People-trafficking and Illegal Migration: Not Just Human but International Security Challenges
By Mark Galeotti

Part of this article originally appeared in the author’s ‘People-trafficking erodes security in former Soviet states’, Jane’s Intelligence Review, vol. 17, no. 4 (2005) and is used with permission.

Illegal migration and the trafficking of humans for sexual and other purposes inevitably receives much attention at the national and international level. It is, after all, a source of untold human misery that intersects with a wide range of other concerns, from the treatment of women and children across the globe to the survival of slavery in other forms. It is probably fair to say, though, that passionate rhetoric and column inches of communiqué has not translated into policy as readily as it ought. To a considerable extent this reflects a lagging appreciation that they are not just global tragedies, they also need to be considered challenges to national and transnational security.

The UN characterizes human trafficking — the use of coercion, force or subterfuge to transport and exploit people for profit, as opposed to human smuggling, in which the subject is a willing illegal migrant — as the fastest-growing criminal business worldwide, worth $32 billion annually. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that there are 12.3 million adult and children trafficking victims world-wide. The majority are forced laborers (77% in South and Southeast Asia), but 1.39 million are women and children coerced into commercial sexual exploitation. Two thirds of all victims are trafficked domestically; the rest across borders, and over half are women and girls. Millions more illegal migrants seek to build new lives in new countries, many of whom will also end up being exploited, persecuted or living in poverty. This is a human catastrophe, but it is increasingly clear that it also has serious and growing implications for national and international security. While being two separate issues, illegal migration and people trafficking can therefore be treated in this respect as parts of the same basic phenomenon. Furthermore, it is a truly global issue: according to the ILO, “The phenomenon of trafficking for forced or compulsory labour is growing so fast that most countries in the world fit into one of the three categories” – country of origin, transit country or destination country.

This is also a growing problem. In 2009 and the first half of 2010, the level of human trafficking has increased, despite early hopes that the economic slowdown would also shrink this market. The opposite was true. Not only did the declining global demand for labour generate a larger pool of workers willing to take greater risks in the hope of possible economic opportunities, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation, but the pressure on profits encouraged unscrupulous employers to favor cheap forced labour. Even some wholly reputable enterprises moved to subcontract production and services unknowingly to such users of trafficked workers because they are cheapest. Furthermore, many organised crime groupings felt the pressure on revenue streams linked with the vicissitudes of the legitimate economy, such as protection racketeering. As a result, a number were forced to lean more heavily on such activities as drug dealing or people trafficking.

The Eurasian dimension

This is clearly visible in post-Soviet Eurasia, which represents a depressing but useful case study of the human and national security impacts of migration and trafficking. Given the strength of domestic organised crime and massive economic inequity, it is hardly surprising that Russia is a major source country of women trafficked for sexual exploitation as well as a transit country for illegal migrants heading towards Europe. There is also a substantial internal flow of victims of trafficking from the countryside to the towns, largely women and children being forced into prostitution. The Russian government has increased both its rhetorical commitment to combating the problem and also taken practical steps, including making amendments to the Criminal Code in December 2003 outlawing people-trafficking. However, a lack of concrete results yet and a failure to make progress over victim-protection measures has meant that Russia remains at Tier 2 Watch List status in the USA’s annual assessment of progress in compliance with best-practice standards of combating people trafficking. More generally, any attempts to combat the problem will have to take place in a wider context of progress in controlling organised crime and official corruption – both of which remain very much long-term goals.

Russian gangs are increasingly active in illegal migration and people trafficking, and land routes to Europe, especially through Ukraine, are increasingly being supplemented by the use of flights out of Moscow and St Petersburg or ships from St Petersburg. Most of their operations involving Russian nationals are related to people-smuggling, with women and children sent to forced prostitution in Europe and the Gulf States. However, they are also now developing a role as facilitators of illegal migration. Their initial market is from other post-Soviet states. A report from the Rosbalt news agency in 2004, for example, said that Moscow city and region contained around 700,000 illegal foreign nationals; some come to work, more using it as a waystation before continuing westward. Of these, an estimated 500,000 came from other post-Soviet states. This is a trend which has remained stable in recent years.

