A year ago today, at least 95 people perished in a shipwreck off the coast of Crotone, a small port city in southeast Italy. They had set off from İzmir, Turkey, sailing more than 1000 kilometres to get around Greece before trying to land in bad weather. The boat broke up on the rocks, killing around half the people on board.

Questions were asked in the aftermath, most notably whether Frontex, Europe’s border agency, and the Italian authorities could have done more to prevent the tragedy. These questions intensified when it emerged they had been aware the overcrowded boat was heading into rough seas hours before it crashed.

Another question hung in the air. Why would people who were presumably trying to reach the EU from Turkey set sail for Italy, when Greece is right there?

There is a simple answer to this question, and a complex one. The simple but unsatisfying answer is: because the border with Greece is closed. The more complex answer requires some background.

Crackdown after disaster

2023 was a year of tragedy across Europe’s borders. Just a few months after Crotone, as many as 600 people perished in similar circumstances off the Greek coast. Again, Frontex and the Greek coast guard were accused of allowing it to happen.

Over 3000 people seeking shelter in Europe died in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean in 2023. It was death at a scale that has not been seen since the “migrant crisis” nearly a decade ago.

As this was happening, European governments introduced a raft of anti-migrant policies to keep people from trying to get to Europe. These were designed to either physically prevent migrants from arriving, or to make their welcome so hostile that they wouldn’t want to come.

The Italian government introduced a law penalising NGOs engaged in migrant rescue on the Mediterranean, and unveiled a scheme to “offshore” new arrivals to neighbouring Albania. The UK government doggedly tried to get its scheme for offshoring to Rwanda off the ground. And Frontex supplied material such as boats to the Libyan Coast Guard, a nebulous entity comprising various militias and criminal groups, so they can more effectively stop people leaving Libya.

Finally, the European Council hailed a breakthrough in a common asylum and migration plan. It agreed on certain “crisis regulations”, allowing under certain conditions, for instance, summary detention of new arrivals for up to a month. These regulations are likely to deprive asylum seekers of basic rights and protections.

Does migration deterrence work?

However, there is no good evidence demonstrating that migration deterrence is actually effective. Instead, migration researchers have shown that such policies above all else push people to take more dangerous routes. Politicians routinely refuse to acknowledge this.

When the Crotone disaster happened, I had just returned from a month onboard the charity rescue ship Ocean Viking, operated by IFRC and SOS Mediterranée. Onboard at various times were hundreds of rescuees, mostly from West Africa but a few from further afield, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The Italian anti-NGO law had just been enacted, and was high on the crew’s mind. The law forces NGO boats to spend far more time travelling to distant disembarkation ports than patrolling the “rescue zone” in the waters above Libya. It effectively limits how many people the NGOs can rescue, without violating maritime law.

“They found the perfect way to fuck us,” one crew member told me.

Speaking to the rescuees onboard, it became clear they had little knowledge of, or interest in, European migration politics. They listened intently as IFRC crew explained the asylum procedure in Italy (the IFRC state they do not assist people in making claims, they simply explain the process). But they did not know or care about such deterrence schemes as Rwanda. From their point of view, the odds still looked better in Europe than what they had been experiencing in their home countries, or the extreme abuse they had faced in Libya.

Once, as survivors were preparing to disembark in the northern Italian city of Ravenna, I saw a teenager from Cameroon standing on the deck. He was shivering and looked nervous.

When pressed, he admitted he still wasn’t quite sure what was about to happen. Then he asked if it was always this cold in Europe. I didn’t have the heart to tell him we were still in southern Europe, and if Ravenna in January was too cold for him he might want to rethink his plan to head to the UK.

Migrants desperate to escape Libya “hell”

The people I met onboard the Ocean Viking did not know the full extent of Europe’s anti-immigration policies. But they were well acquainted with one of its outcomes: the Libyan Coast Guard (LCG).

