Illegal Immigration, Meet Smartphone

In a recent blog, I mentioned that smuggling immigrants into Europe is a $3 billion a year business. But guess who is eating into the smuggler’s business? The ubiquitous smartphone! How? Let this New York Times article explain:
“In this modern migration, smartphone maps, global positioning apps, social media and WhatsApp have become essential tools.”

It’s not just location info and maps though. Immigrants use the phone to get info  on “arrests, border guard movements and transport, as well as places to stay and prices” as well.

Not to be left behind, traffickers too use social media to “advertise their services on Facebook like any legitimate travel agency”, including family discounts! But how do immigrants know if such sites can be trusted? Based on the Like’s and posts of people who used that service, of course:
“Migrants share photos and videos of their journeys taken on their smartphones.”

Add GPS to the mix and the data gets even more detailed:
“They shared their experiences on social media — even the precise GPS coordinates of every stop along their routes, recorded automatically by some smartphones.”
No wonder then that Facebook even has groups like “Smuggle Yourself to Europe Without a Trafficker”! Updates to loved ones back home are sent via WhatsApp.

UN refugee relief agencies are aware of this trend and so in Jordan’s refugee camps, they distributed 33,000 SIM cards and 85,704 solar lanterns that can “also be used to charge cellphones”. Relief agencies acknowledge that information now flows both ways (agency to refugee and vice-versa) thanks to smartphones. Refugees are no longer passive receivers; they escalate issues like a water-main in the camp breaking.

We are now obviously in the age of hi-tech immigration and refugee camps.

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarSeptember 6, 2015 at 5:13 PM

    Well, well - so, we are surely living in a, what shall we say, "global village". A century or two back, illegal immigrants to Europe would have been unthinkable. [A centuries before that, Europeans were happily the "illegal" immigrants to many places, with nobody able to check them. That is, stop them from not just entering, but from declaring all the land were theirs!] Today illegal immigrants "come not in single spies but in battalions" as Shakespeare said in one his books, flood into Europe from war-torn or turmoil-ridden places.

    As to using technologies and facilities, everyone easily and freely chooses all that are developed and available. It is a free market, the user would argue. Using every means along with the help of traffickers immigrants arrive at an "alien" land. One is expected to be humanitarian in treating illegal immigrants.

    After that, perhaps some years or decades later, the immigrants refuse to culturally integrate with the 'aliens' who were humanitarian enough to allow them in long back. "Once-their-immigrants now-their-bugbear" (this too is a twisted form of Shakespeare's "once our sister, now our queen" from Hamlet) may actually demand, "Aliens! Your culture does not suit us. Please reduce it and allow us to increase ours."

    Technology may not offer solutions in such matters.

    In the context of the current crisis of illegal immigration to Europe, nobody knows what to do with future worries. Europe is trying its best about what do with its present worry actually.

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