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Waiting for the Smuggler: Tales Across the Border
Luigi Achilli
European University Institute
Luigi.Achilli@eui.eu
Abstract
According to mainstream media and political discourse, human smugglers are among
the cruellest gures of our time, individuals who prey on migrants’ need for assistance.
Motivated by the circulation of this pejorative view in media and political discourse,
I carried out ethnographic research with Syrian refugees and smugglers in Turkey,
Greece, Jordan, and Lebanon with the ultimate goal of documenting what being a
smuggler entails for the very actors of this unfolding drama. Fieldwork showed me
how human smuggling was rooted in patterns of cooperation and support. And yet,
most if not all my interlocutors, including the “smugglers” themselves, spoke of smug-
gling in negative terms. What I argue in this paper is that the smuggler, a category
functional to the security apparatus, is not only manufactured within law enforcement
circles and mainstream media, but even by those very people who are discriminated or
targeted by states’ migration policies.
Keywords
human smuggling – Syria crisis – morality – discourse – narratives – irregular
migration – border control – Turkey
1 Introduction
In September 2015, the image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying on a beach after
drowning while trying to reach Greece from Turkey sent waves of indignation
I am grateful for the perceptive and thoughtful critiques, questions, and commentary pro-
vided by three anonymous reviewers and by Robert Barski, Geraldine Chatelard, Antonio De
Lauri, Serena Giusti, David Kyle, Alice Massari, Sharif Ghazal Tbeileh, Alessandro Tinti, and
Matt Zwolinski. All mistakes are my own.
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around the world. A few weeks later, equal moral outrage was generated by the
suspicions that Abdullah Kurdi, Alan’s father, could have been one of the smug-
glers who that night caused the death of his own baby and other refugees –
including his wife and other son. Accusing him were the two alleged smug-
glers under trial in Turkey for the deaths, who framed the man as the ultimate
executor of the tragedy, claiming he had organized the trip and piloted the
boat that sunk. Abdullah, whose responsibility in the deaths was eventually
dismissed by the accused, denied any involvement, stating: “If I was a people
smuggler, why would I put my family in the same boat as the other people?”
Indeed, why? Who was the smuggler, then?
“Human smuggler” does not mean, for most people, what the ocial deni-
tion says it means. The UN 2000 Convention against Transnational Organized
Crime, and its accompanying “Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants”
state that human smuggling is “the procurement, in order to obtain, directly
or indirectly, a nancial or other material benet, of the illegal entry of a per-
son into a State Party of which the person is not a national or a permanent
resident.” Accordingly, the smuggler is a person who transports people illic-
itly into a third country. Media and political discourses, however, have placed
more emphasis on the moral dimension of this actor than on their logistical
skills. A profusion of photos and narrative accounts of migrants crammed into
wretched boats or trucks circulates in the media worldwide and sketches out
the moral traits of one of the cruellest gures of our time, an individual who
preys on migrants’ “need for assistance and their dreams for a better life.”
Motivated by the circulation of this pejorative view in media and political
discourse, I started research on Syrian refugees’ irregular migration to Europe
with the ultimate goal of documenting what being a smuggler entails for the
actors at the very centre of this unfolding drama. It all began – as we shall see
later – with a misplaced question: are human smugglers motivated by anything
other than greed and disregard for human life?
To answer this question, my research beneted from the empirical value of a
growing, yet still small, body of scholarship that has questioned oversimplied
depictions of the relationship between the smuggling facilitator, the travellers
Ali, N. and Majeed, S. (2015). “Account of Capsized Migrant Boat Is Disputed” The Wall Street
Journal, June 10.
Ali, N. and Majeed, S. (2015). “Account of Capsized Migrant Boat Is Disputed.”
United Nations (2000). United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime
and The Protocols Thereto, pp. 54–55.
Europol (2016), Migrant Smuggling in the EU, p. 3. .
