Okay. I think I think we will. We'll begin now.
It's great to see such a large audience.
And I'm really pleased to welcome you all to our third one of these little seminars.
This but one more start. So don't don't forget about the next one.
But anyway, it's my pleasure today to welcome Dr. Gabrielle Sanchez to talk to us about her research into human smuggling.
Gabriella is a fellow at the Migration and Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute,
where she leads the migrant smuggling research agenda. She's as a socio cultural anthropologist with a background in law enforcement.
Gabrielle His work focuses on the study of irregular migration facilitation and the crimes often associated with it.
The work which is carried out in all sorts of places, including the Americas, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe,
is recognised for relying on a community centred human rights approach for the study of mobility,
which it draws from direct interactions and research contributions from smuggling facilitators,
and seeks to reduce the research gaps between the experiences of people on the migration pathway and the policy responses that target them.
Gabriela is the author of a number of different books and articles, including the 2016 book with Routledge, Human Smuggling and Border Crossing,
and the co-editor of a 2018 special issue on Migrants Smuggling of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.
She's affiliated with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime and is a co-editor for Border Criminology,
which, as you know, is based here at the Criminology Sense, the criminology.
And currently she's part of a U.S. Mexico border based initiative on young people's roles in the facilitation of migrant journeys.
She conducts fieldwork as part of an EU funded project on human smuggling in Libya and Tunisia and
is working on a new book project on the emergence of smuggling as a global policing practice.
So welcome, Gabriela. Thank you so much. And can you hear me or do I need to bring the microphone?
I'm not even sure it's on. Oh, no, but it looks it looks good anywhere.
It's relaxed. So thank you so much to all of you for being here.
I as soon as I came in, you know, I know that we got here a little bit early, but it's been really,
really exciting and really interesting to see that there is so much interest about this topic, you know,
topic of facilitation, and especially on the fact that we are looking at it or that the work that we have been carrying out,
that the NPC has a different approach to what we tend to to commonly hear about.
But let me start singing by saying how, how happy and how excited and how grateful I am that all of you are here today.
Of course. Thank Mary for the invitations. Great to come to Oxford.
It's kind of like my only opportunity to come and catch up with friends, you know?
So I was also very excited, you know, if you saw me going in and hugging, you know,
several people, I like to be hugs, but also, you know, I was just excited.
And I want to before I start with the presentation, I want to give you a quick sense of where my research comes from.
I was born and raised in Mexico in a very small community.
When I I remember when I first started doing my research, I used to tell people it's not even on Google.
You know, it was that tiny. I was like, No, come on, it has to be there.
Like, it wasn't me. And this community relied for its mobility.
You know, we were it's in the state of Michoacan. Perhaps some of you have heard about this state.
It has not so popular tradition.
We are there. So we have very serious issues with drug trafficking organisations and organised crime.
But this was also what used to be called the cradle of Mexican migration.
So everybody, especially in the case of men, was expected to migrate.
And all the men from my community starting in the 1960s from, let's say,
the 1960s to pretty much the 1990s, relied on facilitators to cross the border.
So I was one of the few members of my family who did not, and all my relatives used to make fun of me.
It was like, Oh, come on, you didn't suffer. Like, Oh, we like you didn't cross the border, you flew in.
That doesn't count. And but I never thought that I was going to end up studying or documenting this processes.
That came a few years later when, in fact, after I was able to attain legal status to work in the United States.
And the very first job that I was given was in. Detention. I got to speak Spanish.
And this was in the state of Arizona along the US-Mexico border.
Some of you have probably heard, you know, a few years back about Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
He used to force inmates to wear pink underwear,
set up a tent out in the middle of the desert to bring in people who had been arrested for minimal offences.
Well, he was my boss for seven years. Mm hmm. And initially, I was assigned to the drug trafficking research unit.
And eventually there was a shift when it came to enforcement priorities.
And migration became popular politically.
And at that point, they decided that it was a very good idea to set up a smuggling investigative unit.
