Small Boats, Big Business: The industrialization of cross-channel migrant smuggling

By: Team from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), including (in alphabetical order) Lucia Bird, Giulia D’Amico, Sarah Fares, Alex Goodwin and Tuesday Reitano

As of January 2024, over 100 000 people had crossed the English Channel using small boats since 2018. The current peak came in 2022, when over 45 000 people were detected arriving in the UK illegally using small boats launched from the coast of northern France. Although small in comparison with the flows of migrants risking the journey across the Mediterranean to reach Europe each year, this figure marked a record high for the UK since records began in 2018. The spike in the number of arrivals can be largely explained by the ‘industrialization’ of a system of smuggling migrants by boat, a process that began in 2018.

This report explores how the English Channel has become a commercialized human smuggling route. It analyzes the shift in human smuggling transportation from land to sea, from trucks using the Channel Tunnel to rigid inflatable boats (RIBs).

Geneva, SWIT: 2024 Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.2024. 34p.