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and their communities. As early as 2004, Jeroen Doomernik and David Kyle
summarized the complex relationship between smugglers and migrants as a
spectrum ranging from the altruistic assistance provided by family members
or friends to the exploitative and abusive practices carried out by hardened
criminals. While the dominant narrative has continued to favour the smug-
gler-as-criminal line, the last ten years have seen the advent of both scholarly
and journalistic work, which has showcased the strong bonds of trust and care
that often tie smugglers and migrants together.
Informed by this body of research, between 2015 and 2017, I carried out
ethnographic research largely based on interviews and, to a lesser extent, par-
ticipant observation with Syrian refugees and smugglers themselves in Turkey,
Greece, Jordan, and Lebanon. The moment was, to use an infelicitous choice of
words, propitious. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians had ed their homes and
sought refuge in Europe and elsewhere following the outbreak of the conict
in 2011. At the time of my research, smugglers operated especially out of Tur-
key, which soon became a gathering point for Syrian refugees travelling from
Syria and its neighbouring countries to Europe.
As my eldwork unfolded, a more complex picture emerged. The time spent
with my interlocutors showed me how human smuggling held strong social
and moral signicance for both migrants and smugglers. Despite assumptions
of deceit and deception, trust and cooperation seemed to be the rule more
than the exception in the interaction between migrants and those behind their
journeys. Most smugglers operated by helping members of their immediate
circles to reach the destinations that would have been otherwise precluded to
them through legal channels. Remarkably, not only did smugglers depict them-
selves as service providers who privileged ethical choices over mere prot, but
even migrants described them as muhtaramin (decent and respectable per-
sons). Indeed, human smuggling appeared to be rooted in patterns of coopera-
tion, protection, and support.
Doormernik, J. and Kyle, D. J. (2004). “Organized Migrant Smuggling and State Control:
Conceptual and Policy Challenges” Journal of International Migration and Integration, 5(3):
93–102.
Khosravi, S. (2010), Illegal Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. Palgrave Macmillan;
Sanchez, G. (2015), Human Smuggling and Border Crossings. Routledge; Tinti, P. and Reitano,
T. (2017). Migrant, Refugee, Smuggler, Savior. Oxford University Press.
This seems to conrm what other studies have remarked in the Eastern Mediterranean route
and elsewhere. See, for example, Baird, T. (2017). Human Smuggling in the Eastern Mediterra-
nean. Taylor & Francis. Zhang, for example, points out how Chinese migrants coming to the
United States often perceive smugglers as philanthropists; Sanchez shows that the migrant-
facilitator relationship in Mexico dwells “on deep, socially cemented ties spanning across
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And yet, most if not all my interlocutors, including the “smugglers” them-
selves, spoke of smuggling in abstract terms as a very abusive and evil practice.
Crucial elements in a mechanism of protection from below, smugglers were
widely perceived by migrants and even themselves as abusive exploiters who
prey on the need of safety of their victims, the migrants. This inconsistency
bothered me.
When interacting with smugglers, they never called them with the Arabic
equivalent – muharrib – a word with a negative connotation that evokes ex-
ploitation and violence. Neither they used this term privately when they spoke
of a facilitator with whom they were in good terms and trusted. A muharrib
could not be muhtaram by denition. In fact, migrants referred to their own fa-
cilitators by using their personal names or honoric appellatives such as hajj
or ammi (litt. paternal uncle). However, my interlocutors, including the “smug-
glers” themselves, used the word muharrib to refer to smugglers at large. And,
when asked to comment over the inner characteristics and moral dispositions
of these facilitators of irregular migration, their narratives did not diverge from
mainstream narratives of migration. Smugglers were bad.
