Smuggling and Trafficking of Migrants in Southern Europe: Criminal Actors, Dynamics and Migration Policies

This book provides a contemporary overview of migrant smuggling and trafficking in Southern Europe, focusing on Spain, Italy and Greece. It considers how criminal players increase such activity and investigates institutional and structural constraints to legal migration in Southern Europe. Migrant workers satisfy the need for a cheap workforce to sustain Southern Europe’s economy, and laws to counter irregular migration alter smuggling routes and expose migrants to forms of exploitation upon reaching their destination. Revealing institutional, economic and criminal factors, the book explains the persistence of migrant smuggling and trafficking.

Stefano Becucci is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Florence. His research interests are the inclusion and exclusion of migrants in the receiving society, human smuggling and trafficking, and organized crime in Italy and other European countries.