Ukraine, like Russia, has become a key source and transit country for illegal migration and people-trafficking, and it faces much the same problems. The port of Odessa and Kiev’s two airports and railway hubs are especially important waystations. As the poorest country in Europe, Moldova’s situation is even more serious. It has experienced a hemorrhage of its population through illegal migration and people trafficking: Moldovan woman and children have become mainstays of the prostitution industries in Western Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East, and men and woman have been trafficked or voluntarily moved to Europe and Russia for cheap or high-risk/low-prestige labour and begging. The main routes include across the border into Romania or through Russia on the way either westwards by land, sea or air, or else by air to Israel.

On the other hand, while relative economic hardship would seem to make Belarus a high risk for illegal migration and people-trafficking, the relatively high level of state security and a strong commitment to defending the integrity of the country’s borders have so far kept this to manageable levels. There is still an outflow of women trafficked for sexual exploitation in Europe, Russia, Japan and the Middle East, but the police have had appreciable successes.

Illegal migration and people-trafficking is also a problem in the Caucasus region. Armenians and Azeris are trafficked largely to Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates for both forced labour and sexual exploitation, but neither country is a major transit route. Georgians are trafficked in the same way, but there is some evidence that the country also offers a route from Russia to Turkey. All three countries are making some progress towards combating illegal migration and people-trafficking, with the creation of action plans and specialist police units. However, in many cases this is still limited by a lack of resources, corruption and the need to adapt to and adopt international best practice. The US Department of State has, for example, raised concerns about the way members of Azerbaijan’s anti-trafficking police unit are not properly vetted but were largely selected by informal means.

Most of the countries of Central Asia are at once an illegal migration and people-trafficking source, transit and destination countries, not least because of the market for forced labour and opportunities for further onwards migration into Russia. However, the Middle East (especially the United Arab Emirates and Syria), Turkey, South Korea and China are all significant markets for trafficking victims. As elsewhere, trails blazed by drug traffickers – whose commodities have a higher value/bulk ratio and need rather less logistical support – have been taken up by illegal migration and people-trafficking gangs. The Kyrgyz town of Osh, for example, infamous as a drug-trafficking hub, has acquired much the same role for people trafficking. Likewise, as well as handling a large share of the country’s opium, Tajikistan has become the main country for transit migrants from Afghanistan, as they travel to other post-Soviet countries and further to the West, alongside the hundreds of thousands of Tajiks who leave to seek better working conditions abroad (who largely end up in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or the nearer regions of Russia: Novosibirsk, Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk). Turkmenistan, by contrast, has not experienced such a serious illegal migration and people-trafficking problem, although economic and social change and the abolition of exit visas looks set to change this.

Trafficking as a security issue

The experience of Eurasia demonstrates the way illegal migration and people-trafficking creates four different kinds of international security challenges:

Border Security: The first and most immediate security threat raised by illegal migration and people-trafficking is that sustained and regular illegal crossing of national borders begins to undermine the integrity of those borders. Facilitators begin to develop a high level of tradecraft and know which are the safest and most efficient ways to cross the border. This knowledge can be used for further illegal migration and people-trafficking and also, as will be discussed below, extended to other cross-border criminal activities. Given that the best way to facilitate such cross-border movements is often to corrupt the relevant police and security agencies, this also contributes to a culture of bribe-taking and impunity within such bodies. An alarming trend has been the growing involvement of gangs based in the self-proclaimed autonomous ‘Transdneistr Republic’ region of Moldova, for example. Not only is it impossible for the Moldovan government to police this region, the gangs involved are increasingly developing ‘multi-use’ routes along which drugs, counterfeit goods and sometimes weapons also move, threading through Moldova and beyond. In some cases, the migrants or trafficking victims are also directly involved in this process (as in the case of ‘X’, the woman whose experiences are listed in the boxed text).

