so many other handlers involved. It can become dangerous.” As travelers move across the Sahara, handlers with high degrees of social proximity are less involved in getting people to their final destination. Instead, handlers may transfer their passengers to a colleague at the next point of transit, usually at a border, or simply leave migrants to negotiate the next leg on their own. As such, the “chain of trust” degrades (van Liempt 2007, 171). Whereas friends may have helped to organize journeys off the coast of Senegal in 2006, today migrants may “experience more exploitation … as they are less able to rely on personal networks” (Baird and van Liempt 2016, 407). That said, Senegalese migrants continue to call on social and religious communities in North Africa to access passage through dangerous spaces. Moustapha explained, “There are Senegalese in Morocco, in Libya, all along the route. Though it’s not easy, they will help if you send someone to them.”

Not only are journeys longer and more insecure, the cost of smuggling services or other migrant assistance has also increased as a response to the escalating risk. According to my respondents, passage to the Canary Islands in 2006 cost between $400 and $800; today Senegalese migrants must pay from $300 to $1,000 to get to Libya and then an additional $300 to $2,000 to cross the Mediterranean (Darme and Benattia 2017; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] 2013, 57). These small fortunes are often earned incrementally en route or allocated by family members back home. With greater kin investments, family debt escalates and migrants become less likely to turn back (Collyer 2007).

Rather than stopping migration facilitation, patrols and surveillance systems have simply redirected it. “With Frontex, migration just moves elsewhere,” Moustapha said. The result is a cycle in which border controls, meant to inhibit migration, provoke it (Bensaâd 2005, 19; Castles 2004). Moreover, as borders become harder to cross, migrants and refugees must increasingly rely on handlers and facilitators for assistance. In 2006, Europol reported that 80 percent of irregular migration from Africa to Europe was facilitated. A decade later, that number has increased to 90 percent (Europol 2016, 13). Such figures are often mobilized to license military campaigns that seek to combat human smuggling while ignoring the extent to which border controls have created the necessary conditions for the rise in facilitation practices. As scholars have routinely pointed out, the rise of border militarization only increases the need for smugglers’ services. “For would-be migrants, what used to be a relatively low-cost, informal affair … now requires greater risks and resources and is less likely to be attempted without some type of professional smuggler” (Kyle and Dale 2001, 30). David Kyle and Zai Liang argue that “human smuggling … is a trade positively correlated with greater border controls” (Kyle and Liang 2001, 3). And according to Hein de Haas, “There’s no point in blaming the smugglers, when in fact the border restrictions have created this phenomenon in the first place” (Osman and Pinault 2016).

Another consequence of border militarization is that migration across the Mediterranean has become more dangerous than ever. As a way to evade detection, Libyan facilitators increasingly employ smaller inflatable rafts, as opposed to larger wooden vessels, placing more people at risk. Whereas in 2015, just over thirty-seven hundred went missing or died in the Central Mediterranean route, more than five thousand faced the same fate in 2016. According to a 2017 report, average death rates in the Mediterranean increased from 1.2 per 100 arrivals in 2016 to 2.1 per 100 in 2017 (Black et al. 2017, 6). ¹⁴ What this means is that death to arrival ratios have steadily risen since 2014. As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recently reported, a migrant’s chances of dying in the Mediterranean rose from one death per 269 arrivals in 2015 to one death in 88 arrivals in 2016. The ratio is even more dramatic in the Central Mediterranean context, where one in forty-seven arrivals perished (UNHCR 2016).

In a troubling development, the language of humanitarian intervention is increasingly used to justify military response. Contemporary narratives, which tend to paint smugglers as part of regional mafia-like criminal organizations, are strikingly similar to those circulated 10 years ago. News stories of smugglers abusing or abandoning their human cargo in unseaworthy boats in the middle of the Mediterranean have become commonplace, generating ire and moral repulsion in the public sphere. Such repulsion has authorized military interventions, such as European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR MED) Operation Sophia, whose mission is to combat smuggling operations in the Mediterranean and thus “protect” vulnerable migrants and refugees from their nefarious handlers. As stated on the EUNAVFOR MED website, a central target is to “disrupt the business model of human smuggling and trafficking in the Southern Central Mediterranean and prevent further loss of life at sea.” ¹⁵ More recently, Europol launched the European Migrant Smuggling Center, ¹⁶ in an effort to “[tackle] the sophisticated international … smuggling networks … that exploit the desperation and vulnerability of migrants” (Europol 2016, 2). For both agencies, the mission is vast.

Tracking down and immobilizing the “40,000 individuals suspected of being involved in migrant smuggling” (Europol 2016, 7) is not only practically ambitious; like Operation Sophia, it also frames intervention as a humanitarian response. Playing on the “care and control duality of humanitarianism” (Pallister-Wilkins 2015, 54), police interventions “control” the national borders while “caring” for the vulnerable migrant who is presumably exploited by criminal thugs. As Polly Pallister-Wilkins has pointed out, “[The] increased use of humanitarianism in both the discourse and practice of European border policing over the past decade … fram[es] and legitimiz[es] interventions at sea, promoting certain technologies and shaping operational responses” (Pallister-Wilkins 2015, 54). Such discourses do not merely license restriction; they produce truths about the way migration works. Stopping the smuggler presumably stops the migrant from heading down a dangerous path filled with thieves, extortionists, rapists, drug lords, prostitution kingpins, and violent murderers. Increased military patrols, then, are mobilized in the migrant’s best interest. And yet, as this article has shown, facilitators often provide protective services to clandestine migrants.

