"The dirty game", the smuggling of migrants as an "improper weapon" of international geopolitics

The trafficking of men, women and children is today one of the most profitable activities for criminal organizations around the world, with earnings even higher than those deriving from the drug and arms trade .

The reason is simple and is linked to a contradiction typical of our era: while with globalization goods and capital can circulate very easily around the world, it has become increasingly difficult for people to migrate legally because all the more developed states have raised legal barriers and often also physical to limit incoming flows . Migrants, however, try to cross borders illegally.

The criminal networks organize the transport of the illegal immigrants by land or by sea , for example in hiding places inside trucks or in shabby boats. Trafficking in migrants is all the more profitable the greater the difficulty of crossing borders.

In fact, as controls grow, prices also grow: a few years ago, for example, crossing the Mediterranean could cost 500 euros, while today the price can even go up to 3,000 and even 5,000 euros .

However, not only criminal organizations "play" on the skin of migrants, but also international organizations and governments, as Valerio Nicolosi tells us, a journalist who has been dealing with social issues and migratory routes for years, in his " The dirty game " (Rizzoli , 2023, pp. 288, also e-book).

In the book, the result of years of experience in the field, in close contact with the most unfortunate migrants, Nicolosi brings to the surface a known truth, but too often removed: migratory flows are now managed as an unconventional weapon. They are an instrument of pressure in the big and small games of contemporary geopolitics.

To make us understand how things work, the author uses a clear example of recent months, an event that he experienced firsthand as he was among the first journalists to arrive in Ukraine to describe its tragedy , landing in Kiev one day before the Russian attack that opened the war. From there Nicolosi recounted the exodus of women and children to Poland and Europe . A migratory route organized by the Polish and European Union authorities and generously supported by citizens and associations, but which hides a fundamental ambiguity. Welcoming refugees is a way of doing politics, of showing the world support for the Ukrainian cause. It is also a way to gain "merit" within the Western Front. This welcome is not disinterested, as Nicolosi recounts, but contains the same implicit threat of the routes in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. It is the "dirty game" that the author has seen far too many times, in too many parts of the world, set up by some governments on the lives of migrants fleeing armed conflicts, persecutions, famine and poverty.

From the coasts of the island of Lesbos to Trieste, from Mariupol to Krakow, from Turkey to Libya, from the Balkans to Sicily, the lives of desperate people - ready to risk everything in order to have even the chance of a decent future - are used every day as a means of geopolitical pressure or outright unconventional attack. As Nicolosi writes: «The Balkan route, for example, opens and closes intermittently, based on how much money the European Union allocates to Turkey to outsource its border and on Erdogan's current needs. Then there are the agreements with Bosnia to build refugee camps with European standards: containers in the middle of a plateau where it freezes in winter and where the nearest town is more than a two-hour walk away. Camps of people who have already been rejected at least five or six times - often even twenty or thirty - by the Croatian police, who use physical and psychological violence on the refugees, and then leave them naked in the woods, forced to cross a river in the middle of winter ».

Along these migratory routes some pass, others die, many await the right opportunity, hardly anyone backs down. These are the side effects of a dirty game in which governments have been engaged for years as Nicolosi always recounts: «Migrants have lost the human component, because it is clear that the issue is very political and concerns the choices of the individual countries of the European Union and transit countries. But it is equally clear that, while we are discussing laws, rules to be respected, closed ports, walls and invasion, tens of thousands of people are living a nightmare along the barriers we have built around our fortress, Fortress Europe".

The one evoked by Nicolosi is a scenario that must at least make us reflect , must question us. Above all, a question must arise for us: if migrants weren't a decoy of that politics that doesn't want to talk about the economy, the energy or the environmental crisis, would we still treat this issue as a constant emergency? Or would we finally find a decent solution?