Smugglers Made at Least $5 Billion Last Year in Europe Migrant Crisis

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/world/europe/migrants-refugees-smugglers.html

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Smugglers made $5 billion to $6 billion in 2015 spiriting roughly one million migrants into the European Union, two multinational law enforcement agencies said Tuesday in a joint report that quantified the profitability of such trafficking.

The report also said that more than 90 percent of the migrants reaching the European Union were helped at some point in their journeys by criminal smuggling networks, and that most of the fees demanded by the smugglers were paid in cash.

“A large number of criminal networks as well as individual criminal entrepreneurs now generate substantial profits from migrant smuggling or crimes related to the ‘facilitation’ of migrant smuggling,” said the report, a collaboration between Europol, a law enforcement agency of the 28-nation European Union based in The Hague, and Interpol, the 190-member International Criminal Police Organization, based in Lyon, France.

The agencies tallied their estimate of smuggler profits last year by multiplying the number of arrivals by the per-person cost, which they said ranged from $3,200 to $6,500.

The report also identified what it called “smuggling hot spots,” roughly 250 hubs along smuggling routes where migrants and smugglers congregate.

It also described the smuggling networks as multinational enterprises, with suspects originating from more than 100 countries, including some within the European Union.

Data in the report was derived in part by analyzing hundreds of debriefings of migrants collected by Frontex, a European border-management agency, and European Union members.

Europe is struggling to deal with shifting patterns in the influx of people fleeing war and instability in the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

A deal that took effect in March to deport migrants reaching Greece from Turkey has sharply reduced the number of people entering Europe via perilous voyages across the Aegean, in which hundreds have drowned. But smugglers have responded by resurrecting disused routes into Europe via the Mediterranean from Libya, which can be just as dangerous.

As of Sunday, an estimated 189,414 migrants and refugees had entered Europe this year by sea, arriving in Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Spain, according to data compiled by the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency.

Deaths through mid-May totaled 1,357 on all Mediterranean routes, 24 percent lower than last year’s total of 1,792 through the same period, the organization’s database showed.