Human trade: The fastest-growing crime

Amato, left, and Blair: Will they be able to stem the tide of illegal immigration?

By Robin Oakley
CNN European Political Editor

LONDON, England (CNN) -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Italian counterpart Giuliano Amato issued a simple, stark warning in the first sentence of a recent joint article: "People trafficking is the world's fastest-growing criminal business."

They were clear about the scale of operations. In the first 10 months of 2000, they said, more than 50,00 illegal immigrants passed through Bosnia en route to the West.

They were equally explicit about how nasty the human trade gets: "There is evidence that traffickers have thrown women and children, many of whom cannot swim, into the Adriatic to avoid detection by police patrol boats."

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Human trafficking is certainly a big business. At a Sicilian conference on organised crime in December 2000, Pino Arlacchi, executive director of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, declared that traffickers of people make annual profits of some $7 billion in prostitution alone. Only the drug trade brings them more.

It is, he says "the biggest violation of human rights in the world." Worldwide it is estimated that between 700,000 and 2 million women and children are trafficked every year.

The Mafia (both the Italian and Russian versions) play their part. So do the Japanese Yakuza and the Chinese Snakeheads. So do countless small "freelance" family groups operating with no more elaborate equipment than a couple of mobile phones. So do corrupt border guards and government officials in Balkan countries with little industry, low employment and large informal economies.

With as many as 500,000 illegal immigrants making their way into Western Europe each year, many through the Balkans, EU governments are turning their attention more and more to countermeasures.

Blair and Amato talked of increasing the penalties for people smuggling. But the scope for that is limited because most of the smugglers operate outside British and Italian borders.

They talked of repatriating more illegal immigrants. But how do you encourage people to go back to countries they fled because their economic or political prospects seemed so grim there in the first place? How do you find them? When most have no papers, where do you send them?

European leaders talk of winning greater cooperation from transit countries such as Bosnia, reckoning those states' eagerness to enter the EU one day will act as an incentive.

But while unemployment is high and people smuggling helps the black market thrive, such long-term aspirations offer little incentive to countries to spend their meagre funds on border patrols.

In war-torn countries like Bosnia, people may have little to lose by leaving

So how will the problem ever be solved? EU initiatives to provide cash and training for border officials are doing some good. So will tough penalties where they can be made to stick. Turkey's EU ambitions will help win cooperation there.

But employers in Europe are keen for more labour, both skilled and unskilled. Many thousands of would-be immigrants are desperate to come in. So while some people smugglers are ruthless criminals who exploit, abandon and sometimes even kill those who have paid them transportation fees, not all are seen that way by their customers.

To some of those who have no other way of getting to European capitals, the people smugglers are seen not as criminals but as facilitators performing a useful service.

Zero-immigration policies, EU authorities now acknowledge, have played into traffickers' hands and cannot succeed in current economic circumstances. One answer is more "managed immigration" that allows legal quotas of immigrants to enter.

Filling the information void with better statistics will help. So will more targeted subsidies and border-control training in transit states.

But there can be no complete solution, the immigration experts say, until Europe can win the cooperation of the "exit countries" from which the illegal immigrants come. And none of the experts are suggesting a likely time scale for that.

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