Economies of sail: migrant-smuggling entrepreneurs

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. This year. Wildfires have raged in South Korea and Japan, larger than either country had seen for decades. Our correspondent discussed how these relate to climate change and where else we might expect to see the planet's ferocity. And unless you've been living on Mars, you'll have heard at least some of the views coming out of Donald Trump's White House. We look at opinion polling to see how the shift in tone at the top is changing how ordinary Americans see their friends and foes. But first, Last year, more than 36,000 people journeyed across the English Channel to enter Britain illegally. Traveling in small, overloaded boats can be a deadly activity. The criminals who ferry these migrants have attracted odium and many names, chief among them gangs. For too long, smuggling gangs have been undermining our border security.

Now, the reason that criminal gangs continue.

To bring small boats there is a serious issue in people smuggling, and that the only way to deal with it is to take down the gangs, the groups that are running this vile.

And though politicians have good reason to speak ill of the smugglers, it could be that branding them gangs obscures the issue at hand and how to tackle it.

Politicians and Other journalists and charities and think tanks talk a lot about the small boats issue. And they tend to analyze it in policy terms or even in moral terms. So they emphasize the fact that many people die trying to cross the channel. It was about 82 last year, which was a record.

Joel Budd is the Economist's Britain Social affairs editor.

I set out with a different question, which is I wanted to understand how does it actually work? How do these smuggling groups actually organize themselves to get people across the channel? How does it function as a business.

And how does it work?

It's very diffuse. So although politicians, including Keir Starmer, tend to talk about smuggling gangs, there seem to be no gangs in the sense of a gang being a stable organization with a hierarchy. Instead, there are lots of people who have contact books and there are people who specialize in different things. So the boat suppliers, for example, the people who import boats from China and Turkey and get them to the French coast, they are separate from the people who recruit potential channel crossers. Payment is handled by another group of people again. And it's become more and more like this over time. It used to be that channel smugglers provided kind of end to end services. They procured the boats, they recruited the migrants, they handled the payments. Now it's become unbundled, with lots of different businesses doing quite specific things.

So why has it become unbundled? And how does thinking about these as small businesses that do specialized things in the chain change how we think about the small boats problem?

I think partly it's become unbundled because it's just become bigger. And I suppose also because businesses of all kinds tend to specialize over time. If a completely new enterprise is created in the legitimate business world, you might well see a company sort of doing everything. And over time, they would start to outsource some parts of their business to other companies. I think also it's become unbundled because of police activity. So it's just become harder to do many of the things that smugglers do. So it's harder to get hold of a boat. For example, a few years ago, if you wanted a boat to transport migrants, you just went into a shop in France and bought one. And those shops no longer sell boats because the police have prevented them. And so now boats have to be specially made and imported. So as a result, specialists have emerged to do that sort of thing.

And how do you know all this? How did you find out how these small businesses are operating?

I found out in a couple of ways. One was by talking to the police Both the British police, the National Crime Agency and also the French police that deal with illegal migration. But the other one was by talking to people who have made the crossing, people who were themselves smuggled over the Channel, because it has often taken them several attempts to get over the Channel, they're often stuck in northern France for quite some time and pretty much all they're thinking about is how to get across the Channel. And so they simply become quite expert. And I also spoke to people in Calais and Dunkirk who are trying to get across now and have paid smugglers. And something that kept coming up is that a lot of the people who were trying to make the crossing had been in Europe for some time. They had often made a claim in another country and been rejected. And they know because of Brexit, they know that if they can make it to Britain, the British authorities don't know who they are and don't know that they have claimed anywhere else. Because we left the fingerprint system when we left the eu.

Wow. That's almost the opposite of what Brexit was meant to achieve, right?

Yes, exactly. Yes. It's sort of less control over the border.

And what did the people you spoke to in Britain who had successfully made that crossing enlighten you about what it took to make this work?