So I was assigned to this group. And when I first started doing this job, which involved carrying out investigations,
criminal investigations in the community with the people who had been impacted by the crimes,
but most importantly, what the people who had been charged for smuggling.
I started to realise that there was a narrative that didn't match the one that as a court officer I had to apply whenever I went to court saying,
well, this is organised crime.
This person is part of a very vast network that just extends across borders and is facilitating the migration of the irregular migration of people.
And the one that was coming from all investigations, from all of my exchanges with the people in detention,
not a single time I came across a smuggling kingpin or any kind of network or people making thousands of dollars over their involvement.
In fact, most of the people that I interviewed over those years where undocumented migrants themselves, single mothers and elderly couples,
families who had disabled children, who were trying to make a living out of facilitating the journeys of people who were crossing the border.
And there was no criminal intention on their part to become involved in the activity.
This was also very much embedded within the community.
So while law enforcement was setting up this distance or raids to catch the people and certainly catch people,
facilitators were operating in public places, markets outside of churches because they were not hidden.
This was a resource for mobility that was available to communities.
So that was my introduction to the topic.
I quit my job to go and get a Ph.D.
And in fact, my first book is based on interviews and contacts with 66 smuggling facilitators,
some of them women because women are involved in the smuggling facilitation.
Despite this images are representations that you get to see of the African smuggler,
the Muslim smuggler, the groups that are so dominant in the rhetoric of smuggling in Europe.
And from there, from following the completion of my Ph.D., I've been very fortunate to do additional research in other parts of the world,
always trying to understand the facilitation of mobility.
And I'm going to tell you why I don't call it smuggling per se. Rick, why should we question the the word?
Because I see the how I've been able to document again,
how much this is part of a sense of community and mobility that many times has become not only criminalised, but a historicist.
And we'll talk about that in just one second. Today's presentation and I'm try to I am going to try to go through it as fast as I can,
but at the same time to provide you as much detail as I can so that we can also have a very productive Q&A.
I'm very much looking forward to your questions. Is related to the work that I have been carried out at the NPC for the last year or so.
This was a field work that was part of the Horizon 2020 initiative on security in North Africa, and especially in particular the migrant smuggling.
Please check back in here at the factory. You can that.
Okay. If not, I'll just speak up. I just don't like the sound.
So in here, you know. You can see my picture.
So when I first joined this initiative, one of the concerns I had was the very language that was being used as part of the project.
Migration was articulated very much as a threat, something that had to be contained,
that had to be stopped, and particularly, you know, irregular migration from North Africa.
Most of us, I think, again, especially in the context of, you know, UK and Europe,
these have become pretty acquainted to this narrative of Libya as the main source of concern when it comes to and migrant smuggling.
And the very language of the initiative of the project that I was part of referring to
Libya as an area of limited statehood or posing a threat to the security of the EU,
already gives you a sense of what was the direction of the project.
It was pretty much identified where going to be the tipping points, where we had to identify the risks,
how many smuggling operators in this case where operating within Libya and many of these concerns
followed the now infamous video from CNN showing what they depicted as slave market markets in Libya.
You probably got to see that quick video with this blurry faces where some men who appear to be of what we typically know,
sub-Saharan or sub-Saharan African migrants were being traded or bartered by.
We didn't see the voices in the video, but there you don't see the faces, but you can hear those voices.
And speaking in Arabic again, communicating this notion that Libyans are the ones that are facilitating the exploitation of migrants,
and especially with the label of trafficking, human trafficking or Mother Nature slavery.
So my role as part of the project was to again determine the scenarios that would lead to the growth of migrant smuggling in Libya,
what that could mean to the security of the EU. And I was assigned to you know, I was asked to produce two case studies,
one precisely on the challenges that were posed by smuggling facilitators within Tunisia,
and another one on that focus that was central specifically on Libya.
So today I'm going to share with you that in a sense, it's still very preliminary findings from that second case study.
