He has vocalised “how angry” he is over the scale of “illegal” immigration and has promised to “roll my sleeves up” to tackle the scourge of the “people smuggling gangs” who allegedly are the main dynamic behind the upsurge in illegal or irregular migration. In language reminiscent of that spoken in GP surgery waiting rooms and other public spaces on the day of the Brexit referendum, Starmer said that the UK had been for too long a “soft touch” for illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration, he opined, “makes me angry because it is unfair on ordinary working people who pay the price – from the costs of hotels, to our public services struggling under the strain.” And he reassures us, “it’s unfair on the illegal migrants themselves because they are vulnerable to being exploited by vile gangs.” [1]
The Prime Minister told the summit that the countries affected by people smuggling should stand together against this ‘vile trade’ rather than be divided by it. He called for measures against people smugglers to be put on the same level as those against terrorist threats. Amongst the measures announced at this summit are extension of right-to-work checks to gig economy workers through amendments to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill; an allocation of £1m to help tackle people smuggling gangs in the Iraqi Kurdistan region and an advertising campaign in Vietnam, another hotspot for this business model. Also £30m will be allocated to tackle global trafficking routes and the flows of illicit money that fund them. A further £3m will go to the Crown Prosecution Service to help it expand its international work.[2]
Perhaps most controversially, from a human rights perspective, is the review announced by the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper into the implementation of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act which protects the right to a family life and which has been used by migrants to argue for their right to stay in the UK “to make sure that the immigration and asylum system works effectively in the way that Parliament intended it and make sure that there is a proper sense of control in the system”. Described by Keir Starmer in February as a “loophole”, Article 8 has tended to attract the ire of the nativist right and has been at the centre of a number of contentious asylum cases, including one earlier this year when a Palestinian family was allowed to remain in the UK having made their original application through the Ukrainian family scheme.[3]
A particularly unpleasant vista for liberals on asylum and immigration matters was the video message sent to the summit by far right Italian Prime Minister Georgi Meloni in which she endorsed the processing of asylum claims in third countries; something which looked to have been discredited by the last Tory UK government’s Rwanda fiasco but something, in the view of Ms Meloni whose time has come. The UK government will also seek advice from Denmark on tougher implementation of immigration law.[4]
With a total of 5,000 arrivals on UK shores so far in 2025, the fastest the figure has been reached in the last three years; the pressure on the UK government to “do something” is undeniable not least because of the potential electoral threat to both Labour and Conservative parties from Reform UK led by Nigel Farage who has revelled in the toxicity of immigration asylum debates; a toxicity for which he in no small measure has been responsible since even before the Brexit referendum and his notorious “Breaking Point” poster campaign. The invocation of the frustration felt by “working people” (rather than the more sociologically neutral figure “taxpayer”) at the cost of “hotels” and the feeling that Britain is a “soft touch” by the PM indicate an unmistakeable shift into populist territory.
However, Keir Starmer’s reprise of the root cause of people smuggling as the major causative factor in “illegal” immigration is part of a fallacious narrative around another migration myth deconstructed by the foremost migration scholar Heine de Hass: Smuggling is the cause of illegal migration. Apocalyptic narratives of mass exoduses of people fleeing poverty and war through dangerous and inhospitable overland terrain and then onto overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels also portray migrants and refugees as victims of ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘merciless’ criminal gangs and ruthless mafias. Rather than providing them with a safe passage, these ‘evil’ misery merchants force migrants into these lethal routes, often abandoning them on the way.[5]
This public perception of migrants as helpless victims of mercenary smugglers and the accompanying moral missives from politicians about the nefarious activities of these “gangs” chimes with the widespread idea that smugglers’ criminal activities are the root cause of illegal migration and the large-scale arrival of asylum seekers at the border. Or, as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) summarised: ‘The system of migrant smuggling … has become nothing more than a mechanism for robbing and murdering some of the poorest people of the world.' According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), smuggling is ‘a global threat to migration governance, national security, and the well-being of migrants,’ while ‘criminal networks who cause such misery.’ In order to ‘break their business model, the Biden Administration in 2022 launched an ‘unprecedented’ operation to disrupt human smuggling networks and prevent Central American ‘migrant caravans’ moving north, boasting of an ‘all-of-government effort to attack the smuggling organisations”.[6]
While the experiences of those seeking refuge and sanctuary from war, economic collapse and oppression in their native lands should never be understated or trivialised, de Haas states bluntly that nearly four decades of anti-smuggling crackdowns or Fortress Europe type border enforcement regimes have signally failed to stop illegal migration while worsening the plight of migrants and refugees. The explanation for such epic failures lies in the idea that smuggling crackdowns will reduce illegal immigration rests on false premises about the causes of illegal migration.[7]