I was ready to romance resistance, to enjoy my research participants debunk-
ing of the derogatory ways that media and political leaders used to describe
human smuggling; yet, that did not happen. At that point in my eldwork,
I was not still prepared to understand the near unanimity with which migrants
and even smugglers complied with mainstream narratives about human smug-
gling as a fundamentally predatory activity. Interestingly enough, however,
the way my interlocutors represented the smuggler was not unique. Sharham
Khosravi notes how the perception of irregular migration as fundamentally
countries.” Zhang, S. (2007). Smuggling and Tracking in Human Beings: All Roads
Lead to America. Praeger, p. 89; Sanchez, G. (2014) Human Smuggling and Bor-
der Crossings. Routledge, p. 17. However, while these studies have begun to dis-
mantle common stereotypes about human smuggling, the assumption that smug-
glers are criminals driven exclusively by prot remains evident not only in media
coverage but even in much of the relevant literature. See, for example, Soudijn, M.,
Kleemans, E. (2009). “Chinese Organized Crime and Situational Context: Compar-
ing Human Smuggling and Synthetic Drugs Tracking” Crime, Law and Social Change,
52(5): 457–474. (2018). Global Study on Smuggling of Migrants. Vienna:
.
The word is used to refer to someone who has successfully completed the pilgrimage to
Mecca. In the Middle East is also often used as an honoric title for an older and respect-
ed person.
Khosravi, S. (2010), Illegal Traveller.
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predatory and dangerous in nature is evident in the terminology used for in-
dicating human smugglers and their clients across the world – respectively
coyotes/pollos (chicken) in Latin America, wolves/sheep in Morocco, gosfand
(sheep)/darposte gosfand (in the skin of sheep) in Iran, while smugglers are
called shetou (snakehead) by their fellow nationals in China.
My intellectual and ethnographic wanderings brought me back to the start-
ing point. If anything, this going in circles helped me understand that I needed
a better compass, a new research question. My eld research showed me that
the discourses around smuggling and smugglers were more about moral judg-
ments than the real-life people involved in everyday practices of irregular mi-
gration. As we will see in what follows, the point was not investigating whether
a smuggler – a person intrinsically bad in the eyes of my interlocutors – could
be good. It was rather to shed light on the broader circumstances in which an
individual earned the smuggler label, through or by whom, and why.
To follow this line of reasoning, here I will pursue a brief excursion into the
social and moral world of the facilitation of irregular migration. In so doing,
I will focus less on the empirics of human smuggling and more on the way the
term is used among migrants and facilitators. My goal is to show how actors do
not merely inhabit ocial categories, but they actively re-enact their authori-
tative messages. A category functional to the security apparatus, the smuggler
is not only manufactured within law enforcement circles and mainstream me-
dia, but also by the very people who are the target of the label created by the
states’ migration policies. By reiterating the same message, migrants and fa-
cilitators introduce minute displacements into the discursive regime in which
Along these lines, Ruben Andersson argues that irregular travellers actively participate in
the construction of the category “illegal migrant.” By drawing upon Ian Hacking’s notion
of “making up people,” Andersson describes how the illegal migrant “becomes a lived-
in category in the borderland ‘matrix’ of the illegality industry.” Andersson, R. (2014). Il-
legality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. University of
California Press, p. 16. Hacking’s idea of “looping efect” is particularly relevant to my
analysis for it highlights the role of people in interacting with and manufacturing their
own categorization. As the Canadian philosopher puts it, “people [...] can become aware
that they are classied as such. They can make tacit or even explicit choices, adapt or
adopt ways of living so as to t or get away from the very classication that may be applied
to them.” However, they inevitably change the original categorization: “what was known
about people of a kind may become false because people of that kind have changed in vir-
tue of what they believe about themselves. [...] This phenomenon [is] the looping efect
of human kinds.” Hacking, I. (1999). The Social Construction of What? Harvard University
Press, p. 34.
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it is articulated, disrupting the indexical connection between the smuggler
as a concept and its referent in the eld. To put it simply, the more people
spoke about the smugglers and human smuggling in abstract terms, the less
clear it was who (or what) exactly the smugglers were or stood for in the eld.
Here, I will show this by glimpsing into the gure of Abu Hamza, a man whose
actions in Turkey in 2015 would certainly gain him the legal appellative of “hu-
man smuggler.” What follows is a fragment of his story, as it was told to me by
himself and other people I met during eldwork.