I don't want to be turning like this, but I didn't want to be standing there. So just I'm just going to stand.
So there's there were a few issues, of course,
with that of the messaging and the narratives that were connected with smuggling or that were connected with the overall project.
But there's here I identify for that. From my experience as somebody carrying out research and mobility facilitation, we've raised concerns.
First of all, the hyper emphasis on militias and tribes that has been mobilised in the case of Libya,
this very Orientalist depiction of Oh God, I just length of the name Lawrence of Arabia.
Like, you know, there's militias out there in the middle of nowhere in catching migrants,
trying to get them into distant locations and that that's here and exploit them where the smugglers are.
Again, was this very specific, a specifically gendered and racialised persona of a male Muslim smuggler?
I think the last time I was here actually showed some of the images, but I don't think that I have to share them with you.
You just have to think about some of this representations that are very common or commonly used to describe smuggling.
And also, again, there was this focus on the sub-Saharan African body, black men, precisely.
There was, of course, this ahistorical treatment of mobility in the region.
We tend to hear not only as part of the media discourse, but also the policy discourse,
that mobility of this kind is unprecedented, that this had never been seen before,
that levels of exploitation like this have never been documented in the region, and in fact,
that these militias and tribes have reached, again, unprecedented reach and need to be contained.
And all of them, of course, you know, their only objective is to get people.
You know, across the Mediterranean into Europe, there was another key element of this narrative that keeps popping up.
And in fact, we're going to spend some time talking about that today.
The trope of modern day slavery or the slaves that came out of that video.
But most importantly, and for those of you who are right now thinking of going out to the field or who are or who are,
they are carrying out some of the research. I had concerns of the methodological level.
Most of the work, most of the research,
most of the data that is coming out of Libya comes from a very or has been generated by a very small group of researchers.
Most of them are men, European men, who have gained access to Libya.
So we really and the lens that most of them have used has been pretty much the lands of security.
These are men who probably who know probably who go and carry out some of this research,
protected many times with by their organisations that support financially their journeys.
And they have pretty much dictated that this course coming out of Libya, if you look at the reports,
all we hear about is detention centres, slavery, the boats, the militias.
There's really no discussion or no conversation outside of those margins.
And some think that as somebody who has also carried out, again,
this research in other parts of the world and who is very much he might be doing comparative work,
there's I also have this concern that this has silenced or has systematically,
structurally silenced local researchers, the ability of Libyan scholars themselves to produce their work and being able to share it outside of Libya,
if it's on the grounds again that it's too dangerous for them or that they don't know how to do it.
But of course, for you, researchers have the ability to do so. This slide right here summarises some of the points that we back up a little over.
About four or five years ago, a group of us researchers, primarily sociocultural anthropologists,
started to come together to bring together our empirical work on the facilitation of mobility.
And this are some of the ideas that as a cohort we have been mobilising.
We are critical, for example,
of this criminological or hyper criminological angle that or the criminological angle that dominates the conversation of migrant smuggling.
The very fact that we refer to it as a smuggling already infers or implies that we are framing it as a crime.
The facilitation of mobility is not a crime.
And in fact, in many countries, despite the fact that we refer to it as smuggling,
many countries do not have legislation that typifies that as a crime.
So we tend to use it as a term has become migrant smuggling has become a very use term.
But we really have to understand that it's come it comes or is derived from this criminological angle.
There is, of course the very strong literature in the migration industry and brokerage and the economics of illegality.
One of the concerns that we had at the time was precisely the fact that we were not only seeing this notion of production or monetary exchange,
but that we understood it as part of a community and collective knowledge how people move,
how people generate the knowledge, the information, and also how they share protection when they move.
Just think about your own journeys. Whenever you travel, whenever you go to places where you get lost, who helps you along the way?
Who have been the people who have helped you? Who have rescued you at some point?
This is also very much based on this angle's draw quite a bit from feminist scholarship concerning Labour
because we understand the facilitation of migrant journeys as a form of intimate labour for they preserve life.