For the basic cause of illegal or irregular migration is the closure of legal, legitimate means of entry to a host country. Since the 1990s, persistent demand for migrant workers in agriculture, construction and services in destination countries has not been matched by legal migration opportunities. Quite the reverse actually as governments have introduced visa requirements for migrant workers who could hitherto enter and leave unhindered and have enforced those requirements by upping border controls. Consequently, the resultant mismatch between labour demand and border policies has led to rising numbers of workers prepared to traverse borders illegally, or to overstay their visas or temporary work permits. For example, boat migration across the English Channel to the UK in the early 2020s as dominated by Albanians, mainly because Albania is the only country in Western and Central Europe whose citizens still need a visa to enter the UK.[8]
The introduction by Spain and Italy in 1991 of visa requirements for North Africans who before then could travel freely ‘gap year’ style to Southern Europe taking in periods of work on farms and construction sites, pleasure and adventure was the opening salvo in the trans Mediterranean boat migration controversies of the next three decades. Under the pre-Schengen era of open frontiers, benefits accrued to Moroccans, Tunisians, and Algerians in the form of job opportunities and higher salaries abroad while spending the rest of their time with family at home where living was cheaper. With the blocking of free entry into Spain and Italy, North Africans started to cross the Mediterranean illegally in pateras (small fishing boats). But with the quasi-militarisation of the Straits of Gibraltar by Spain by early-warning border control radar systems, the professionalised smuggling of migrants began to spread out across an array of crossing points on the long Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines, a diversification process which continued in the first two decades of the 21st century to encompass aspirant migrant workers from sub-Saharan African countries such as Senegal, Nigeria, Mali and Ghana and later refugees fleeing countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Eritrea. These refugees could no longer travel by aeroplane to Europe because of carrier sanctions. From 2014, increased maritime border patrolling in the Mediterranean created yet more reorientation of smuggling routes – towards Turkey, the Balkans and central Europe, reinforced by the large-scale movement of Syrian refugees from Turkey to Greece. Increased border enforcement in the Aegean Sea after 2016 led to the convergence of more smuggling routes in the central Mediterranean – from Libya and Tunisia to Italy and Malta, from Morocco to Spain, and from the West African coast to the Canary Islands.[9]
So, this snapshot of border controls in the Mediterranean demonstrates that massive investments in border enforcement does not stop smuggling but rather initiates endless cat-and-mouse games between border patrollers and smugglers, who will constantly shift routes and strategies to maintain their business. The same story can be told about how the militarisation of border controls on the US-Mexico border has only increased migrants’ dependence on smugglers (‘coyotes’) and so made them more vulnerable to violence, exploitation and abuse – whether by smugglers, police or border guards, or temporary employers for whom many work to pay for the next leg of the journey in Mexico.[10]
Condemnation by political leaders of the business model of “people smuggling gangs” and pledges to smash them not only fail to take account of how visa restrictions by potential host states and the border security industrial complex instituted by European states as well as the EU generate clientele for smugglers but also make two other category errors. The first is the systematic conflation of smuggling with trafficking. Trafficking does not have to involve any migration at all. Trafficking concerns the severe exploitation of vulnerable workers through deceit and coercion. Smuggling is about service delivery, with migrants and refugees voluntarily paying money to smugglers to cross borders safely and avoid being caught by the police, border guards or criminals. This failure to distinguish between smuggling and trafficking was brought into sharp relief by media coverage of the tragedy in October 2019 when 39 aspiring Vietnamese migrant workers were found dead inside a truck trailer in Grays, Essex. The media almost immediately reported that they were ‘trafficked’ to Britain via China and France, whereas in reality this was about smuggling, with migrants and their families paying large sums of money to make the passage to the UK, where they planned to work. [11]
The second error is the oft quoted assertion is that smugglers are part of international organised crime or centralised, hierarchical, mafia-like structures or criminal gangs. However numerous studies from around the world refute thus assertion. Smugglers’ core business is to provide migrants with a safe passage which is why migrants are willing to pay or their services, in order to stay away from criminals, as well as the abusive state agents who collaborate with them. Several studies by Gabriella Sanchez, an anthropologist who has done extensive research on the US-Mexico border, have shown that most smugglers are small operators and are often former migrants themselves. She found that women and children play an important role in smuggling operations, recruiting customers, negotiating fees and payment plans, withdrawing smuggling payments from banks, caring for migrants, and guiding groups of border crossers though the desert.[12]
