What are human smugglers really like?

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“These people are not only my customers: they are my brothers. I help them because they are on the wrong side of the world.” -Abu Hamza, a human smuggler

Luigi Achilli is a anthropologist who studies migrants and refugees, and the smugglers who help them move across borders. For many people, the image that comes to mind when we think of human smuggling is a ruthless criminal who preys on vulnerable people. This was certainly my image of a human smuggler. But his fascinating research reveals a far more positive picture of human smugglers.

I did a quick run-through of some of his papers. Here were the main things I learned:

  • Migrants like the individual smugglers they work with, rather than thinking of them as exploitative. “Remarkably, accounts about the callousness of smugglers were often dismissed by those very people who risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean. The majority of migrants with whom I spoke did not perceive their smugglers as exploitative.” And the smugglers themselves emphasize the “importance of being morally respectable and kind.” Smuggling is a business, and as in any business your reputation is extremely important.

  • But when both migrants and smugglers think of “smugglers” in the abstract, they think of someone predatory. "[T]he degree of consensus was surprising: smugglers were fundamentally evil.” So in the abstract, they think about human smuggling basically the same way as we all do. They just don’t think of themselves as engaged in that sort of activity. (”Waiting for the Smuggler”)

  • There is not a strict dichotomy between smugglers and migrants. A lot of smugglers are migrants themselves, and migrants assist in smuggling activities (e.g., piloting boats, recruiting migrants, serving as lookouts) (”Waiting for the Smuggler”)

  • Smugglers often share ethnic ties with the people they transport, which helps them establish solidarity with them. At times they will even transport the elderly, infirm, or children for lower than their typical costs. The unfortunate converse to this ethnic solidarity is that when when smugglers and migrants do not share the same ethnic background, abuse is more likely to occur. (”Irregular Migration”)

  • Migrants underestimate the risks - at least those migrating from Africa to Italy. Many say that if they had known the risks, they never would have left (page 5).

He also has a few points that counter common narratives about how smuggling is organized For example:

  • There is this idea of extremely organized criminal organizations who organize the smuggling of people from, say, Nigeria all the way to Europe. This is not the case. Instead, the people who move from Africa to Europe typically make their way piecemeal. They don’t even have a final destination in mind when they set out - much less have their entire journey planned for them by a centralized crime organization.

    • “Indeed, it would hardly be possible for a single centralized organization to carry out all services alone along a route that comprises journeys of several thousand kilometres and in a market characterized by high levels of instability and unpredictability.” (from Irregular Migration)

  • Similarly, sometimes you might hear that terrorist organizations participate in migrant smuggling as a source of revenue. He finds that this is not really true.

One of my overarching takeaways from his work is that the “smugglers are predators, migrants are victims” narrative is far too simple. It is a way of thinking that lets you avoid blaming illegal immigrants, while still allowing you to view illegal migration as a moralistic issue. The reality is much more complicated than that.

I’m very glad there are people like Luigi Achilli in the world - helping the rest of us understand this area of human activity that is important, often misunderstood, and fascinating.

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Some interesting works from Achilli:

The cyclical pattern of Bangladesh -> Malaysia migration

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Migration from Bangladesh to Malaysia has followed an interesting pattern over the past 25 years.

Malaysia is a significantly richer country that Bangladesh. In Bangladesh 90% of people live on less than $10 per day, compared to only 9% in Malaysia. Bangladeshis who are able to migrate to Malaysia to work on palm-oil plantations are able to double their wages - so demand is extremely high from Bangladeshis for the opportunity to migrate to Malaysia to work.

Malaysian palm-oil companies need labor, so it would seem there is a clear win-win here. But every 5-10 years, Malaysia halts immigration from Bangladesh to Malaysia. this has happened in1996, 2001, 2008, 2018, and most recently in 2024.