One thing that's really clear from talking to people who have been smuggled is that the number of people that are required to run a smuggling operation is absolutely enormous. There are many people who the French authorities call small hands, petite mains, who do everything from liaising with migrants in the camps, to transporting people to beaches in the middle of the night by car, to searching them, to photographing them. There's an enormous number of these people. The other thing that's really striking is that to the extent that there are higher level smugglers, they are simply never seen. So they will be in contact with these smugglers using encrypted messaging apps. But I remember one of them saying, an Afghan man saying, my smuggler might have been in France or he might have been in Afghanistan. I have absolutely no idea. Those folks keep themselves as far away from the action as they can.

So you're talking about a large number of people involved, but you're also talking about small businesses. Are these small businesses innovating?

They are innovating. They're innovating quite a bit. One thing smugglers have done is made increasingly capable use of social media to advertise themselves. They are quite often on TikTok and other social media. And although some of their Ads are very simple, that you just have a picture of a boat and a phone number. Some are more sophisticated. Some of them use testimony from migrants, sort of saying, yes, my smuggler was absolutely the best smuggler. You know, really, really good at it, really good crossing. And they're trying to sort of build brands. The police and the social media platforms like TikTok try to take down these ads, but they pop up again in a better disguised form. There's been a lot of use of emojis. I think a bird often means a migrant, for example. Another innovation is that some of the people who've been arrested and charged and convicted recently of facilitating illegal immigration weren't exactly smugglers. They were brokers. What they did is they assembled groups of migrants, let's say about 10. There was one man, for example, who did this from Birmingham in England. And then once they had a group together, they would sort of sell these migrants to a smuggler and they would work for several smugglers, which obviously makes things much easier if you are a smuggler, if you've got these folks sort of brokering for you, because it means you don't have to run your own recruitment operation.

Joel, what does all this add up to? If we think about these as small businesses with branding machines, supply chains, specialist knowledge, innovation, how does that change how we as journalists cover the crisis, how politicians should deal with it?

I think it should probably lead us to conclude that it's not a great idea to try and decapitate the smuggling networks, as it were. That the truth is that if you try to sort of smash a gang, you will realize that there is, in fact, no gang to be smashed. There are people playing roles. There are people who have contacts. Some of them have better contacts than others. And you can take out some of the people who have better contacts, but it's very likely that somebody else will be able to slip into that space. So the Channel migrant smuggling business, although it's much smaller than the international drug trafficking business, it's starting to look alarmingly like the international drug trafficking business in that starting to seem as though it's going to be hard to arrest your way out of the problem.

Joel, great to talk to you. Thank you very much.

Thanks.

South Korea is not known for its wildfires, but this year the country saw the largest blaze in its modern history.

Noah Snyder is our East Asia Bureau chief.

It started, to be exact, on March 21, and in the course of the following week spread rapidly through provinces in the country's southeast. The initial cause of the fire is believed to be human related, but the underlying conditions are really what fueled the fires. It's been unseasonably hot, it's been dry, it's been windy, and there hasn't been much rainfall. All in all, the fires burned about 48,000 hectares. The fires took out hundreds of buildings, including homes, farms, and ancient Buddhist temples, some more than 1,000 years old. At least 30 people are believed to have been killed in the fires, and tens of thousands were evacuated. One man spoke of how he couldn't even grab his spoon and chopsticks on his way out. Fires are a rather common occurrence in South Korea, but at a very small scale. And what we've seen this year, in addition to these massive wildfires, is a real uptick in both scale and frequency. So there is something about the underlying conditions that are fueling fires, causing them to burn more frequently and ever larger than before.

With me today are Oliver Morton, one of our senior editors.

Hiya.

And Rachel Dobbs, environment editor.

Hi, Rosie.

You've both listened to Noah's reporting there, and he talks at the end about the underlying conditions fueling the fires. So, direct question here, is that climate change?

Direct answer? Well, maybe, but to be more precise, we know that the conditions that encourage fires are increasing in many parts of the world, including South Korea, as a result of climate change. We see longer summer seasons. Less rains in some areas during the summer seasons leads to more of what experts call fire weather. And so you expect there to be more fires in general. And so when you see an unexpected fire, an unexpectedly large fire, I think Noah said this was the largest for sort of like four, 40 years or something, it's natural to assume that it's due to climate change, whether or not that's in some sort of, like, tight causeway.