Almost everybody onboard had been intercepted at least once by the LCG as they tried to escape Libya. The Cameroonian teenager had been intercepted twice. And each time they had entered an LCG-affiliated detention centre, they had witnessed myriad abuses while awaiting a chance to leave again.

Here’s a typical story. One of the Ocean Viking’s crew told me about a man who had tried to cross the Mediterranean seven times before being rescued by the NGO. The first six times he was intercepted or the boat capsized. At a certain point, he said, he’d stopped caring whether he lived or died because for migrants Libya “is hell on earth.”

Everybody I spoke to used the same word – hell – to describe their time there.

But despite the interceptions and inherent dangers of crossing the Mediterranean in a tiny rubber boat without a lifejacket, the rescuees had been determined to keep trying.

Another West African man I met watched his brother drown after their boat capsized near shore. Just a few weeks later he was setting off again. The coast guard is quite effective at pulling people back – aided by ships and, previously, training from the EU – but that doesn’t change peoples’ goals.

Smugglers increasing the risks

What does change, under the system of EU-funded patrolling of the coastline, supported by Frontex drones and intelligence gathering, is the practice of the smugglers.

“Smugglers have to take a number of measures in order to bypass border controls,” said Luigi Achilli, a senior researcher at the European University Institute in Florence. “And these measures almost inevitably lead to an increase in the dangers faced by migrants.”

In the past, smugglers would pilot the boats themselves, Achilli explained. But as patrols have increased the chance of arrest, now it is common that one of the passengers is put in charge of the tiller. Untrained, and sometimes pressured or incentivised with a small fee reduction, they do their best to point the boat in the general direction of Europe.

This makes it less likely that they’ll reach their destination in one piece. And, for those driving the boat, actually getting there presents a special risk. Migrants identified as being on the tiller are being increasingly prosecuted and sentenced to decades in prison for being “human traffickers.”

There are other ways smugglers increase the risks. Knowing the vessel won’t be recovered, smugglers use the cheapest boats they can find. They also pack as many people onboard as possible, drastically increasing the danger. On the first rescue I witnessed with the Ocean Viking, 116 people were rescued from a rubber dinghy made to hold 20.

All of this has contributed to rising deaths in the Mediterranean in recent years. You can see similar changes elsewhere in the world, along other areas of high irregular migration.

Over in the United States, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, of George Mason University, said enforcement on the US-Mexico border started to become really visible in the 1990s. Government operations such as “Hold the Line” in 1993 focussed on the El Paso-Juarez crossing, and “Gatekeeper” focussed on San Diego-Tijuana the following year.

“This is when we started seeing a change in terms of the routes that were followed by migrants,” said Correa-Cabrera. “More dangerous terrains, crossing through the Sonora, Arizona desert. And this is where things started to become much more dangerous for migrants.”

Likewise, in the United Kingdom, securitisation of the English Channel Tunnel shifted the behaviour of people trying to get across from France.

This securitisation “was a huge investment,” said Peter Walsh, of Oxford’s Migration Observatory. “Kilometres of fencing, CCTV cameras, C02 detectors to see if people were breathing inside lorries. Dogs, more people, more boots on the ground. Just overall enhanced securitisation, a very concerted effort to reduce irregular entry.”

What followed was an observable rise in people crossing from around Calais in small boats. It’s a correlation, but a strong one.“Smugglers have had to innovate,” said Walsh, and they “are quite resourceful. Once that route became established, it has a kind of momentum of its own.”

And, like in the Mediterranean, those migrants steering the boats are especially vulnerable to prosecution. Just last week, Ibrahima Bah was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to nearly ten years in prison because he had been put on the tiller of a dinghy crossing the English Channel when four people drowned. Bah and other survivors told the jury that he had been assaulted and coerced into steering the boat.

Migrants know the risks – but move anyway

The Crotone disaster of February 2023 is an extreme example of what happens when migration routes are closed and re-routed.