It turns out that a cyclical pattern has emerged:

  • The governments of Bangladesh and Malaysia reach an agreement to allow Bangladeshi workers to migrate to Malaysia on temporary visas

  • The supply of Bangladeshi workers wanting to move overwhelms the capacity of the government to match them to jobs

  • Middlemen assist migrants to go outside the system. Sometimes they actually matching people to jobs (just without proper paperwork), and sometimes they invent fictitious jobs. And to do this higher-risk migration, migrants are actually willing to pay at least 5x the normal migration cost

  • In response to abuse of the system, Malaysia blocks immigration from Bangladesh

  • The Bangladeshi and Malaysian governments enter talks, and the cycle repeats

In general across the world, demand to immigrate is wildly higher than the supply for immigration slots allowed. Over a billion people worldwide would like to move internationally for work. Any American who has ever taken a taxi in Kenya can attest to this: You are always being asked "Can you help me get to America?"

Governments in destination countries do not always want to promote in-migration. But my takeaway here is that even when governments want to encourage migration, they don’t properly account for how much demand there is.

The willingness of migrants to pay 5x sticker price to migrate shows that migrants value the opportunity to move at a value far greater than the government thinks is fair to charge (1). Regardless of whether you think that the costs to migration should be determined by market forces or not, the fact that migrants are WILLING to pay so much shows how much people value the opportunity to move.

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1. By the way, the International Organization for Migration says that labor migrants should not be charged any recruitment fees or related costs. There seems to me to be an oversensitivity here - an equation of “charging money” with “exploitation”.

Luigi Achilli provides evidence that even in the case of illegal migration, we should not equate “charging a high price for an illegal service” with “exploitation”. In general, if someone understands the risks of a service and is willing to pay the price, then there is something more interesting going on than simple exploitation.

Update on high-skill immigration work

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In September I wrote that I was trying to work on high-skill immigration into the US as my political cause of choice.

I’ve decided to stop focusing on this, after spending a few weekends digging into the topic and concluding that realistically there’s not much a person can do to make progress on this by spending a few hours a weekend - especially if that person lives in Kenya as I do.

I had hypothesized 3 ways to have an impact on high-skill immigration, and have concluded that none of them are too effective right now.

1. Convincing / bothering my representatives or people in the state department to change things

  • I’ve written a few emails to my senators and representatives (congress is the most likely place to make big progress on this issue). I got stock responses. Always hard to say with things like this, but likely these emails had no impact.

  • One of my senators, Chuck Grassley, has been one of the biggest opponents to actual immigration reform in the Senate. I tried to get a meeting with him (he makes it relatively easy for Iowans to meet him) but wasn’t able to. If I moved back to Iowa, I would spend some time at political events to see if I could get a meeting with him, but it’s not a feasible option while I live in Kenya.

2. Growing my blog to hundreds of thousands of readers and then using it as a soap box

  • Getting tons and tons of readers was a joke, but the general idea of trying to mobilize activism myself was something I thought a little bit about. But 1) it’s hard to do, and 2) if I mobilized a bunch of people to act on high-skill immigration there is a chance this would actually backfire. Raising the profile in public discourse of “high-skill immigration” specifically (which has less public attention on it than low-skill immigration) could attract anti-immigration people to the issue

3. Getting involved with activist organizations that know how to be effective much more than I do:

  • There aren’t any good volunteer activities I could find on high-skill immigration. If I was German I could volunteer with Malengo. If I was looking for a full-time job, I could try Formally or the Institute for Progress. But other than those, options are limited.

If I move back to the US in the next few years, I may try to get involved in political activism on this issue with my senators and representatives. But for now, I’m going to put this time and mental energy elsewhere.

People in Kenya can now travel to the US in a more reasonable time frame

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Visa wait time in the US embassy in Nairobi is down to 63 days from 365+ in July. 63 days is still too long but it’s a great improvement!

The embassy, under the new Ambassador Meg Whitman, has made some significant changes such as getting more people to perform interviews and waiving the interview requirement for people who already had visas in the past 4 years.

I doubt that my annoying emails to the embassy and state department contributed at all to this change.

I wrote an EA forum post sharing what I’ve learned from this, and giving an update on an an earlier post arguing (a bit naively) that it would be relatively easy to badger embassies into doing things.

As I say in the post, I’ve since learned that in this case at least, "not enough advocacy from Americans" was less of a limiting factor on visa interview wait times than "political capital within the embassy".

How do people enter the US to live there?