True.

It's certainly true that we are having more fires because of climate change.

So have there been fires elsewhere in the region?

Yes, not entirely surprisingly, fire weather has been common beyond the borders of South Korea.

Yeah, you've seen quite dramatic fires in Japan towards the end of February, which.

The Japanese government classified as a disaster of extreme severity. And they burned for 12 days before being contained and covered about 3,000 hectares, which is the largest wildfires in the country for about 50 years. So, again, really unusual for these kind of fires at this kind of time.

And, Rachel, can these fires be linked to hotter climate in East Asia?

So there haven't been specifically any rapid attribution studies, which are the studies that are done to try and pin exactly the role that climate change plays in Any sort of major weather event or disaster. But it is pretty reasonable to say that if you look at the temperatures in both South Korea and Japan and how much higher they were than the seasonal average in South Korea, they were between 4.5 and 10 degrees above the 1991-2020 average. In western Japan it was about 7 to 8 degrees higher. And you know, you have springs and summers that are hotter, but that does seem to be unseasonably warm. And you are seeing spikes in temperatures around the world, cause of climate change.

And obviously we've talked before on the show about more and more severe fires elsewhere like la. Where else might we see this happen?

I think one thing to look for is outside the tropics, you're seeing more change in fire behaviour. I think in the higher latitude regions. Eastern Europe is one region that shows up on a lot of the maps as well.

It's also worth noting that a lot of those higher latitude regions have old boreal forest, which tends to sequester huge amounts of carbon. And uncontrolled burns in these very remote areas can then release masses and masses of greenhouse gases.

The fire in South Korea appears to have been started by human activity. Is there a way that we can do more to stop these fires starting in the first place?

So a huge amount of fires globally are always going to be started by human activity. And that doesn't mean deliberate human activity. You know, it could be a cigarette chucked out of a car. I think this was a candle being lit at a temple. Yes, you should have more awareness of those kind of things, but I think that that's kind of a given and part of it is going to be how quickly you can respond. And we have recently seen the launch of two new satellite systems which are meant to aid rapid detection of fires. I know more about Firestat, which is the Google one, I think, Ollie, and the point there is that a lot of satellite resolution for detecting fires is both quite low res and also it just is not updated quickly enough. And that makes it much harder to see small fires that have just started. But if you can spot the small fires, you can then deploy resources and start to try and deal with them before they spread out of control.

Or indeed you can also look at them and say, well, that one doesn't worry me too much, but I know you can keep a sort of watching brief. Yes, there's firesat, which is a consortium of which Google is a member. There's also a company called Aurora Tech which deals with this sort of thing and they Just launched a bunch of satellites on the rather wonderfully named rocket lab mission, finding hot wildfires near you, which is also very much the same idea. And of in this area, AI systems for spotting fire signals in data are becoming more important. If you tie this into the sort of systems that tell people what's going on and tell fire services what's going on, there is a hope that suddenly the fires that might damage human infrastructure or worse kill people, it might be possible to respond to those more quickly. The really big fires in the boreal forest. This probably doesn't make that much difference.

To you say that governments need to be prepared, but they've got a lot on their hands right now with Donald Trump in the White House. He's occupying the headlines, he's occupying the policy agenda and of course, pulling out of the climate change agreements. How can government stay on top of what's going on?

Well, yes, fair enough. And it's very tempting to say, well, they can't. But one thing to remember about this and quite a few climate things is that there's the global and the local. Most of the people responding to forest fires aren't national federalized agencies. It tends to happen with fire services that are local or regional. And they may actually find their jobs made easier by this sort of new information flow, regardless of the increasingly vexed politics which surround the situation.

But how governments are responding in this kind of changing political climate and changing actual climate is something that we are going to be looking out for. And Ollie and I will be bringing you an update on that roughly once a month.

Ollie, Rachel, thank you so much.

Pleasure to be here.

Thanks, Rosie.

Donald Trump recently found a way to explain away Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine.

I actually think he, he's doing what anybody else would do.

I think he's, he trashed America's northern neighbor and second largest trading partner, too.

One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.