2 The “Smuggler”
“I am not a muharrib [smuggler]!” Having said that, Abu Hamza paused for a
moment reectively, and then added: “look, I am known for being muhtaram
[respectable person], this is how people who really know who I am call me.”
A man in his early fties, Abu Hamza was himself an asylum seeker from
Syria. The rst time I met him was in Elgar, a coastal town of West Turkey, in the
courtyard of a four-star hotel near the city centre. The man was sitting around a
table where he was sipping a cup of tea while juggling three mobile phones. He
was arranging the arrival to the city of a new batch of people wishing to cross
the narrow stretch of water that separates Elgar from the Greek shores. With
him were several boys and young men that he introduced to me as his crew.
As I came to discover soon after, it was a mixed group that comprised both
migrants and smugglers. They were all Syrians who had become stuck along
the route to Europe. Even Abu Hamza was seeking to reach Europe for asy-
lum. As many others like him, he left Syria in 2012, taking the route to Italy, via
Libya. However, his journey abruptly ended in Egypt, where local authorities
detained him for a few months before sending him back to Lebanon. He tried
again. The second time he took the Balkan route: Turkey, Greece, Macedonia,
Serbia, and Hungary. Again, he did not make it. While waiting on the western
shores of Turkey to be smuggled into Europe, Abu Hamza changed his mind:
“I could not any longer watch my fellow countrymates sufering in Syria or be-
ing exploited by smugglers and locals in Turkey. I decided to do something
for them. […] These people are not only my customers: they are my brothers.
I help them because they are on the wrong side of the world.”
Abu Hamza explained to me how he decided to put together a group of his
own and help Syrian asylum seekers. In Elgar alone, in 2015, there were half a
Yurchak, A. (2013). Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation.
Princeton University Press.
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dozen of groups of facilitators and about the same number of rubber dinghies
departing at night. Each of these embarkations carried thirty to fty people to
the Greek islands of Agathonisi and Farmakonisi. There were Syrian, Kurdish,
Afghan, Iraqi, and Pakistani migrants. The largest client groups were Syrian
and Afghan asylum seekers. The majority paid around 1,000–1,300 per per-
son to reach Greek territory. Crossing the stretch that separates Turkey from
the closest Greek island took around 50 minutes.
Abu Hamza ran one of these groups. Yet, he felt he was diferent from the
other smugglers. He claimed that he was not like those who capitalized on
the hope and desperation of people who would do anything to reach Europe.
In truth, he said, he did not even think of himself as a smuggler. “If I were
[like these smugglers],” he told me, “I would not have so many friends around
Europe, so many people praying for me!” “I’ve never sent anyone to death,” Abu
Hamza insisted. “I never overload my boats with men, women and children.
I do not send them adrift waiting for the coastguard to rescue them.” Interest-
ingly, nancial gain did not seem to disqualify the morality of his actions in his
own eyes. “What I do is very expensive,” the man argues, “sometimes I pay with
my own money the journey of people who cannot aford the cost. There are
months that I lose more money than what I earn.” Abu Hamza even claimed
to operate a moral economy and privilege ethical choices over mere prot. He
would thus prioritize the transport of his nationals, guarantee a full reimburse-
ment or a free passage to the client if the rst journey was unsuccessful, and
carry some passengers – generally children, elderly and the disabled – for a
discounted fee.
At a certain point, something apparently went wrong, and Abu Hamza had
to interrupt his work. Last time I heard from him, he was already in Norway
where he was waiting to know the outcome of his asylum claim. In a long con-
versation on Skype, he explained to me how he was happy to be there, and
how he had nally reunited with his wife and children who had arrived a year
earlier. When I asked him about his activity in Turkey, he replied immediately
that he really loved helping people but unfortunately facilitating their migra-
tion was no longer sustainable. Indeed, the EU-Turkey agreement on March
2016 and the decision of many Western Balkan countries to seal their borders
in the winter of 2016 considerably stemmed the ow of people across this route
and curbed smuggling operations in Turkey. As Abu Hamza put it, “After the
EU-Turkish deal, the Turkish government started to make our life impossible.