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I was in New York City last month and wanted to learn about US immigration policy I went to Barnes and Noble to see if I could find any books describing how the system works.

In the sociology / politics section, I found at least 10 books on immigrant experiences. To varying degrees, these books were all trying to convince you that immigrants were good and we should have more of them. But I found 0 books that actually explained how the immigration system works (1).

Lots of people are focused on making you feel nice about immigrants - not so much focus on the nuts and bolts of how it actually works now and what has to change (2).

I assume most Americans (reasonably) don’t know what the main mechanisms are by which immigrants enter the country. And I couldn’t find a super clear, concise explanation of what I wanted, so decided to write one for myself (3).

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Around 1M people immigrate to the US each year. There are three main reasons you are allowed to immigrate - because of family, work, or being a refugee. The yearly breakdown is below.

A couple observations

  • The system is not optimized to bring in people who will most contribute to the economy, it is optimized to bring in families of people here already (5)

  • We don’t invite people in to live and work in the US long-term. Instead we invite them to work temporarily, then later they ask to change their status to be a full immigrant (represented by the blue section of thee “work” bar) (6)

Most common work visa types (potentially leading to changing status to get a green card):

(Note that this is total entries into the country - not total number of people granted these visas. A person can enter and leave more than once).

Immigration caps: Family immigration is capped based on a complicated formula that seems like it is about 500k people per year (immediate family of US citizens are excluded). Work immigration is capped at 140k per year. And no more than 7% of immigration between these two categories can come from more than one country (7).

H1B visas - the kind wanted by most of my non-American peers from MIT/consulting who want to move to the US - was capped at 85,000 each year. Since more than 85k people apply each year (last year 300k+ people applied), acceptance is determined via lottery.

Biggest opportunities to increase high-skill immigration from my understanding:

  • Congress could simply lift green-card caps - particularly for high-skill workers under H1B visas which wouldn’t be super politically charged (relative to low-skill immigration at least)

  • The US could make a direct-to-green-card path for people who study in the US (students - not included in charts above). This would be a significant policy change, may require a change in the US immigration framework

  • The executive branch can grant more O1 visas to people. Not very many people apply for these visas right now, and it has not been super clear just how extraordinary you need to be to get one of these. Do you need to be a Nobel prize winner? Or just a well-known scientist or entrepreneur within your field? The executive branch has a lot of discretion with who gets let in under this visa, and could clarify and expand their policy to let more smart talented people in

  • The Biden admin has started a IEP entrepreneurship program - currently it does not have a path towards permanent residency but the program could be developed

Things I still don’t understand that well:

  • Where does OPT fit? I think it is just an extension of student visas

    • update: yes, a 1-3 year extension on the F-1 student visa

  • Does the 140k cap apply to those changing status as well as those entering directly?

    • update: confirmed yes

  • What % of people on different work visa types end up wanting to and being able to get permanent residency status?

  • Since there is a skilled labor shortage, why aren’t big powerful companies advocating for immigration reform?

    • update: see footnote 6



Summary: It’s very complicated, and I have a lot to learn. But this at least gives me a starting knowledge of how it works, and the context to know where to look next.

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1. It turns out that the place in NYC to buy fact-filled books on immigration is the Tenement Museum gift shop. Let me know if you know of other places.

2. The notion that pro immigration have nice feelings but don’t do much about it feels like it is in line with the finding that people who are anti-immigration care much more than people who are pro-immigration. (as a matter of epistemic hygiene I must admit that I have not read the linked paper, but am relying on the Institute for Progress’s reading of it)

3. This is not at all authoritative - it’s just my current best understanding of how things work. I may update it later as I learn more.

Data comes from the Department of Homeland Security and is based on 2011-2020

4. Surprising fact #1: The same number of people got permanent lawful status under Trump as in Obama’s second term. It’s actually even slightly higher under Trump if you exclude 2020, during which there was a pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus

5. Historically the reason for this was that in the ~1920-1960s, WASP Americans didn’t want inferior types like Southern Europeans (Catholic) or Eastern European (Jewish) entering (not to mention Asians/Africans/Hispanics). By accepting mostly people who already had family in the US, they hoped that it would mean more people who were - like the majority of Americans at the time, WASPs

6. There are 5 preferences for employment-based immigration: 1) extraordinary ability 2) advanced degrees or exception ability 3) skilled workers with 2 years experience + unskilled shortage workers 4) religious / US government workers 5) investors investing $900k-1.8M in the US

Obtaining these employment based immigration usually requires that an employer petition on your behalf (similar with family visas). So there are very few ways for you to initiate immigration yourself. This gives a lot of power to companies hiring people. Workers are dependent on them for their visa and if they quit/are let go, they lose their visas.

