Migration Fundamentals - Trafficking, Smuggling, and Human Rights
- Document number
- 1424
- Date
- 2005
- Title
- Migration Fundamentals - Trafficking, Smuggling, and Human Rights
- Author/publisher
- Jacqueline Bhabha, Harvard University for Migration Information Source
- Availability
- View/save PDF version of this document
- Document type(s)
- Research/Study/Analysis,
- Summary
- In recent years, the smuggling of human beings across international borders has grown rapidly. A small-scale cross border activity affecting a handful of countries has become a multimillion-dollar activity that is global in scope. Information about human smuggling — the numbers of people smuggled, the conditions that they endure in transit and their treatment on arrival — is patchy at best. It is currently estimated that some 800,000 people are smuggled across borders every year.The spread of human smuggling needs to be understood in the context of globalizationand migration. Since 1965, the number of international migrants has doubled to some175 million persons at the turn of the millennium. Prospects of a better life abroad,poverty, economic marginalization, political and social unrest, and conflict are allincentives to move.
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