Beyond legality and illegality: Palestinian informal networks and the ethno-political facilitation of irregular migration from Syria

ABSTRACT

Contemporary studies on human smuggling and irregular migration have often overlooked the importance of national ties in the formation of transnational networks able to support refugees throughout their journey and settlement in the country of arrival. Nonetheless, the ability to support and help people through informal networks is something that has increasingly characterised the flow of refugees from areas of conflict. This paper focuses on the experience of Palestinian refugees from the Yarmouk camp – a refugee camp established in the outskirts of Damascus that fell under the control of the Islamic State (IS) and other fighting forces after the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011. Our research provides an anthropological investigation into the social and political roots of networks of solidarity established by Palestinian youth from Syria across the Middle East. In so doing, the paper strives to accomplish two goals. First, it aims at analysing the importance of informal networks in irregular migration, beyond the narrow framework of exploitation and criminality. Secondly, it seeks to move beyond the discussion of whether migration flows are best defined in terms of legality or illegality and to examine how these aspects are ultimately interconnected.

KEYWORDS:

• Irregular migration
• Syria
• human smuggling
• Palestinian refugees

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 On the excess of Palestinian exceptionalism, see Kagan (2009).

2 In this regard, it is fundamental to underline the particular relevance of the transnational character of this ethno-political solidarity in the specific case of Palestinian refugees. As a matter of fact, the unique condition of statelessness, dispersion and exile have made transnationalism a necessary form of national socio-political reorganisation. In this sense, we can talk about a Palestinian ‘transnational nationalism’: a struggle for national liberation and self-determination that is fought through transnational strategies and structures (Achilli 2019). While recent studies have often underlined the national-transnational dialectic in the strategies of contemporary social movements, suggesting that the former leads to the latter, in the Palestinian case this relation works on the opposite trajectory: transnational strategies are necessary to pursue national ambitions. When talking about transnational solidarity among Palestinians, therefore, the peculiarity of transnational practices as well as the specificity of the ethno-political drive of solidarity deserve particular attention.

3 Doomernik and Kyle (2004) summarised the complex relationship between smugglers and migrants as a spectrum that ranges from the altruistic assistance provided by family members or friends to dynamics of exploitation based on the intent of hardened criminals. Since their work, empirical research has shown that trust and cooperation seem to be more the rule than the exception in the interaction between smugglers and migrants (e.g. Bilger, Hofmann, and Jandl 2006; Galemba 2018; Koser 2008; Spener 2004; Zhang, Sanchez, and Achilli 2018).

4 The UN 2000 Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, and its accompanying ‘Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants’ state that human smuggling is ‘the procurement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a State Party of which the person is not a national or a permanent resident’ (United Nations 2000, 54–55).

5 Their names in the text are pseudonyms.

6 There is, however, a considerable discrepancy between international and domestic laws. For example, the European Committee on Crime Problems notes how

there are very grave discrepancies in the way in which smuggling of migrants is criminalised in [Europe] Member States … . There appears to be minimal, if any, common understanding about what constitutes smuggling of migrants, what types of smuggling and what motives of smugglers ought to be and ought not to be criminalized. (CDPC 2016, 9)

7 Al-shatat can loosely be translated as ‘diaspora’.

8 Further waves of refugees arrived in the following years, especially after the Suez War in 1956, the Six-Day War’ between Israel and the Arab states in 1967, the Jordanian civil war known as Black September in 1970, and the outbreak of the Gulf War in 2003 (HRW 2015).

9 The UNRWA is a UN agency charged with the care of the Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, West Bank, Gaza, and Syria.

10 The PLO was established in 1964 and is the umbrella organisation under which all the Palestinian movements and groups such as political factions, armed groups and sectoral unions work to achieve national liberation. See Hamid (1975).

11 For an exhaustive account of the first days of the war and the loss of neutrality in Yarmouk, see Bitari (2013) and Diab (2014).

12 Also referred to as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or Islamic State (IS), ‘Da’ish’ is the acronym of ‘al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham’ (lit. Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant).

13 In virtue of their ambiguous status and political history, Palestinian refugees been barred access to country of first asylum – e.g. Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon – well before the implementation of the no-entry policy that these states have adopted to curb the mobility of Syrian refugees since the 2014 (Badil 2014)

14 In 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimated that 5000 people lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean to enter Europe – a thirty-five percent increase since 2015. By April 2017, a further 942 people had died or were reported missing in the Mediterranean (2017).

15 For a more articulated analysis see Abu Samra (2015).

16 With ‘Palestinian nationalism’ we refer here to the shared experience of colonisation and exile that is at the core of Palestinian history. It is this collective predicament that shapes Palestinian social political and cultural identity regardless of the geographical fragmentation imposed on the people (see, for example Schulz 1999).

17 For a similar argument, see Napolitano (2015).

18 A document issued by the Palestinian Authority for Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority is an administrative body established within the framework of the Oslo Accords in 1993.

19 Again, this is not unique to the Palestinian case. Zhang, for example, points out how Chinese migrants coming to the United States often perceive smugglers as philanthropists (2007, 89).

20 Wasta, in Arabic, refers to both the process of intermediation and the person who, by virtue of his connections and reputation, provides services and connectivity.

21 Of course, that smuggling may at times be cemented within social ties between smugglers and their customers does not always protect the latter against exploitation and violence. However, while social networks can be supportive, kin and social networks can be deceiving and envious; religion and ethnicity might be used to justify deception and exploitation (see, for example, Monsutti 2005). We have showed elsewhere how migrants’ likelihood of being abused and exploited increase precisely within these ties of kinship and ethnicity when border controls intensify and channels of legal entry diminish (for more, see AUTHORS).

22 It is worth pointing out here that even the so-called smugglers were not actually crossing the border with the migrants but simply providing information and means of transport (e.g. rubber dinghies) that migrants would have then used to cross the border. For an analysis of the modus operandi of smugglers operating across the Eastern Mediterranean corridor at the time of the so-called migrant crisis, see Baird (2016) among many others.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions [752144].