It was too dangerous, I could be arrested at any time […] Who will take care of
(2017). Q2 2017 – Frontex Risk Analysis Network Quarterly Report. War-
saw: .
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my family, then? […] I said ‘stop’ and I left the country when I still could.” The
ow of Syrians eeing the war did not stop, though; yet, the risks for migrants
increased. Indeed, counter-smuggling operations along this route only redi-
rected unauthorized migration ows on diferent, more dangerous routes.
According to Abu Hamza, “There is no smuggler working without the police
knowing that. When Turkey decided to shut down the route, they [the authori-
ties] simply made it more expensive. […] They [the authorities] are the real
smugglers!”
3 The Associate
Many of Abu Hamza’s associates equated their involvement in the group as
belonging to a family. “Abu Hamza is a good man, he’s like a father to me.” This
is how Mahdi described the man to me a few days after I met him in Elgar.
Mahdi – in his mid-thirties – was not the only one in the crew to think that way.
This family-oriented description of the role of Abu Hamza was shared by other
members of the group. In this sense, Mahdi was adamant to set Abu Hamza
and himself apart from the so-called smugglers: “muharribin [plural for smug-
glers] are those people in Libya who make all these masakin [wretched ones,
the poor] die every day in the sea.”
Abu Hamza’s group was based on pre-existing kinship and friendship
connections, and on the idea that helping people reach their destination
was not only a legitimate form of labour, albeit criminalized, but a moral
duty. As a matter of fact, most of the members, and many of their costum-
ers, had a story similar to that of Abu Hamza. They came from the same vil-
lage in Syria. So did Mahdi, who contacted Abu Hamza for help. In the rst
two years following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the village saw erce
armed clashes between the government forces and the Free Syrian Army. It
was subsequently occupied by the Islamic State (IS) in 2013. The intense
ghting between the various factions over the years deprived the village
of basic commodities. The resulting hunger, disease, and high death rate
forced many to leave. Mahdi was one of them. Abu Hamza agreed to bring
Mahdi and his family to Europe if Mahdi worked for him in exchange. When
I asked Mahdi whether he believed he had been forced into smuggling human
beings or had gotten involved in the business voluntarily, he replied: “Look,
it’s a dangerous job. If the Turkish or Greek police catch you, you can spend
, p. 17.
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up to 10–15 years in prison. So, if I could have chosen, I would have never done
it. But—hamdulillah’ [praise to Allah]—Abu Hamza was there when I need-
ed him. Had it not been for him, my family and I would have died in Syria.”
While working in Elgar, Mahdi was waiting to have the last member of his fam-
ily in Syria smuggled into Greece before quitting smuggling and leaving for
Europe.
Things, however, did not go as Mahdi had planned. Upon my departure from
Elgar, he had agreed to do a last job for Abu Hamza. He had to escort a dozen
well-of clients, who could aford a journey onboard a fast boat, to the closest
Greek island. In theory, this last job should have earned him a few thousand
euros and he could then rejoin his brothers who were waiting for him in Greece
to continue their journey to Europe, following the Western Balkan route. On
his way to Greece, however—a few hundred meters from the Greek shore—
the boat was intercepted by Greek coastguards. Mahdi, identied as one of the
potential smugglers onboard, was arrested.