Case Study: The Fujian Connection

X is a 25-year-old woman from China’s southeastern Fujian region; her story, suitably camouflaged to protect her identity, is given her with her permission. Several members of her extended family had moved illegally to Europe to work and, with money they sent back home, she arranged with a ‘snakehead’, a criminal facilitator of illegal migration, to be smuggled into Europe. Along with nine other women, she was taken to Beijing in 2004, given false entry documents and put on a train for Moscow, from where she was promised she would be flown to Europe. A man travelled with them; he seemed to know the Russian Border Guards who checked the train and paid them a bribe to ignore the women, then he got off the train at the next stop. However, when the women were met in Moscow, all their documents were confiscated by the criminals, who told them that the snakehead in Fujian had not paid them, and so they owed them a ‘debt’ of $20,000 each. Six of the women were taken away and, X was told, would be working on a farm outside the city. X and three other women were instead forced into prostitution; the criminals charged her ‘rent’ and other fees, and even after seeing as many as eight clients, she ‘earned’ less than $20 a day, which the criminals held ‘for her.’ After three months, she was sold to a different gang. X was flown to Tiraspol, capital of the self-proclaimed ‘Transdneistr Republic’, given documents claiming she was of Buryat ethnicity and posed as the wife of a drug smuggler as he travelled through Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, on the way to Italy. She was told that customs officers were less likely to stop a couple, but that if she tried to flee, the Italians would simply deport her back to Moscow, where the gang would take their revenge. She was promised her freedom in Italy, but X overheard the criminals planning to force her back into prostitution. Fortunately for her, X was separated from her ‘husband’ at the Italian border when an immigration officer became suspicious about her documents, and she took the opportunity to confess all and seek asylum.

Economic Security: Illegal migration and people-trafficking can also have serious economic security implications. In the more advanced nations, immigration is often an economic necessity, bringing in workers prepared to accept low-paid and low-prestige jobs, as well as new generations of entrepreneurs and new insights and perspectives. Of course migration can sometimes be a positive force of the source countries, too, with a diaspora of emigrant laborers sending back money to support their families at home: remittances into Moldova, for example, were worth 36% of GNP in 2007. However, uncontrolled illegal migration and people-trafficking can drain a population of its able, healthy and mobile young adults as well as those with the skills to ensure that they will be welcomed as immigrants or else the entrepreneurialism and ambition to succeed. Furthermore, countries become dependent on remittances and thus suffer disproportionately when economics slowdowns reduce the earnings of their expatriate communities.  High levels of illegal migration and people-trafficking can have other detrimental impacts, too. The International Organization for Migration estimates that perhaps a quarter of Moldova’s population is working abroad, many illegally, and in a vicious circle, this is impeding efforts to revive the domestic economy, which might help keep Moldovans at home. Besides which, the vulnerable position in which illegal migrants find themselves means that they may be forced to work in exploitative, under-regulated or illegal activities. Not only can they in this way undermine legitimate businesses in destination countries (which, for example, must pay legal wages, as well as employment taxes and similar personnel costs) but they can lead to knock-on expenses for society, such as in caring for immigrants injured while working in unsafe conditions. Furthermore, illegal migration and, even more so, people-trafficking have wider public health implications. As well as contributing to the spread of AIDS/HIV through prostitution and consequent unsafe sex, trafficking can spread diseases more broadly. Given that traffickers seek to move their victims without official scrutiny, they also often avoid epidemiological controls.  There has been a striking correlation between the routes used by human smugglers and traffickers out of Asia and the spread of recent pandemics such as H5N1 (Avian flu) in 2004-7 and H1N1 (Influenza A) from 2007.