If those it's those of you who have work with migrants who can't or who come from a migrant background,
have probably at some time documented or heard stories of how people care for each other.
Along the migration pathway is the kind of support that is provided.
The friendships that get developed along the way, the love that emerge in something that emerges from those people.
So it's not only this narrative of pain or pain or suffering or abuse and exploitation,
but also one of care and trust that is indeed braided with profit.
So here we are not talking about them being separate entities or categories, but actually them coming together.
They are not separate. And when you come, they come together over migration, purpose you.
We understand this facilitation of migrant journeys. Again, not smuggling for that is the crime.
Though we criminological term as an informal form of labour, we can deeply embedded in community formation.
So the question for the project became no longer.
You know, again, what are the tipping points or how are smuggling organisations situated or what?
What can we learn about the networks and their extent? But what are their relationships that exist in the facilitation of migrant journeys?
Tell us about the conditions experienced on the ground not only by migrants, but the people people who live in Libya.
And that is because migrants are not separated from the community.
We really wanted to understand what was happening with the communities, had large how they understood each other,
how they interacted with one another, and what we could learn from that day to day interaction.
If that is not present, that is so absent from the way media tends to talk about facilitation of mobility.
Here we go to. Well, how do you do it? How do you how do you actually go and talk with people in the field?
Many times going back to the Libyan case. We've read about all of the stories that portray many researchers as adventurers.
You go out and you find the militias.
You know, when you go and you talk to a guy that has, you hear I'm in a sense, making a little bit of fun of some of that literature.
Now, I went and I talked to all RB Mohammed and he welcomed me to his home.
And that's how I got access to the secret side of the militias in the desert.
You don't really need to do that. In in that is that is something that our work has been able to document one, you know, several times along the way.
And that is, again, because the facilitation of mobility is deeply embedded in the community.
So when we go out to carry out this research, we don't go to communities asking like, Oh, did you know this mother's in if we're going to find them?
You can't imagine what would happen to us if we ever did that right.
Because my people would not only laugh at us, we probably will chase us out of tune.
So but we did a for for is a specific project.
I did carry out a qualitative strategy, very much aware of the restrictions involving the war, involving carrying out research, whether it's in Libya.
So the closest option was to go to Tunisia to the border that it shares from Libya.
This was also part of the restrictions that the EU that the European University placed,
mostly because of security for work for me as a researcher and I carried out this field work during the first quarter of this year.
So it was January, February and March, and it involved visits to migrant smuggling, hopes to what are your end?
And also some some of the documents from the EU defined as migrant smuggling cuts across the country being special attention to Tunisia,
Libya, border dynamics here as in many other borders.
But I was able to document and what other researchers have already also been able to
document is the president of the presence of multiple illicit illegal sized economies in.
Once you start driving into or down to Tunisia, closer to the border,
you see a lot of fuels dense with this fuel that is being smuggled from Libya into the country.
And surprisingly, migrant smuggling was not a big deal because it ranked in terms of interest
or attention that was paid to it was not really that much of a of a concern.
What really mattered to people was to get fuel for their vehicles.
So smuggling was not at the top of their concerns.
The data was also supplemented by qualitative interviews that are carried out with migrants
living in Italy in the context of a smaller project that we had going on at the ICC.
This where the Bangladeshi and men from sub-Saharan African countries who had spent time in Libya and actually been there
and who had been quote unquote successful in their journeys across the Mediterranean with the assistance of facilitators.
And in terms of methodology, this was a grounded theory approach.
You know, theory developed from the data. It was very much following or allowing the respondents to guide the very direction of the inquiry.
So what what do what have we been able to document there?
What were the the some of the first initial findings in some of this may come as a surprise to several of you.
Again, knowing how much the narrative and the message coming out of Libya and or Libya is how mediated it is.
But migration into Libya is still quite strong. People are coming to this.