In the same vein, Julien Brachet, a French geographer who spent years doing fieldwork in towns and oases in the Safara Desert, found that for migrants from sub-Saharan African countries who attempt to cross the Sahara on their way to North Africa via countries like Niger and Libya, the greatest risks they face are abusive or corrupt policemen, border agents and soldiers, who exact informal tolls and bribes and may strip migrants of money and essential assets like mobile phones. Brachet’s research also refutes the stereotypical images of international mafias: smugglers tend to be small-scale operators who have a good knowledge of local routes and circumstances. They are often former nomads, migrants or ex-migrants who sometimes cooperate with corrupt police and border officials. For decades, local traders and truck drivers have played an important role in smuggling migrants across the Sahara Desert often in combination with other businesses such as cross-border trade and the smuggling of goods.[13]
The received wisdom of the people smuggling narratives pushed by governments and media alike also deprive migrants of agency in the journeys they choose to make. For the bottom line is that smugglers provide a service that migrants and refugees are willing to pay for. For most people who engage with smugglers, emigration is not an act of desperation but a deliberate investment in a better future which requires careful planning, regardless of the risks involved. When Senegalese economist Liunguere Mously analysed survey data she collected in Dakar, she found that prospective migrants who planned to undertake the dangerous trip to the Canary Islands across the Atlantic were aware of the risk of dying they were willing to make it. She also found that they had very realistic expectations of the wages they could earn in their favoured destinations of Spain and France. The demonisation of the ‘vile’ people smuggling trade conveniently ignores the humanitarian motives of ordinary citizens and activists who simply give refugees a ride across the border or those who helped Jews escape Nazi-occupied territory in the Second World War or those who helped people escape people escape from the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War or those who help refugees escape contemporary tyrannies such as the smugglers who helped Iranian refugees to flee the mullahs regime across deserts and mountains to Afghanistan.[14]
For what governments refuse to accept is that demand for labour is the main driver of illegal migration and that closing down legal migration channels and the ability to move freely will not deter migrants from making perilous journeys especially if legislators ignore the illegal employment of migrant workers. Governments focus on smugglers as a means of distraction from the interests (and ballooning costs) of the security industry complex in border controls. For it is arms and technology companies who have reaped the real benefits of illegal migration. According to a series of investigations by the Migrants’ Files – a consortium of European journalists – EU countries paid 2.3 billion Euros in taxpayer money to border enforcement between 2000 and 2014, while deportations had a price tag of at least 11.3 billion Euros.
The Prime Minister told the summit that the countries affected by people smuggling should stand together against this ‘vile trade’ rather than be divided by it. He called for measures against people smugglers to be put on the same level as those against terrorist threats. Amongst the measures announced at this summit are extension of right-to-work checks to gig economy workers through amendments to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill; an allocation of £1m to help tackle people smuggling gangs in the Iraqi Kurdistan region and an advertising campaign in Vietnam, another hotspot for this business model. Also £30m will be allocated to tackle global trafficking routes and the flows of illicit money that fund them. A further £3m will go to the Crown Prosecution Service to help it expand its international work.[2]
Perhaps most controversially, from a human rights perspective, is the review announced by the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper into the implementation of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act which protects the right to a family life and which has been used by migrants to argue for their right to stay in the UK “to make sure that the immigration and asylum system works effectively in the way that Parliament intended it and make sure that there is a proper sense of control in the system”. Described by Keir Starmer in February as a “loophole”, Article 8 has tended to attract the ire of the nativist right and has been at the centre of a number of contentious asylum cases, including one earlier this year when a Palestinian family was allowed to remain in the UK having made their original application through the Ukrainian family scheme.[3]
A particularly unpleasant vista for liberals on asylum and immigration matters was the video message sent to the summit by far right Italian Prime Minister Georgi Meloni in which she endorsed the processing of asylum claims in third countries; something which looked to have been discredited by the last Tory UK government’s Rwanda fiasco but something, in the view of Ms Meloni whose time has come. The UK government will also seek advice from Denmark on tougher implementation of immigration law.[4]
With a total of 5,000 arrivals on UK shores so far in 2025, the fastest the figure has been reached in the last three years; the pressure on the UK government to “do something” is undeniable not least because of the potential electoral threat to both Labour and Conservative parties from Reform UK led by Nigel Farage who has revelled in the toxicity of immigration asylum debates; a toxicity for which he in no small measure has been responsible since even before the Brexit referendum and his notorious “Breaking Point” poster campaign. The invocation of the frustration felt by “working people” (rather than the more sociologically neutral figure “taxpayer”) at the cost of “hotels” and the feeling that Britain is a “soft touch” by the PM indicate an unmistakeable shift into populist territory.