I saw Mahdi again in Athens on a sunny day in spring 2016. We arranged
to meet at a cofee shop in Omonia Square—the once commercial centre of
Athens that at the time of my research was serving as a meeting point and a
makeshift detention camp for thousands of irregular migrants stranded in the
capital of Greece. Here Mahdi told me how after being detained in a Greek
prison, he was temporarily released to wait for trial. At this meeting, a diferent
picture emerged of Abu Hamza, one that clashed with Mahdi’s earlier depic-
tion of him as a benefactor. “He was good with me when I was in Elgar,” Mahdi
conceded. Yet, he argued, “Abu Hamza forgets about his associates and friends
in the moment of need. I tried to reach him several times, but I never got a
hold of him. The only thing that he did was to send my cousin 1,000 euros that
served to pay part of the legal fees.” Mahdi went on by giving vent to his frus-
tration: “Can you believe it? He made a fortune in Turkey!” When I confronted
Mahdi with the fact that he, too, should have made money out of his involve-
ment in such a lucrative business, he looked at me and asked abruptly, “You
think that I was a muharrib?” I nodded yes. Mahdi gave me a long and contem-
plative look, after that he replied resoundingly, dismissing my reference to him
as a smuggler: “I am not muharrib. I was just the captain. Do you think that if
I were a muharrib I would be in this condition now? Muharribin make a lot of
money! If I were one of them, I would not need money to pay my lawyer now.”
To him, smugglers were Abu Hamza and other associates of him, who were
deeply involved in the business, sharing the prot; on the contrary, he spoke of
himself as the “captain” – simply a service provider. Abu Hamza was the leader
of the pack, in truth a “big muharrib,” as he then stressed, someone with wide
reaching connections who “just cares about making money.”
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4 The Migrant
Like many others, Ahmad used the Arabic term muharrib to indicate the
“smuggler.” Yet, every time he referred to Abu Hamza during the short time we
spent together in Elgar, he rather preferred the word hajj over that of muharrib
to refer to him.
When I rst met him in Elgar, Ahmad was in the hall of the hotel where
other migrants were sleeping, right next to Abu Hamza’s fancy hotel. Ahmad
left Homs in Syria when he was still an adolescent along with his brother,
younger by a few years. Like many other families, theirs covered the cost of
the journey by liquidating the few assets that they had left after months of
severe siege and starvation. It is a decision akin to gambling: as young men
leave for Europe, families get into debt and lose an economic lifeline within
their already stranded households. At the same time, if the sons succeed, they
become a mainstay of the family’s survival. Indeed, domestic survival hinges
largely on the remittances periodically sent by family members who have mi-
grated. Furthermore, acting as veritable trail-blazers, those who successfully
migrated can facilitate the migration of their kin left back in Syria, constantly
monitoring their movement and giving them useful advice on the duration of
the journey, the permeability of the borders and sharing important contacts.
Ahmad ew to Turkey precisely with the goal of facilitating the journey of his
family.
Ahmad’s collaboration with Abu Hamza was not unusual. It is rather com-
mon for migrants to work together with those facilitating their journeys
performing roles that would legally fall into the category of smuggling – such
as piloting boats, recruiting migrants, watching for police, etc. During my eld-
work, I saw this type of collaboration developing in diferent manners. Migrants
might work as recruiters, guides, or intermediaries—positions that can be cov-
ered by the same person. They might escort immigrants across the border be-
cause of their own rst-hand knowledge of the route; recruit clients because
they share the same ethnic networks; and provide the various services needed
to the migrants (food, accommodation, and so on) because of their long-term
relationship with local communities in the transit countries. They would do all
this to pay the required fees or have a decent livelihood. This is what Ahmad –
like many others – did to pay part of the smuggling fees for his family. He fa-
cilitated the connection between a group of Syrians stranded in Istanbul and
Abu Hamza’s group. This overlapping of roles introduces a further layer of
complexity by blurring the boundary between smugglers and their customers
and weakening even further the analytical grip of the term muharrib. It is not
surprising that Alan Kurdi’s father was accused of being a smuggler.