They into Libya. Despite all of this representations and all the images of conflict and kills, people are coming in.
That's primarily because the conditions across the countries,
throughout the countries where the people are migrants are coming from are remain unchanged.
The possibility of finding jobs primarily need formal activities or formal labour are still considered quite strong by migrants going there.
This includes North African migrants. So that is people from Tunisia, people from Egypt have continued to travel into Libya.
Something bad being on the Tunisian side of the border is very telling.
Of that situation was the very fact that many people had actually crossed the border from Libya into Tunisia at some
point and decided to go back to Libya because they decided or they perceived the conditions as less productive for them.
They were not as safe. They didn't feel as safe staying in Tunisia as they did when they were in Libya.
And we can talk about this notion of perceptions of safety.
Of course, another factor was the high value of the Libyan currency.
Despite the valuation, the Libyan dinar has the highest value of all the currencies in North Africa.
And there was also, of course, the issue of scant cash availability.
Cash is not readily available.
When you go to Libya, which has implications in terms of labour that we're going to be talking about later in the presentation.
But most importantly, did stakeholders and people in general described was this concern,
this overall concern over the hyper emphasis of the detention facility because of how,
again, the message that is coming out from Libya, as everybody said, the detention facilities, look at what is happening there.
It's horrible. We need to stop it.
If you look at official numbers, 4 million people in detention facilities is estimated to be about 1% of the entire migrant population in Libya.
Of course, here I'm not saying that they don't matter or that we should not care,
but rather to understand how that very small group or the conditions of this small group are helping define the policy for an entire country.
And this has not been questioned in the sense that all of the responses, all of the policy,
all of the policy responses and policing responses have focussed primarily on people in detention,
when, again, this is a very small portion of those in the country, migrants in the country.
Another factor, what's important for for me in terms of deciding the research was again,
not not to understand Libya monolithically when realistically because that is that's the very way we talk about the countries that way.
It's just Libya as if it was just this mass in uniform place.
So and this is primarily given the restrictions that I have in terms of access, but I also divided the findings in regions.
But I was able to document along the border, going to the border region and what the migrants themselves were reporting,
what's happening in Tripoli and the surrounding areas.
So who is behind the facilitation of migrant journeys?
Why long border regions? Well, this is actually run by local populations.
So local people whose presence and also involvement in the facilitation of mobility goes back not only to the years of the revolution in 2011,
Ben Affleck but and this is something that creates some confusion when we bring it up.
But people have been engaged in the facilitation of mobility not for centuries, perhaps for thousands of years.
Facilitating transits, allowing people to travel throughout the desert, and most importantly,
relying on this community knowledge to facilitate or transit has been part of the tradition of many of this.
So this is not new. It's is the way that the language they became involved was definitely not new.
And the label of militias and tribes actually obscures the levels of marginalisation that they face.
So these are, again, communities that are hours away from let alone a medium sized city for that.
And this are regions of the country that are have not only been forgotten under the regime,
but which very location made it very difficult for anybody to access them to get to
to where they were located in as we have been able to document in other regions.
This facilitation of mobility became a strategy to reduce the levels of local inequality.
What do I mean by that? The earnings, whichever earnings that are generated by smuggling, are immediately recirculated into the economy.
We have this idea from a primarily comes from representations that are circulating in the media that smuggling facilitators and thousands,
if not millions or trillions or trillions of dollars for their trade.
The actual earnings are very small.
If when you are in a part every month of the country, there is very little that you can do with that money or perhaps reinvesting it.
Again, this is this earnings benefit.
Not only the, quote unquote, smugglers themselves or the facilitators, but actually the people they live with, the people in the community.
There's a lot of concern on the part of international organisations as well because they have seen
an increase in the numbers of women and children who have joined the process of facilitation,
also in an attempt to reduce their levels of marginalisation and precarity.
Kind of on a side note, this is the work that women and children perform is also part of the project that I have on the US-Mexico border,
which reveals very similar outcomes.