In the years preceding 2016, people would typically employ smugglers to help them move from Turkey to Greece. They would then continue their journeys unaided towards Western Europe via the Balkans. Some still manage that way. But after the EU made a deal with Turkey’s president to close land borders, and securitisation of the Aegean sea was stepped up with more aggressive patrolling, many people found themselves stranded in Turkey.

But for those who could afford it, there was the Calabrian route. Smugglers procured larger boats for the journey from Turkey to southern Italy, a far longer and more perilous journey. Turkish authorities turned a blind eye to these departures, knowing there’s no way those migrants could be returned from Italy as they would be from Greece.

These journeys are more expensive, but smugglers still cut costs where they can. Boats are crammed way beyond capacity, and though smugglers seem more likely to accompany this journey as it has higher navigational demands, they’ve been known to slip away on smaller crafts before the boat reaches the rocky shores of Calabria.

Some people make it. Migration authorities have noticed a sharp increase in the use of this route in recent years, and the shores of Calabria are reportedly littered with abandoned boats. But many others perish, as seen on that stormy day in February 2023.

All these processes operate under their own logic.

Demand for smuggling services is created by the presence of borders and people determined to cross them no matter what. “Smuggling is a reflection of the difficulty, the obstacles migrants face,” Achilli said. “The more you make it difficult to move, the more there will be smugglers.”

People travelling to Europe generally ignore, or are not aware of, internal migration policies in destination countries. And even if that wasn’t the case, research suggests that the deterrence effect of policies would remain limited. “There's surprisingly little evidence that deterrence makes all that much difference, it's not particularly effective” Walsh said. “That includes policies that affect the rights that await asylum seekers when they enter a country.”

Border enforcement mechanisms shift the routes and increase danger. At the same time, if would-be migrants are excluded from legal pathways, they have little incentive to follow the rules. “They are fully aware of the risks they are facing, but they do that because it's still a rational decision,” Achilli said. “They decide, maybe wrong, maybe right, to gamble and embark on a dangerous journey.”

Deterrence benefits politicians and smugglers

Many benefit from the project of creating risk and vulnerability for people seeking shelter.

European politicians benefit. Despite the occasional outcry over a shipwreck, for the most part they get to say they are doing what their voters want – reducing immigration. This applies just as much to wealthier northern EU member states, who have a big hand in shaping policy across the bloc, as it does “frontier” countries such as Italy and Greece. Keep in mind it was the European Council, not Greece, that made the 2016 deal with Turkey, and EU cooperation with Libya was spearheaded by Federica Mogherini, a former EU official belonging to the centre-left bloc.

Smugglers benefit. The enhanced border measures increase demand for their services, and the dangers involved allow them to cut costs where they can. Achilli noted that after borders along the Balkan route were tightened in 2016, “we saw the proliferation of smuggling networks that were not known there before.” Now, as securitisation of the Mediterranean increases, the Balkan route is seeing a resurgence.

Corrupt authorities in countries of origin and transit benefit, as well as countries that position themselves as destinations for offshoring. “Rather than getting money from the smugglers working their territory, (authorities) decided to get money from Europe to stop migrants,” said Achilli. “What we witnessed was the business of migration turning into the business of detention. These corrupt border authorities and militias no longer getting money from smugglers, or perhaps less than they used to. Instead they now get money from Europe to keep people inside.”

In the media cycle that follows every large ship-wreck, the question always asked is: “How did this happen?” A more salient question, perhaps, is when will it happen again.

Policymakers “are creating the smugglers,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera. “They have created all the problems themselves.”

Unsurprisingly, policymakers in Europe and North America reject this message. From Washington D.C. to Rome to Brussels the tune of more enforcement isn’t changing.

“What I think will happen is that we will follow the same approach that we have followed so far,” Achilli predicted. “And probably with even more intensity than before.”

If that is the case, 2024 will be another deadly year on the Med.