However, Keir Starmer’s reprise of the root cause of people smuggling as the major causative factor in “illegal” immigration is part of a fallacious narrative around another migration myth deconstructed by the foremost migration scholar Heine de Hass: Smuggling is the cause of illegal migration. Apocalyptic narratives of mass exoduses of people fleeing poverty and war through dangerous and inhospitable overland terrain and then onto overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels also portray migrants and refugees as victims of ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘merciless’ criminal gangs and ruthless mafias. Rather than providing them with a safe passage, these ‘evil’ misery merchants force migrants into these lethal routes, often abandoning them on the way.[5]
This public perception of migrants as helpless victims of mercenary smugglers and the accompanying moral missives from politicians about the nefarious activities of these “gangs” chimes with the widespread idea that smugglers’ criminal activities are the root cause of illegal migration and the large-scale arrival of asylum seekers at the border. Or, as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) summarised: ‘The system of migrant smuggling … has become nothing more than a mechanism for robbing and murdering some of the poorest people of the world.' According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), smuggling is ‘a global threat to migration governance, national security, and the well-being of migrants,’ while ‘criminal networks who cause such misery.’ In order to ‘break their business model, the Biden Administration in 2022 launched an ‘unprecedented’ operation to disrupt human smuggling networks and prevent Central American ‘migrant caravans’ moving north, boasting of an ‘all-of-government effort to attack the smuggling organisations”.[6]
While the experiences of those seeking refuge and sanctuary from war, economic collapse and oppression in their native lands should never be understated or trivialised, de Haas states bluntly that nearly four decades of anti-smuggling crackdowns or Fortress Europe type border enforcement regimes have signally failed to stop illegal migration while worsening the plight of migrants and refugees. The explanation for such epic failures lies in the idea that smuggling crackdowns will reduce illegal immigration rests on false premises about the causes of illegal migration.[7]
For the basic cause of illegal or irregular migration is the closure of legal, legitimate means of entry to a host country. Since the 1990s, persistent demand for migrant workers in agriculture, construction and services in destination countries has not been matched by legal migration opportunities. Quite the reverse actually as governments have introduced visa requirements for migrant workers who could hitherto enter and leave unhindered and have enforced those requirements by upping border controls. Consequently, the resultant mismatch between labour demand and border policies has led to rising numbers of workers prepared to traverse borders illegally, or to overstay their visas or temporary work permits. For example, boat migration across the English Channel to the UK in the early 2020s as dominated by Albanians, mainly because Albania is the only country in Western and Central Europe whose citizens still need a visa to enter the UK.[8]
The introduction by Spain and Italy in 1991 of visa requirements for North Africans who before then could travel freely ‘gap year’ style to Southern Europe taking in periods of work on farms and construction sites, pleasure and adventure was the opening salvo in the trans Mediterranean boat migration controversies of the next three decades. Under the pre-Schengen era of open frontiers, benefits accrued to Moroccans, Tunisians, and Algerians in the form of job opportunities and higher salaries abroad while spending the rest of their time with family at home where living was cheaper. With the blocking of free entry into Spain and Italy, North Africans started to cross the Mediterranean illegally in pateras (small fishing boats). But with the quasi-militarisation of the Straits of Gibraltar by Spain by early-warning border control radar systems, the professionalised smuggling of migrants began to spread out across an array of crossing points on the long Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines, a diversification process which continued in the first two decades of the 21st century to encompass aspirant migrant workers from sub-Saharan African countries such as Senegal, Nigeria, Mali and Ghana and later refugees fleeing countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Eritrea. These refugees could no longer travel by aeroplane to Europe because of carrier sanctions. From 2014, increased maritime border patrolling in the Mediterranean created yet more reorientation of smuggling routes – towards Turkey, the Balkans and central Europe, reinforced by the large-scale movement of Syrian refugees from Turkey to Greece. Increased border enforcement in the Aegean Sea after 2016 led to the convergence of more smuggling routes in the central Mediterranean – from Libya and Tunisia to Italy and Malta, from Morocco to Spain, and from the West African coast to the Canary Islands.[9]
So, this snapshot of border controls in the Mediterranean demonstrates that massive investments in border enforcement does not stop smuggling but rather initiates endless cat-and-mouse games between border patrollers and smugglers, who will constantly shift routes and strategies to maintain their business. The same story can be told about how the militarisation of border controls on the US-Mexico border has only increased migrants’ dependence on smugglers (‘coyotes’) and so made them more vulnerable to violence, exploitation and abuse – whether by smugglers, police or border guards, or temporary employers for whom many work to pay for the next leg of the journey in Mexico.[10]
