I watched the VICE video “People Smuggling in Sicily” and was exposed to an entirely new side of the trafficking business – the land smuggling that occurs once migrants reach Europe and are trying to escape the EU Dublin Regulation.

It shocked me to learn that the land people-traffickers were also migrants – individuals who had formerly (most likely) paid an exorbitant amount of money to reach Europe were now manipulating those who reached after them to pay even more, all to continue their trek into the European mainland. It was even more confusing to learn that these migrant-people traffickers thought that “they are helping [these] people”. The newly established traffickers had “lost their humanity” because of their own migration processes and were perpetrating an already horrific cycle and creating a profit out of human life. It was mind boggling to see children paying nearly 5x the cost of a regular bus ticket, to the wrong city, simply because of their vulnerability.

This brought me back to the EU’s original “war on trafficking” plan, that had the intention to “save lives” and “disrupt the model of business…traffickers”, especially “those [businesses] that are making money off of lives, and more often their deaths”. It seems that by investing millions of dollars yearly to prevent trafficking INTO Europe, the EU has failed to maintain the security and regulation at its own borders that it claims to have, perpetrating this negative cycle of human trafficking and creating an opening to “worsen” the migrant influx into the EU.

One might even call this ongoing negative cycle a “catastrophe”, but following the paradigm outlined by Cristiana Giordano, that would insinuate that this cycle is extraordinary, when it really is just an ordinary migration process, whose flaws have been taken advantage of by profiteers and ignored by officials who have the power to incur a positive change or reform.