I'll be happy to share those with you as well. But so that was the part of the country that I had access to.
It was again methodologically impossible for me to go to into Libya, but the migrants themselves had a lot to say about their time there,
and they pretty much guided the conversation in terms of when it comes to when it came to describing what their everyday life was.
There was was like when they were in Tripoli time you so we tend to there there's a very
I think one of the main finding so or differences rather that emerge from the the data
was the fact that along the coast and also when you just in Tripoli itself there was no
migrants were more likely than locals to be involved in the facilitation of journeys.
And what were they doing?
Well, they were very much involved with recruiting, recruiting all their migrants, trying to help them, to help them, to help get them on the boats.
That's a very common strategy and facilitation.
You get a reduction of your fee or you actually get to travel for free if you are able to get enough people in the boat.
So migrants were very active on that.
They were also given a reduction of their fees if they agreed to pilot some of the boats, which has also been extensively documented.
There were also reports of how eventually many of those who had become stuck in a sense,
or who had no other ways of earning or generating an income, had relied on extortion or in kidnappings.
And more. A lot of the work was not only carried out for me.
In fact, migrants never, never mentioned or never never refer to the people in the city in this context as smugglers or anything like what?
Brokers. That was the actual word that keep popping up.
Brokers and brokers were not only people from Libya many times or Libyans themselves many times.
They were also migrants who have been in the country for a very long period of time.
People who were already established in-country and who were facilitating themselves.
Migrant journeys. Coordinating them. And something that was similar to what I was able to document along the border was the fact
that the facilitation of journeys is producing employment or even employment opportunities.
So I'll talk about income in a second, not only for.
For smuggling, facilitation, smugglers, smuggling facilitators, but for people in the community.
And this is because, once again, labour opportunities are limited.
But let's see, where do I see myself as a disillusioned with the right not only for migrants,
but also for people who are already living within within Libya, who have been there for a long period of time.
One aspect that kept that has been documented in the form of many, many migrants who have actually made it to Europe.
Many of them really did not want to come to Europe.
Europe was not part of their plans. And when you ask them, then you know, what happened?
What was how was life in Libya like for you? There were specific moments,
the specific experiences that eventually led them to or led them to decide to to
get on one of the boats or look for the services of a smuggling facilitator.
Many times this experience has involved kidnapping, extortion, series of robberies.
But it was also many times the outcome of family pressure, families demanding money.
In a country where you can't really make a lot of it,
you may be able to find a job to work for an employer for some time in exchange for room and board, but not generate actual income.
That was for many of the people that I interviewed.
One of the decision making elements.
Well, you know, my family's putting pressure on me. I've been kidnapped or threatened with being kidnapped.
I'm losing money.
Another factor that was very kept that was mentioned several times was the fact that there was the amount of money that they had paid for.
Let me rephrase this, that their initial smuggling fee, what they had paid to get to Libya, they had not been able to pay that off.
And the inability to make any more payments had actually played a role in their decision to travel somewhere out of Libya.
But the notion of Europe was not necessarily part of how they described their journeys.
Very few people, and this is from my experience, this was also very similar to what I used to to see along the US-Mexico border.
People used to say that they were going north if it was almost a naughty U.S.,
but there was no clear definition of what I'm going to this specific state and going to this specific city.
There was just a different space that they were migrating to.
I think this is one of the again, one of the questions on everybody's minds and something that I'm asked about constantly.
You're frequently like, well, but what about human trafficking?
There were again the videos and we cannot deny and I am on and please do not think that that's what I'm doing,
but I'm denying the suffering or that I don't believe that people are experiencing exploitation.
And in the case of Libya, really just trying to understand what is actually happening on the ground.
So human trafficking, we have to take that critical look at the term was, in fact,
not much of a concern in terms of the in the very term, the very articulation of the term, the human not.
I think human trafficking is very much of a Western trope in how we think
about the relationships and labour of relationships that emerge among people.