Condemnation by political leaders of the business model of “people smuggling gangs” and pledges to smash them not only fail to take account of how visa restrictions by potential host states and the border security industrial complex instituted by European states as well as the EU generate clientele for smugglers but also make two other category errors. The first is the systematic conflation of smuggling with trafficking. Trafficking does not have to involve any migration at all. Trafficking concerns the severe exploitation of vulnerable workers through deceit and coercion. Smuggling is about service delivery, with migrants and refugees voluntarily paying money to smugglers to cross borders safely and avoid being caught by the police, border guards or criminals. This failure to distinguish between smuggling and trafficking was brought into sharp relief by media coverage of the tragedy in October 2019 when 39 aspiring Vietnamese migrant workers were found dead inside a truck trailer in Grays, Essex. The media almost immediately reported that they were ‘trafficked’ to Britain via China and France, whereas in reality this was about smuggling, with migrants and their families paying large sums of money to make the passage to the UK, where they planned to work. [11]
The second error is the oft quoted assertion is that smugglers are part of international organised crime or centralised, hierarchical, mafia-like structures or criminal gangs. However numerous studies from around the world refute thus assertion. Smugglers’ core business is to provide migrants with a safe passage which is why migrants are willing to pay or their services, in order to stay away from criminals, as well as the abusive state agents who collaborate with them. Several studies by Gabriella Sanchez, an anthropologist who has done extensive research on the US-Mexico border, have shown that most smugglers are small operators and are often former migrants themselves. She found that women and children play an important role in smuggling operations, recruiting customers, negotiating fees and payment plans, withdrawing smuggling payments from banks, caring for migrants, and guiding groups of border crossers though the desert.[12]
In the same vein, Julien Brachet, a French geographer who spent years doing fieldwork in towns and oases in the Safara Desert, found that for migrants from sub-Saharan African countries who attempt to cross the Sahara on their way to North Africa via countries like Niger and Libya, the greatest risks they face are abusive or corrupt policemen, border agents and soldiers, who exact informal tolls and bribes and may strip migrants of money and essential assets like mobile phones. Brachet’s research also refutes the stereotypical images of international mafias: smugglers tend to be small-scale operators who have a good knowledge of local routes and circumstances. They are often former nomads, migrants or ex-migrants who sometimes cooperate with corrupt police and border officials. For decades, local traders and truck drivers have played an important role in smuggling migrants across the Sahara Desert often in combination with other businesses such as cross-border trade and the smuggling of goods.[13]
The received wisdom of the people smuggling narratives pushed by governments and media alike also deprive migrants of agency in the journeys they choose to make. For the bottom line is that smugglers provide a service that migrants and refugees are willing to pay for. For most people who engage with smugglers, emigration is not an act of desperation but a deliberate investment in a better future which requires careful planning, regardless of the risks involved. When Senegalese economist Liunguere Mously analysed survey data she collected in Dakar, she found that prospective migrants who planned to undertake the dangerous trip to the Canary Islands across the Atlantic were aware of the risk of dying they were willing to make it. She also found that they had very realistic expectations of the wages they could earn in their favoured destinations of Spain and France. The demonisation of the ‘vile’ people smuggling trade conveniently ignores the humanitarian motives of ordinary citizens and activists who simply give refugees a ride across the border or those who helped Jews escape Nazi-occupied territory in the Second World War or those who helped people escape people escape from the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War or those who help refugees escape contemporary tyrannies such as the smugglers who helped Iranian refugees to flee the mullahs regime across deserts and mountains to Afghanistan.[14]
For what governments refuse to accept is that demand for labour is the main driver of illegal migration and that closing down legal migration channels and the ability to move freely will not deter migrants from making perilous journeys especially if legislators ignore the illegal employment of migrant workers. Governments focus on smugglers as a means of distraction from the interests (and ballooning costs) of the security industry complex in border controls. For it is arms and technology companies who have reaped the real benefits of illegal migration. According to a series of investigations by the Migrants’ Files – a consortium of European journalists – EU countries paid 2.3 billion Euros in taxpayer money to border enforcement between 2000 and 2014, while deportations had a price tag of at least 11.3 billion Euros.
