The trade that means misery by the cargo

When money and goods move without restriction through the world, it's called free trade. But when people start to move freely around the globe, it's a crisis.

Human trafficking is certainly an astonishing phenomenon, and is destined to be a growth industry for the 21st century. The migration of people from the poor to the rich countries - the flipside of globalisation - is also an increasing preoccupation for Western governments.

As with the war against drugs, ever greater resources are being marshalled, and stiffer penalties threatened. Yet the results are disappointing, and containment, rather than elimination of the problem, seems to be the most viable option.

The reports from Irish Times correspondents this week graphically illustrate the scale of modern-day migration. Desperate refugees and other migrants will risk life and limb - literally - to get to the West. They will indenture their labour for years. They will sell their bodies. They will, in some instances, even sell their body parts. The response of Western governments has been confused and narrowly legalistic. Current immigration and asylum policies are "practically and ethically bankrupt from all positions", as a report commissioned for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees noted last year.

"Much of existing policymaking is part of the problem and not the solution. Refugees are now forced to use illegal means if they want to access Europe at all," the report remarked. Current policy is directed not towards ending trafficking but towards ending the right of asylum. In the rush of migrants to the West, those fleeing persecution are finding it harder and harder to reach sanctuary, or be accepted there on arrival.

This week's reports show that trafficking of people is increasingly a criminal activity. Already in 1994, the International Organisation of Migration estimated that criminal syndicates were making five to seven billion dollars annually from human trafficking; there is little doubt that this figure has increased substantially since then.

One of the main reasons for this growth, as reported in Africa and Eastern Europe, is the perception among criminals that human trafficking is a lowrisk activity compared to the smuggling of drugs or other forms of crime.

As the UNHCR report noted, there is a marked absence of leadership on the issue. In Europe, some of the bodies with an input include: the UN; a gathering of 34 states in the Budapest Process; several EU working groups; the European Parliament and Commission; the Council of Europe; the G8 countries; Europol; the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe; the IOM; and the International Labour Organisation. However, no consistent, co-ordinated approach has emerged from these many forums.

In addition, national tensions and rivalries bubble just below the surface. In many cases, for instance, immigration officials have found it more convenient to shunt rejected asylum-seekers on to a neighbouring state rather than sending them back to their home countries.

Any response based purely on the policing of migration is doomed to failure. Migrants seek asylum in Europe because that is the only way for most of them to gain a foothold on the continent. Changing the asylum laws or employing more immigration officials will do nothing to diminish the overall flow, or the economic demand for migrant workers in the West.

It may, however, deflect the flow. This partly explains the growth in asylum claims in Ireland and Britain in recent years. Waves of asylum-seekers whose claims were rejected in Germany and France have moved further West to try their luck here. Others have exploited comparatively lax regulations in the Irish legal code, such as the provision that grants citizenship to all Irish-born children and, consequently, residency rights to their parents. Britain removed this provision over a decade ago.

Yet any approach that neglects the criminal aspects of trafficking is equally suspect. What about the human rights of desperate refugees duped by traffickers into boarding floating rustbuckets that sink during the first storm? Or the rights of African women, some as young as 12 years of age, forced into prostitution in European cities? A proper solution has to balance the rights of states, to sovereignty and control, with those of individuals, whether citizens or refugees. Penalties should focus on the traffickers, rather than the trafficked. European states need to balance their responsibilities more evenly, and to harmonise their asylum and immigration systems.

There have to be alternative legal ways of reaching the West other than claiming asylum. Europe needs to develop legal systems of immigration comparable to those operated by the US and Australia. It should also seek to resettle those refugees in greatest need; at present, most EU states (Ireland included) accept only a handful of refugees each year under resettlement programmes. In the early 1970s, UNHCR resettled over 200,000 refugees a year through these programmes, but this figure has shrunk today to under 30,000 a year.

EVEN for developing countries, the migration of its citizens to the West is not necessarily a desirable thing. Many of those fleeing to Europe are among the most enterprising and educated in their home countries. The loss to their homeland is incalculable.

Yet the only real way of eliminating the problem of human trafficking is to eliminate the global inequalities that give rise to the problem. We know the statistics - how half the world lives on less than $2 a day; how the world's three richest individuals are wealthier than the 100 poorest countries; how the wealthiest 20 per cent control up to 80 per cent of the world's resources.

No one expects the world's inequalities to disappear overnight. However, what we have seen in recent decades is the extermination of all hope in many developing countries. The problems of debt, war, corruption and environmental degradation have robbed many states of the optimism they had in the 1960s.

In such a situation, millions have decided that if the West can't bring prosperity to their countries, they will bring themselves to the West. And who, ultimately, can blame them?