The people smuggling trade is a high-profit, low-risk crime. Pic taken from FMT News.
BERLIN: Waves of desperate people are slipping across international borders every year and smugglers are making billions from an industry built on human misery.
The secretive nature of this dark and deadly trade means experts can provide only an educated estimate of the profits it generates for the criminals involved.
But the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) best assessment is that it’s worth a staggering $US10 billion a year.
“It could even be more,” says Frank Laczko, the director of the IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre in Berlin.
Laczko is a global leader in migration research and despairs about what the world still doesn’t know: how many people are engaged in smuggling, how many people are smuggled each year, and how many migrants are dying during their journeys.
The several thousand deaths the IOM documents each year is presumed to be just a fraction of the true figure. Read more