Note that the current Labour government did not shout from the rooftops about the costs involved in the record deportation numbers of 24,000 in the last eight months they trumpet. A further billion euros was spent on coordination efforts to control European borders, mainly through Frontex, Europe’s border agency. Between 2012 and 2022, the annual budget of Frontex rose almost ninefold, from 85 to 745 million Euros. Four leading European arms manufacturers – Airbus, Thales, Finmeccanica, and BAE – and technology firms like Saab, Indra, Siemens, and Diehl are among the prime beneficiaries of EU spending on military-grade technology supplied by these privately held companies. In total, the EU budget for ‘migration and border management’ for 2021-7 is 22.7 billion Euro, up from 13 billion Euro on 2014-20.[15]
Manufactured moral panics over “small boat invasions” and the “vile” people smuggling trade will never alter two basic truisms about movement of peoples; first that human beings have moved around the globe since the dawn of time; second there are no lengths to which either determined or desperate people will go to better their lives and those of their dependents or to escape adversity, no matter how extreme. The solutions to the problems of illegal migration is to create or restore legal routes and, yes, speed up asylum application processes so that applicants do not have to exist in the limbo environment of hotels to their perpetual boredom and frustration and to the (ill-informed) outrage of the native vox populi. Sadly, it seems that the short-term imperative to ward off electoral threats from Reform UK will dictate UK migration policy rather than long-tern evidence based strategic approaches. A cut and paste version of pan-European approaches with the populist right tail wagging the dog. When will they ever learn?
[1] Keir Starmer calls for global unity against ‘vile trade’ of people smuggling at summit.
Manufactured moral panics over “small boat invasions” and the “vile” people smuggling trade will never alter two basic truisms about movement of peoples; first that human beings have moved around the globe since the dawn of time; second there are no lengths to which either determined or desperate people will go to better their lives and those of their dependents or to escape adversity, no matter how extreme. The solutions to the problems of illegal migration is to create or restore legal routes and, yes, speed up asylum application processes so that applicants do not have to exist in the limbo environment of hotels to their perpetual boredom and frustration and to the (ill-informed) outrage of the native vox populi. Sadly, it seems that the short-term imperative to ward off electoral threats from Reform UK will dictate UK migration policy rather than long-tern evidence based strategic approaches. A cut and paste version of pan-European approaches with the populist right tail wagging the dog. When will they ever learn?
[1] Keir Starmer calls for global unity against ‘vile trade’ of people smuggling at summit.
[2] Ibid
[3] Kiran Stacey Immigration. Review of human rights for small boat arrivals. The Guardian. 31st March 2025
[4] Keir Starmer calls for global unity against ‘vile trade’ of people smuggling at summit.
[5] Hein de Haas (2023) How Migration Really Works. A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Viking p.291
[6] Ibid, pp.291-92
[7] Ibid, p.293
[8] Ibid, p.295
[9] Ibid, pp.296-98
[10] Ibid, p.299
[11] Ibid, p.302
[12] Ibid, p.303
[13] Ibid, p.304
[14] Ibid, pp.304-06
[15] Ibid, pp.306-08
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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