‘Here we go again:’ Misleading European Union Communications on Human Smuggling

The narratives used by political leaders should bring stability to contested policy spaces. Instead, recent European Union communications risk destabilising counter-smuggling responses by relying on an incomplete set of evidence. As migration rates along the Central and Western Mediterranean routes increase this year relative to 2020, the upcoming release of the EU Action Plan Against Migrant Smuggling (2021-2025) in Q2 2021 presents a key opportunity for European policymakers to implement sound evidence-based strategies to safeguard the wellbeing of individuals engaging in irregular migration journeys. Worryingly, misleading narratives in European Union communications indicate that it may squander the opportunity to bring stability to policy responses to human smuggling.

The European Commission’s information-gathering efforts, such as the recently concluded Public Consultation on EU Action Plan Against Migrant Smuggling (2021-2025) may be considered a promising sign as they aim to gather the perspectives of relevant stakeholders, practitioners, political actors, and academics. Despite this, the narratives present in EU communications favor a narrow sliver of available research on irregular migration and human smuggling services and therefore threaten to repeat past mistakes.

Irregular migration and human smuggling are contentious and politically divisive topics. Leaders experience intense pressure on the national level from their publics that are looking for quick solutions. On a European level, leaders face the difficult challenge of seeking to build consensus between Member States that have widely disparate stances towards migration governance.

This is a part of a blog post by Andrew Fallone, run by Migration Policy Centre.