It is a highly lucrative business to traffic human beings to destinations where, they believe, better jobs and living conditions readily await them on landing.
Semi-literate people from poor nations, mainly in Africa and Asia, who hope to get into menial jobs in the European countries and the USA and Canada are lured by traffickers who assure them of a passage to destinations in these countries without travel documents.
The EU countries are among the favourite destinations. Once inside the country the illegal immigrants quickly reach the poverty-stricken shanty towns and vanish into thin air.
The poor travelers are charged heavily by those who organize the trips. The people sell whatever little property they have in their villages and pay the smugglers for the passage. The rates can be anywhere between €1,000 (US $1,330) and €100,000 (US $133,000) depending on the point of departure and the destination. Human tafficking has grown into a multi-million dollar business in the hands of international criminal gangs. Very raely these criminal smugglers get caught.
The smugglers load the people on rust-eaten trawlers or boats that leave the coast, in most cases from western Africa, illeaglly and go towards a place where the travellers disembark before the final trip into the country of desination. The Canary islands is a preferred transit point on way to European shores.
Sometimes, the smugglers wash their hands off with having transported the helpless immigrants upto the transit point and vanish.
The journey on a rusted boat that is not seaworthy for many days, sometimes weeks, without protection from the elements kill many of the immigrants on the way. Even if the boat is lucky enough to reach its destination, the passenegers are required to step out into the sea and wade their way in neck-deep water to reach the coast since the boat operators do not want to be caught.
A trip inside empty containers on a cargo ship is equally horrible. Immigrants are literally roasted inside the hot container under the scorching sun. The advantage of travelling inside a container is that the people get to reach an inland city, unlike those who travel on a boat and manage to reach the shores in the dark of night.
The conditions under which human trafficking takes place are totally inhuman and terrible to say the least. No arrangements for food and water are made. There is no guarantee the trip will be safe or they are not caught by the police.
Most boats the immigrants take for their trips sink midway. The traffickers are not bound by any laws. Their job ends with collecting the money.
Some human rights organizations and the Drugs and Crimes wing of the United Nations and the Interpol have been striving to stop this crime, but with little success.
Kristen Kvinge, the assistant director for the Interpol subdirectorate on trafficking in human beings, says ‘The police and other institutions doubt that there is a single person pulling the strings. We don’t know the strength, the depth, the width of the network.’