This is why big companies don’t particularly advocate for immigration reform (according to an expert I talked to). They like the status quo insofar as it gives them a lot of power. They may argue for increased immigration caps so they can get more workers, but don’t really want to see an systematic immigration overhaul that might reduce their power.

7. There is a 55k limit on “diversity” visas awarded via lottery every year (included in “other” bar of the first chart)

If your immigration petition has been approved by USCIS (part of DHS who oversees the process), but the immigration cap for your country or overall has been exceeded, you get added to a visa queue. Currently the queue is 3.8M people for family immigration, and 1M for employment immigration

Updated 8 October 2022: footnotes 6-7


Further reading:

I'm working on high-skill immigration; or, being a doer, not an opinion-haver (at least trying)

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I recently switched from working in consulting to working at a startup (1).

This has forced a general mindset shift from “I want to sound smart about the stuff I’m talking about” to “do things”, that affects how I think about political issues.

It’s easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking I should have smart political opinions so I can have intelligent conversations about nuclear energy, police reform, or zoning laws. But a lot of this is just posturing. I look smart, my friends look smart, we pat ourselves on the back, nothing changes.

I want to focus on being a good citizen by actually achieving things.

In politics though? There are so many problems though! And they are so big and complicated and difficult! It seems hopeless.

So I’m trying out a new rule for civic engagement: Everyone should have one political cause of choice.

There are lots of important political problems. You can’t work on all of them. Pick one that is important, that you care about, and that you think you can reasonably make progress on (2).

I have decided that my political cause is: The US should allow many more highly-skilled people to immigrate.

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Why high-skill immigration?

I have a strong belief in the importance of immigrants to the US, both as a matter of fact (economically/ culturally/ scientifically) and as a matter of what the US should aspire to be.

Living in Kenya makes this especially salient - it was so easy for me to move here and I think I am doing good. There are so many people here who can’t move to the US, and I think that they would do good.

I think allowing immigration of skilled workers is pretty indisputably good for the US, those individuals, and (more disputably) for the world. This article captures arguments for high-skill immigration quite well.

There are lots of arguments I could make, but I find this Tweet to be the most concise and emotionally effective argument:

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Smart hardworking people from all over the world (3) want to come to the US to build things, and we should let them (4).

What do I actually want to do?

Turns out it’s hard to find actual productive things to do on big political issues. It makes sense that it’s easier to just have opinions.

At root what needs to happen is that congress or the executive branch needs to change the law or the enforcement of the law to make high-skill immigration easier. This means that the avenues to affect change are:

  • Convincing / bothering my representatives or people in the state department to change things

  • Growing my blog to hundreds of thousands of readers and then using it as a soap box (5)

  • Getting involved with activist organizations that know how to be effective much more than I do

A pre-requisite to this is knowing exactly what things I want changed. So the first step is learning a ton about how immigration to the US actually works, and where potential avenues for change are. Get ready for a blog post on that soon!

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It’s been a fun journey so far, trying to transform from an opinion-haver to a doer (6).

Let me know what political cause you are working on, and if you disagree with me or if you have any suggestions on how to make an impact through activism.