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Ahmad had left Syria four years earlier. It took him and his brother almost
four months to reach Sweden. A long and dangerous journey that they did via
Libya, through the central Mediterranean route – a sea corridor that has telling-
ly gained the appellative of al-tariq al-mawt (“the death road”) due to the num-
ber of people who lost their lives in the attempt of crossing. After obtaining
asylum in Sweden, Ahmad ew back to Turkey to get married and, afterward,
arranged the crossing of his family who had previously moved to Turkey along
with his now wife. When I met him at the lobby he was waiting for the Turkish
taxi drivers who picked up his family and took them to a nukta (the spot, point
of departure) on the beach where around 30 other migrants were on board
a ten-meter inatable boat. When his family nally departed, we joined Abu
Hamza in his room where he was tracking the boat’s itinerary using a app
on his mobile while instructing the pilot using his other phone, on the right
direction to keep. Ahmad left Turkey only when he received conrmation from
his wife that her and his family had reached the Greek shores. Before bidding
farewell, he confessed that he feared that Abu Hamza could be like any other
smuggler, unconcerned of the people who requested his services, but he was
relieved to know that “in truth, he is ‘really a good person’ [shakhs ktir tayyeb].”
The sociomoral proximity between migrants and facilitators as well as the
protracted condition of illegality that they inhabit facilitates these collabora-
tions. Yet the sense of mistrust, or that something can indeed go wrong never
leaves the minds of the migrants who work with facilitators. To Ahmad, his fam-
ily’s successful journey dispelled any doubt that Abu Hamza could have been
like any other smuggler. When Ahmad used the word muharrib, he referred
to someone wicked, evil. I encountered such a pejorative view in my conver-
sation with many migrants: “muharribin are bad,” I was constantly reminded
by many of them. However, even if muharrib carried a negative connotation,
the person who facilitates irregular journeys was not necessarily bad. He or
she can simply be someone who sneaks something or someone undetected.
Among my interlocutors, the facilitation of irregular migration was not just
about proting because the smuggler was not necessarily driven only by mate-
rial gain. It entailed a range of practices encompassing honesty, empathy, soli-
darity, and moral conduct. It involved the smugglers restricting their margin
of prot, using good quality boats, and displaying civilized and rened man-
ners with their customers. They regarded as immoral any misconduct relating
In 2016, the International Organization for Migration () estimated that 12,781 people
lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean through this route. (2017). Migrant
Deaths and Disappearances Worldwide: 2016 Analysis. ’s Global Migration Data Anal-
ysis Centre.
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to the smugglers’ quality of services or treatment of customers. The more the
smuggler stuck to this moral “code” or principles, the less he was considered a
muharrib. The outcome of the smuggling process substantially contributed to
determine the appellative: muharrib if it was bad, muhtaram or any other term
with a positive connotation if successful.
5 Conclusion
As my eld research progressed, my initial assumptions about the inner moral
inclinations of the smugglers were displaced and an altogether diferent pic-
ture emerged, or rather disappeared, from the scene. In the eld, nobody was
a smuggler, and yet I was surrounded by facilitators of irregular migration and
people who required their services.
Was Abu Hamza a trustworthy facilitator or, conversely, a vicious smuggler?
This question does not lend itself to an easy answer. Many of the people I met
had not doubt about his moral skills, others were unsure, and some changed
their mind. And yet, they all referred to the same person and the same actions.
Narrative coherence was out of the frame, of course. Narratives were contested
and multiple, and not only was the same story told in diferent ways from dif-
ferent people, but the same person could tell the same story diferently over
the time. Waiting to see the outcome of the journey, Ahmad – who at rst was
dubious – enthusiastically described Abu Hamza as a respectable person, a
shakhs ktir tayyeb. The “captain” embraced a rather opposite approach when
he rst spoke of him as a father to them and then, a few months later, accusing
the man of being a reckless muharrib. Even Abu Hamza’s self-narrative was not
so straightforward. However eloquent Abu Hamza description of himself as a
good person might be, his obsession to distance himself from the infamous cat-
egory of smuggler is indicative of the intrinsic fragility of this endeavour. Even
for the best of the facilitators there were diferent and opposing voices who
questioned their moral rectitude and concur to stick to the label “smuggler.”
