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Of course, we know about the oil market,
the fruit and vegetable market, and the sugar market.
What do they have in common?
Buyers and sellers everywhere always look out for their own interests.
The law of supply and demand controls these exchanges.
The crime world is no exception to the rule.
All trafficking has an economic reason to exist.
A mafia, a criminal enterprise is first and foremost a business
with its own products to deliver and services to perform.
The organized crime market generates around $870 billion a year.
Where does this money come from?
Trafficking in every form.
The more illegal it is, the more profitable it is.
Who are the main players in these underground markets?
How are they organized?
Who benefits from the illegal profits?
This is what Dirty Dollars reveals.
It's a journey behind the scenes of the criminal economy.
Economic, environmental, and political imbalances around the world
push entire populations to leave their home countries for a better future.
The nearly universal problem is that they're rarely welcome.
For the populations of the host country, they're seen as a risk, a danger.
However, for mafias, there's none of that.
Migrants are above all,
one of organized crime's most lucrative and promising businesses.
It's a market they've developed with no sense of morality
and with absolute cynicism while increasing their profits
and exploiting the poorest populations.
Welcome to the market of migrant smuggling.
If you are a migrant, and you want to pay for crossing the Mediterranean Sea,
you are going to face things that you never imagined.
This is a multibillion-dollar business.
I've seen lots of people get shot.
I've seen a lot of people lying down there in the street.
You, me, him, everybody here, they have seen a trafficking victim.
We're not talking about small potatoes, but billions of dollars.
I couldn't swim, I cried.
I said to myself: "What can I do now? I can't turn back now"
There's a lot of money involved
in taking advantage of the most needy, the scapegoat, or the victims.
Migration is an innate characteristic of our species.
Since populations left Africa for Eurasia millions of years ago,
up until a total colonization of the planet,
peoples and individuals have always traveled
to places more likely to guarantee their survival.
When a journey seemed difficult or dangerous,
we always used a guide to show the way so we wouldn't get lost.
Today, in the era of GPS
and efficient transport that criss-crosses the planet,
the profession should have disappeared, but the opposite has happened.
It is experiencing a veritable boom in international crime organizations.
Vincent Cochetel is the Special Envoy
of the UN Refugee Agency for the Central Mediterranean Situation.
There are many borders that are very protected.
They don't have the right travel documents,
they need to leave their country.
There are areas that are mined.
There are dangerous areas between Niger and Libya.
If you don't know the tracks, you'll die in the desert.
There are many roads where you need a smuggler.
The smugglers have not always been traffickers or criminals.
We've always needed a guide in the desert to cross the Sahara for centuries.
We've always needed that.
Today, illegally crossing borders
is first and foremost a market in which mafias offer services
either in packages or a la carte
with a level of comfort that depends on the price the client is willing to pay.
The objective is to increase the criminal organizations' profits more.
Organized crime relies on this business model
to illegally smuggle potential exiles from their country of origin
to the destination of their dreams.
The Special Envoy for refugees identifies between two types of migrants,
refugees and economic migrants.
Refugees are driven to flee by war, by political pressure,
or by the fact that they risked their lives if they stayed put.
Life was becoming difficult in the city, with the fighting, the explosions.
We didn't know where to go, there was no future for me there anymore.
Those who are generally called migrants
are considered to be volunteering for exile,
even if the reality is sometimes more nuanced.
A migrant is often someone who leaves his country
for economic reasons,
a lack of employment, or bad governance in the country.
Often it starts with a contribution within the community.
The people put money together
to send a young person toward a brighter future elsewhere,
hoping that this young person will arrive in Europe or someplace else,
maybe in the Middle East,
to find a job and he will regularly send money back to the country.
Today, Moussa is 17 and he now lives in France.
At the age of 15, he had to leave his country alone to escape poverty.
My goal was to go to a peaceful place, to be able to breathe.
To go somewhere where my rights would be respected as in other countries.
To be free like everyone else.
My goal was to be in a peaceful place like other people.
To have the same rights, to have the same duties as the others.
To be able to go to school like other kids my age.
There are approximately 900 million migrants around the world.
This figure must be put into context
because most migrants move around within their own country or continent.
When we look at the phenomenon of economic migration
in West Africa in particular, there's a lot of migratory movement
in the space of the ECOWAS,
the Economic Community of West African States,
much more important than the movements of Africa into Europe, and we forget that.
There is also plenty of myth and perceptions.
We think that all people going to Libya want to come to Europe.
Our studies show that 60% of people who come to Libya
do not actually have any other migration projects.
They want to find work in Libya.
It's always been a country looking for migrants to run its economy.
We have to stop fantasizing
that people from East or West Africa all want to come to Europe.
That's not the reality.
Currently, there are thought to be around 200 million migrants
far from their home countries.