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  1. Stealth mode, can’t talk about it, going to change the world

  2. For those of the Effective Altruism persuasion, I think it should pass a gut check on Importance, Neglectedness, and Tractability. Don’t need to be too rigorous because a) it’s pretty hard to really quantify on-the-margin effects of activism, and b) intrinsic excitement is more important for hobbies than for jobs - the fact that you are doing this activism in your spare time (as opposed to a career) means you really need to be motivated on a weekly basis to work on it

  3. You know, people like Albert Einstein

  4. The issue is important and I’m excited about it. It may be the case that I find it is impossible for me to take any useful action, outside of becoming a senator, but I’m optimistic.
    I personally would be much more in favor of lots more immigration of all kinds - low-skill and refugee as well. But I’m focusing on high-skill immigration since those are politically much tougher issues, high-skill immigration is more important from a scientific / economic progress perspective, and the fact that it seems likely that increased high-skill immigration makes countries more receptive to immigration of all kinds.
    A further clarification that I’m saying “immigration” here for simplicity, but I am including temporary residence status that enables people to work (e.g., H1B visas) in the scope of what I am working on.

  5. I could pretty well believe that long-term my best shot at having impact is being a top-level executive at a super successful company and then lobbying from a position of power

  6. Though I haven’t actually accomplished anything yet

The US has effectively stopped giving visas to travelers from Kenya

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Summary: Currently you have to wait for over 1 year if you want to travel to the US from Kenya. The US has effectively blocked travel (for a large fraction of people) not through any law or policy decision, but seemingly just through lack of staffing in the US embassy in Nairobi.

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I am generally pro more and easier cross-border movement - into the US and to everywhere in the world more generally. Part of making movement easier is a matter of policy, which is complicated, political, socially contentious, and won’t change quickly.

But there are non-policy barriers to free movement as well, and these seem much easier to fix. One such example is lack of consular interviews at US embassies.

When you try to schedule a consular interview at the US Embassy in Nairobi, you will see that there are no interview slots available for over 1.5 years (674 days at time of writing). No interview means no visa (1), which means the US has blocked people from entering the US from Kenya.

I think this is an important issue, and also one that is potentially pretty tractable.

Why does this matter? Less people visiting the US hurts the US:

  • Economically: Tourism is good for the US, and US business benefits from international deals that are facilitated by the ability of foreign businesspeople to visit for meetings

  • Intellectually: I have had several friends who wanted to attend a philanthropic conference (EA Global hosted in Boston) but were unable. They may go to a similar conference in Singapore instead, where no visa is required. If the US wants at the forefront of international discussion of world problems, it has to let people in to its conferences. Otherwise people will just start going other places.

  • Culturally: We like to think of the US as a melting pot, welcoming to people all over the world. Rejecting people from visiting hurts this important part of US culture.

  • International relations-wise: When people visit the US, they form connections to it and think positively of it

The above are all benefits that accrue to the US by letting people visit. There are also of course benefits to the people visiting, and to the people in the US they are visiting.

Is this a tractable issue?

I think yes. The solve seems simple. The embassy just needs to hire more people. It is not a political issue, does not require change in law. I imagine the main reason this is a problem is that the embassy has basically zero accountability to people applying for visas, and not that many US citizens care about this (2). It seems like an area where a few people’s voices could have an outsized impact.

So let me know if you want to add your voice. Or if you have insight into how decisions about consular interviews get made that can help us use our voices more effectively. Comment here, email me at ljeure@gmail.com, or tweet at me at @lukeeure. Americans could also email the US embassy in Nairobi at VisitorVisaNairobi@state.gov to show them that there are Americans who care about this issue (3).

For over a century people have wanted to come to the US because it is a great place to be. We are a better country for it. Let’s not let staffing shortages stop this.

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1. Required to visit the US for any generic reason - tourism, an academic conference, business meeting, visiting family. This is required both of Kenyans and citizens of most other non-US countries who live in Kenya.

Note that it also seems this is not just Kenya, and is an issue in US embassies around the world.

2. I’ve been advised that people can simply apply for expedited visas in case of urgent matters. But

  1. These expedited visas seem very hard to get - I’ve had at least 3 friends try to get them and be rejected

  2. More importantly, there is a problem with your system if expedition is required to get a visa within 1 year

2. There could be things that make this more complicated than just a staffing issue, but if there are the embassy has not been willing to explain them to me when I’ve inquired over email.

3. Not that is don’t me much good so far. In addition to being advised that people can get expedited visas, I was told that “To keep both applicants and our staff safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of appointments for all of these categories is much lower than normal.”

I really doubt COVID safety is the issue here, and that they would send this just makes me feel like there is little accountability for having a process that works well.