Political Security: The question of legal migration and the granting of asylum can be a fraught enough issue, but illegal migration and people-trafficking can be especially problematic. It can also force national governments to enact draconian border security measures, which may well have only minimal effects on illegal migration and people-trafficking but impact legitimate trade and travel, as well as raising tensions between neighboring states. Concern among ordinary Russians about illegal migrants from the Caucasus has certainly contributed to their willingness to condone Russia’s heavy-handed approach towards Georgia, which before the 2008 invasion was in part dominated by demands that Tbilisi strengthen its border controls.

Force Multiplier: Facilitating illegal migration and trafficking in human beings for sexual and other purposes are big business: for example, the Hungarian Border Guard estimates the proportion of illegal immigrants who have paid crime gangs has risen from 25% in the mid 1990s to almost 75% by 2008. Organised crime groups able to profit from these activities therefore acquire considerable wealth, which can then be put to other uses, from funding further illicit ventures to bribing government agents. Worldwide, trafficking alone earns transnational organised crime groups an estimated $9.5 billion annually.  The gangs also often acquire new human resources, as illegal migrants are often forced not only to continue to pay off their facilitators but may also be used to carry out other illegal activities. Likewise, in 2004, the ILO estimated that 20% of the five million illegal immigrants in Russia were victims of forced labour, largely working either in prostitution or else in sweatshops, typically producing counterfeit goods for organised crime gangs. In this way, they are both exploited personally and also work to enrich organised crime and expand its other illegal activities. Furthermore, with such profits to be made, it is not surprising that some terrorist movements are also becoming involved in illegal migration and people-trafficking, both as a means to raise funds and also to develop networks of sympathizers and suborned agents abroad.  After all, insurgent groups are both consumers of trafficking victims (such as child soldiers: the UN puts the number of armed groups using child soldiers now at over 57, compared with 40 in 2006) and providers. In Colombia, for example, Interpol estimates that gangs linked to insurgent movements earn $500 million annually through trafficking women for sexual exploitation. In this way, illegal migration and people trafficking helps make organised crime and terrorist groupings increasingly formidable threats and provides material and other assets which can be used in activities more obviously posing a direct threat to nation states.

Thus, one of the challenges for advocates, academics and policymakers alike will be to articulate the view that the trade in people, whether willing migrants or coerced trafficking victims, represents a clear and present danger, a challenge to the modern international order. It may be depressing that stronger efforts to control a criminal business founded on human misery may need to be packaged in the language of security threats, but if the events of the Cold War and the post-9/11 world order teach us anything, it is that security sells, and by securitizing the issue, it stands a better chance of being given the attention and resources it requires.

Dr Mark Galeotti is a specialist in transnational organized crime, security affairs and modern Russia. He started his academic career concentrating on conventional security issues, including the impact of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the implications of the disintegration of the USSR. However, in his fieldwork he encountered the rising new generation of gangsters carving out their portions of the decaying Soviet Union and was one of the first Western academics to recognize this as an emerging security concern. Since then, he has become increasingly interested in the transnationalisation of not just Russian but all forms of organized crime and their impact on the international order and development as a shadowy opposite to the global citizenship at the heart of the CGA’s mission.

Dr. Galeotti read history at Cambridge University and then took his doctorate in politics at the London School of Economics. He has worked as a researcher in the British Houses of Parliament and in the City of London, and visiting professor of public security at Rutgers-Newark, but before joining the faculty of the Center for Global Affairs he had been head of the history department at Keele University in the UK and the founding director of its Organized Russian & Eurasian Crime Research Unit, the only such specialized center in Europe. He has served as an advisor to the British Foreign Office and has worked with a wide range of commercial, law enforcement and government agencies, from the State Department to Interpol.

Dr. Galeotti founded the interdisciplinary journal Global Crime and wrote a monthly column on post-Soviet affairs in Jane’s Intelligence Review from 1991 to 2007. He has published widely, with 11 authored and edited books to his name and numerous other pieces, from articles in peer-reviewed academic journals to newspaper op-eds. His present projects include a global history of organized crime and an analysis of the Russian ‘mafiya’.