Ironically, the logical conclusion of migration management discourses and policy interventions has been to curtail migration because of the number of lives presumably placed at risk rather than establishing safer channels for legal mobility. In a neat, if too convenient, calculus, migration management has been operationalized to police borders in a kind of “paradox of protection” (Pallister-Wilkins 2015, 54), whereby hapless victimized migrants are saved through humanitarian intervention and, at the same time, Europe’s borders are protected from the criminalized invasion of the “illegal” other. In this way, caring for the migrant and controlling his or her movements become part and parcel of the same unproblematized conflation that frames institutional ethics and responses to clandestine migration.

Conclusion

Though migration facilitation is increasingly used in today’s climate of global migration, we still understand very little about how it works, and how people on the move use facilitators to negotiate dangerous spaces. While violence along the clandestine migrant route does exist, this article has shown that captains and other facilitators are more often protectors and guides who serve a necessary role in helping people to transit unknown territories. By pointing out the nuances of the persistent image of the smuggler as criminal, this article shows the ways in which migration is a fundamentally human undertaking. I suggest that risk itself is not generated by the migration facilitator or handler per se, but by the political conditions along the migration routes, and highlight the degree to which immigration policy has resulted in journeys that are long and dangerous for Senegalese migrants and refugees.

Although it has become relatively common in media and policy reports to suggest that irregular migrants the world over are lured by greedy and unscrupulous human smugglers who do not fully disclose the dangers of passage, and who take advantage of passive or gullible migrants, this article emphasizes the sociality of migrant facilitation, arguing that that smuggling is embedded in social processes of exchange that are not universally exploitative but are often based on spatial economies that are culturally sanctioned and sustained. Contrary to alarmist reports of internationally syndicated human smuggling networks operating in Africa, I demonstrate that facilitation practices are mostly small-scale operations oriented around economies of social proximity. The majority (87 percent) of repatriated migrants who I interviewed in Senegal knew their handlers personally and relied on them to facilitate transit through unknown and dangerous spaces. Journeys were frequently negotiated within close-knit communities among people who already knew each other.

Future research on migration facilitation would do well to combine disparate theoretical approaches—for example, social networks and world systems approaches—which would help researchers to understand how migrants navigate the multisited landscape of socially remote migration facilitators. Such a hybrid approach would also contextualize migration facilitation within a larger political economy and global governance regime that creates the conditions necessary for “human smuggling” to flourish. As Baird points out, “critical research on migrant smuggling is to turn the focus from supporting states in their efforts to police and prohibit migration, towards a focus on ending harms and reducing suffering of those who have felt the most brutal effects of the regimes of prohibition” (Baird 2016, 8). More than trying to define who the migration facilitator is in terms of marked identity, critical research should focus on trying to understand such actors as “embedded in the complex interplay of systemic forces that lead to migration” (Baird and van Liempt 2016, 409). Further, as Line Richter has pointed out, rather than defining smugglers as ideal types (i.e., criminals, extortionists, blackmailers, and so on), migration facilitators and brokers can be better understood as “assemblages of practices,” which underlines the relational, heterogeneous, and productive aspects of migration facilitation (Richter 2016).

Though migration patterns out of West Africa have shifted, the social landscape of clandestine migration remains largely the same. Prices for boat fares are persistently variable, as smugglers calculate what to charge from which passenger. In other words, access is still socially organized. The act of making waxhaalé for facilitation and protection between handlers and migrants was, and continues to be, governed not so much by fixed notions of value, but rather by social and spatial proximities that function, in some way, to domesticate volatile conditions. Such negotiations are “as routine in general as they are extraordinary in each instance, in an economic life lived under volatile conditions” (Guyer 2004, 114). Such negotiations form part of a preexisting paradigm wherein people use distance and proximity to gauge and negotiate value. As Jane Guyer makes clear, African systems of value are conditioned by a “multiplicity of scales” that are reflexively and mutually referential (Guyer 2004, 172). In much the same way, the spheres of exchange that govern facilitation prices and services are spatial, proportional, and relational. Who you know, and how remote or close they are in terms of kinship or community, influences the migrant-handler relationship in specific ways.

Understanding the economies of migration facilitation as social rather than strictly monetary renders facilitation itself as something more complex than a profit-seeking industry. It also disrupts the notion of handlers as criminals and migrants as victims, and instead accommodates the possibility that the handler-migrant relationship, including negotiating prices and providing security, might be shaped by the social variability of value. By taking a more socio-spatialized approach to migration facilitation, we can see that clandestine migration itself is not a static institution but rather one that operates according to local conceptions of fungibility and proximity, which shape how social and material exchanges are conducted and how migrant pathways are facilitated.