People did speak about being sold, but this was not in the same sense that we understand being sold or being a slave,
but rather it was part of an exchange of this bartering of labour.
People would go and sell their own labour to others, especially in the case.
But in a situation like Libya, when there's not a lot of cash around or cash available and there's a high need for protection.
So what many migrants used, many migrants described doing,
was they would go and find an employer in work for him or her in exchange, again, for room and board.
Occasionally, some of those employers were able to pay them a little bit of money, but if not,
migrants trade that many migrants were okay with that in the sense that being in a steady place,
in a safe place, where they were not required to travel to other parts of the city, providing them with a sense of safety and stability.
And so, again,
what we see here are primarily mostly labour interactions that emerge from the lack of available cash rather than specific forms of exploitation.
At the same time, it is very clear that migrants are not always able to control the conditions of that exploitation.
What that means is an employer can probably can continue demanding labour or it can, for example, stop providing a place to stay or providing food.
And many of these cases, migrants will just leave because they were not staying there.
They are not going to for many of those things to happen.
And but again, this these relationships are mutual.
They are not only you know, it's not only what happens to the migrants, but also how the people who employ them may benefit from this.
So from this interactions. So this kind of exchange allowed employers many times migrants themselves to have access to labour as well or even safety.
There were many references in the throughout the interviews of how people used to say that they would care for one another.
Their employers used to care for them, but they would also protect their employers, take care of their children.
Many times employers would pay smuggling fees for migrants as well so that they could travel.
So once again, there's this level of care, exchange and partnership that is very much obscured by the narratives of human trafficking and slavery.
Okay. So I think we have we're going to have plenty of time for for discussion.
But I'm moving, too, to the conclusions.
Think if I if I want for if I want you to take away one idea from the presentation
is the fact that the facilitation of mobility is a strategy to counter precarity.
That's the bottom line. People are not becoming rich.
People are becoming wealthy, rather, from engaging in this activity.
What we tend to label as migrant smuggling is an activity of the poor and for the poor.
There's not hierarchies, there's no networks, there's no millions that are stored anywhere.
These are people, most of the people who are ever detected or apprehended in the context of food mobility facilitation are
people who are making this to supplement all of their incomes in other income from other sources of labour.
But so in the case in the specific case of of Libya, what we see is this existence of a labour market that has come to rely on bartering.
Given the the absence of cash or limits when it comes to cash, the very end.
This is, again, where we can from the outside, we tend to label or we can label that as a form of exploitation.
We also see this this emergence of transactions and with the lack of a stability.
And, of course, increasing inequality and marginalisation.
And then again, it's something that I always start with that I really ask people to think about.
Again, the representations, the way migrant suffering tends to be circulated about the suffering migrant, the body of the suffering migrant,
and the very orientalist and even imperialistic tropes that are associated with facilitation, in this case militias and tribes.
The narrative of migrant smuggling is one of those perfect fictions exist.
They allow to criminalise poor communities or marginalised communities under the label of organised crime,
because it's very easy to just say it's organised crime. Who did that?
Or It's the organised crime networks.
And again, this claims of of migrant smuggling generating this very large profits are really not sustainable from what we get to see on the evidence.
And this is, again,
because we see this convergence of the paths that migrants use for their journeys with the existence of very marginalised and isolated communities.
But I think one of the well, the two most important points to take away primarily with in the case of Libya,
it's that we need to start thinking beyond the narrative of smuggling.
We need to start thinking beyond slavery, especially because Libya is here to stay.
It's not going to go anywhere. And there's no really clear strategy when it comes to policy wise and what is going to happen in the country.
And by only narrowing it down to the conditions in detention,
we think we are perpetuating or facilitating wide spread of inequality across the country.
So any solution or any kind of alternative that is proposed or articulated for Libya at this time is going to have to
understand that the facilitation of journeys has become an essential part of the way in which people generate an income,
especially amid marginalisation and inequality can stop right there.
And I would just thank you for your attention, and I look forward to your questions.