The people that now this was true.

As for the European Union, it was.

Formed in order to screw the United States.

I mean, look, let's be honest, there's.

Been a lot of vitriol, but whatever you make of that bombast, statements like these appear to be swaying public opinion at home and overseas.

In the past few months, Americans views of their traditional allies has been changing for the worse.

Ainsley Johnston is one of our data journalists.

It's particularly true among Republicans. But it's not just Trump fans. Even Democrats are now changing how they view other countries. And the reverse is also true. So for Europeans they now view the US Much less favorably with Donald Trump in charge.

So, Ainslie, before we talk about the rather alarming ways in which we all view each other, tell me how we know all this.

The data comes from the Economist's YouGov polls. So every week we ask a sample of about 1,500Americans. Some questions, they're questions about current affairs, but also demographics, their party affiliation, things like that. For some of these questions, we've been asking them every week for more than 15 years, but others we're just asking every now and then. And so we can bring all of this data together and look at how people's opinions on things has been changing over time.

And the top line is that Americans are falling out of love with their allies.

Yeah, unfortunately, it is. Americans views on Europe and Canada have been changing really fast. In November, around 12% of Republicans said that they thought Canada was unfriendly or an enemy. And now that's doubled up to around 27%. More than doubled. The same is true for the EU as well. Republicans have always been a little bit more negative on the EU than Democrats have, but in the past few months, they've really divided. And Republicans have become far less friendly towards the EU. Now, again, around 30% say that the EU is unfriendly or an enemy. What is interesting, though, is that while the trend is strongest in Republicans, Democrats also do seem to be turning a little bit away from their allies as well. The change is a lot smaller, and it's maybe not totally clear whether this is going to be something that's going to continue for a while, but it's definitely there.

So if they're calling their friends enemies, what are Americans saying about people who were traditionally their enemies?

Well, now Americans are starting to view some of these traditional enemies with a little bit less suspicion. So, for example, Russia, they're beginning to see a little bit more favorably. When Putin launched his invasion In Ukraine in 2022, both Republicans and Democrats were very clear they did not approve. Around 85% of the US population thought that Russia was an enemy or unfriendly. And that stayed pretty much steady until about last year when Trump was elected. Then we started to see things really turn. And now only around 72% of Republicans see Russia as an enemy. The share of Republicans who see Ukraine as an enemy, though, has risen by around 10 percentage points in just that same short amount of time. And again, here we do start to see the Democrats joining, too. The Democrats views on Ukraine haven't shifted that much, but they are starting to become a little bit more friendly towards Russia.

So it sounds like you're saying that Trump is the cause of the timing.

Well, it's hard to say with 100% certainty that it's definitely caused by Trump, but the timing definitely looks that way. We know that voters will often take cues from political leaders to sort of guide them on how they should think about complex issues, things like foreign affairs that they may not really know that much about. So it definitely makes sense that Donald Trump's recent comments about different countries would really begin to move the needle. But what is amazing is just how quickly it shifted and also that it's really starting to reach out well beyond America. We can see that, for example, Canadians, their attitudes towards the US have really cooled. There's been booing at sports matches between the US And Canada. Sales of the Canadian flag have just gone through the roof. And in Europe as well, we see that a lot of countries are beginning to see the US A little more negatively now.

So where's souring on the US the most?

Denmark definitely has had the biggest swing. Before the election, around 50% of Danes said that they had a favorable view of the US that's now fallen to just 20%, no doubt because of Donald Trump's repeated comments about wanting to control Greenland, which is part of Denmark, but also in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, all of these places, we're starting to see people adopting a less favorable view of the US There is one small group, though, in these countries that isn't changing its opinions on the US or is even starting to view the US More favorably. People who supported hard right parties at the last election are now having a more favorable view of America than they did before Donald Trump was in charge. A lot of these parties may disagree with Trump on issues like Ukraine, but they're really much more aligned with him on things like immigration and domestic policy issues. It seems that for them, America looks like a much better place than it was before Trump was in office.

So propaganda works.

It seems that way.

Thank you very much, Ainsley. Great to talk to you.

Thank you, Rosie.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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