At the end, whether Abu Hamza was a good or a bad person is irrelevant
here. However, with this brief narrative excursus in the actions of Abu Hamza
in Turkey, I had two interrelated goals. First of all, and perhaps most impor-
tantly, I wanted to show how those very actors who are the blunt side of the
border control and security apparatus – facilitators and migrants – reproduce
a discourse aimed to criminalize irregular migration. Indeed, quite alike the
“vox populi” in Europe, even for my research companions the smuggler was
a constant source of social anxiety. Certainly, diferences emerged in the way
the gure of the smuggler was sketched out in their accounts, and how the
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diferent actors positioned themselves in relation to this character. However,
the degree of consensus was surprising: smugglers were fundamentally evil.
The real wonder was that smugglers and migrants shared with mainstream
narratives of migration the same understanding of what a smuggler ultimately
is: a reckless criminal who preys on migrants’ vulnerability. But does this come
as a surprise?
It is worth reminding that a plethora of studies on enforcement have dem-
onstrated how the tightening of border controls and the implementation of re-
strictive immigration policies reduces safe migration mechanisms and favour
the emergence of increasingly dangerous routes where relationships between
migrants and their facilitators tend to be more exploitative. Furthermore,
narratives of smugglers as violent, especially if circulated by powerful media,
have the tendency to be resilient and highly contagious. As the militariza-
tion of the Mediterranean increased the risks faced by irregular migrants, mi-
gration ows along the Eastern Mediterranean route in 2015 reinforced in the
European public opinion the feeling of being under siege. In mainstream me-
dia, the smuggler was blamed for the countless deaths of migrants and the
alleged invasion of Europe. Press coverage of crime and violence provided a
language that placed the “refugee crisis” on the shoulders of the smugglers at
the same time that it aforded the European Union (EU) with a means of dis-
tancing itself from the evident failure to protect and support asylum seekers.
Small wonder that facilitators of irregular migration and migrants so anxiously
dissociated themselves from the criminal label stuck onto them by iterating
dominant narratives in expressing outrage and condemning the “smuggler ma-
a.” “Nobody takes pride in being called muharrib,” Ashraf told me. A formerly
smuggled migrant from Syria who spent over a year with Syrian smugglers in
Greece, he knew that his friends “might be proud of smuggling, might even
enjoy what they do, but they would never be happy to be called smugglers.”
Secondly, I wanted to shed light on how the term “smuggler” is morally- laden
and in fact fails to identify any actual person on the eld. More than anything
See, for example, Achilli, L. (2018). “The ‘Good’ Smuggler.”
Briggs, C.L. (2007). “Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relations between Narrative and
Violence” Cultural Anthropology, 22(3): 315–56.
I agree here with those who have argued how the “crisis” narrative is part and parcel of
a European discourse on “migration” or “refugees” that fails to reect the empirics and
ultimately depoliticize the context in which migration occurs. See, among others, De
Genova, N. et al. (2016). “Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of Europe,”
New Keywords Collective. Near Futures Online, pp. 1–45.
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else, smuggler and his vernacular equivalent muharrib speak of a generalized
condition of moral panic over immigration that media have concurred to gen-
erate. The simultaneous ubiquity and evanescence of the smuggler is largely
explained by the absence of a clear referent. Blame is located rmly on the
smuggler; yet, it is less clear who the smuggler is. This does not mean that mi-
grants were unaware of who was organizing the journeys, neither were they
naïve when it came to facilitators’ economic interests and the chances of being
exploited and deceived. At the same time, however, they did not underesti-
mate the importance of their services and often referred to these facilitators of
irregular migration as saviours. In Elgar, Abu Hamza was an honourable person
when things went as planned; a smuggler if migrants believed he did not keep
his promises. What the struggle to pin down the smuggler ultimately tells us is
that the term has lost its capacity to describe local contexts of human move-
ment. As Wendy Vogt aptly put it, smugglers “are the boogeymen of the migra-
tion industry, an omnipresent danger, but disembodied and dicult to see.”
Against this background, the smuggler becomes the taunting spectre of our
age: easy to evoke, hard to locate.
Vogt, W. (2016). “Stuck in the Middle With You: The Intimate Labours of Mobility and
Smuggling along Mexico’s Migrant Route” Geopolitics, 21(2): 366–386.
