There’s big money in smuggling people and entrapping them into servitude. Go read this story and about the elaborate underground system of gangs that funnels people thousands and thousand of miles through dozens of countries. Don’t think that those same gangs and their peers aren’t just as sophisticated getting people to the U.S.
Earlier this year, Vietnam emerged – abruptly – as the biggest single source of new migrants seeking to cross the Channel to the UK illegally in small boats. Arrivals surged from 1,306 in the whole of 2023, to 2,248 in the first half of 2024.
The Vietnamese do not control the small boat crossings themselves, which are largely overseen by a handful of Iraqi Kurdish gangs. Instead they negotiate access and timings.
“The Vietnamese are not allowed to touch that part of the process [the crossing]. We just deliver clients to [the Kurdish gangs],” says another Vietnamese smuggler, who we are calling Thanh, currently living in the UK. He tells us the extra cash secures priority access to the small boats for their Vietnamese clients.
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