This migration doesn't necessarily go from poor countries to rich ones.
The main movement generally goes in the following way.
Twenty-five percent of the traffic is from North to North,
six percent from North to South, 25% from South to South,
and 35% from South to North, from developing countries to rich ones.
Not all of these migrants turn to criminal organizations
to cross borders because for them, it's legal.
Kristiina Kangaspunta is the chief of the crime research section at UNODC,
the UN's office that fights organized crime.
I am a migrant because I came from my origin country, Finland,
to live in Austria.
I was a lucky migrant because I actually made it.
I have a good job.
I have a legal status.
I have good housing, nobody is exploiting me.
Even the United Nations every now and then, but that's normal.
I was a lucky migrant but many of them are not lucky,
and because of one reason or another, they actually don't make it by themselves.
They need to turn to the criminals, sometimes organized crime criminals,
who are then, so-called, assisting them to make their way
to be migrants.
My friend Hassan didn't feel safe either.
He knew someone who could take us to Europe.
We didn't have the money right away,
but we could pay later.
Think about yourself.
What would you do if you had your family with you?
You are leaving a country which has a crime situation.
It's terrible, you can't stay with your family there.
If next to you, there is a criminal or somebody,
who is promising that, I can do everything for you
and I can bring you here, there, everywhere,
and I can actually solve your problems, I would be very ready to believe in that.
Two hundred million potential customers is an enormous market,
especially since it's naturally boosted by the strengthening of migration laws
and increased border checks,
in particular at the gates of Europe and those to the United States.
We're in Tijuana, Mexico, on the country's west coast.
Here, several meters behind this wall is America.
The border between the two countries stretches over 3,000 kilometers
from coast to coast.
Border Angels are activists dedicated to help anyone trapped behind the wall.
These are often destitute people from all over the American subcontinent.
Three generations ago when people wanted to come into the country
and they could not get a visa, they would hire a smuggler, a coyote.
The smuggler would charge two or $300, and they would bring them.
The people came predominantly from Mexico,
and they would bring them to the United States, to Los Angeles,
or to wherever they would go, and they'd be with them.
They would treat them fairly and they would get paid.
Then about two generations ago, it started changing.
There were still people doing that, paying maybe 1,500 or $2,000,
and some people would take them where they were going, but some would not.
It was organized crime, they started getting involved.
They started abusing the migrants.
The women were being raped, some people were being killed.
It was horrible.
Most are no longer from Mexico.
Now, the largest group is actually from Central America.
Some of the migrants have traveled thousands of kilometers
to be beaten by the wall.
This is the case of Tijuana's Haitian community.
They had to leave their island and travel up all of South America
before regrouping while they wait for their potential entrance to the USA.
Pastor Gustavo Banda Aceves runs the center that's hosting them
in an area that the local media have nicknamed Little Haiti.
When I asked them why they had chosen Tijuana,
they told me it was the only town they knew
where everyone could easily get from Mexico into the United States.
We have always known migration here.
It has become more difficult in recent years
because of the measures taken by the United States government.
The barriers are higher.
There are more dogs and guards.
The police increase their vigilance with electronic means, drones, etc.
They increased vigilance and sanctions against our compatriots,
our brothers in Central and South America.
For years, the United States has actively fought against illegal immigration.
Many Mexicans are forcibly returned to Mexico
even if they've never lived there.
It's a real opportunity for Mexican cartels
because the deportees, as they're called here,
will do anything to get back to the country where they grew up.
Efraim Guevara Galindo is one of them.
We're from Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador,
and Honduras.
The people that are staying right now are here.
Well, I was in the United States for 46 years and they grabbed me.
The ICE immigration grabs me and throws me to Mexico
without knowing anything by myself.
I couldn't bear it, I was scared.
For one, I was paranoid, confused, and depressed.
I couldn't take it anymore.
I had called my family members.
I told them to get me out of here before something happens to me.
My family got together, and gathered up 3,500
because I met one of the guys that was working with me.
He goes, I know some people
who transport people from Mexico to the US.
They charge 3,500.
The work of the smuggler or the coyote, as they're called in Mexico,
has become professional in transnational criminal organizations.
As it's a very competitive market,
each group tries to attract the most customers.
Criminal networks work the same way on every continent.
They organize networks where everyone is independent
and they work together to guarantee the longevity of their business.
You have a picture where organized criminals
are like mafia types of groups.
It's really not the case at all anymore.
There are different structures for organized criminals.
They might be these kinds of hierarchical structures
or they are just networks so that they are like business networks.
They have somebody they know who is doing all the corruption business.
Then, there is somebody who is organizing the falsified passports.
Then there is somebody who is doing something else that is in need
in order to operate the whole trafficking or smuggling process.
These kinds of networks exist
and they are also regarded as organized crime groups.
The business model the traffickers have developed
to exploit illegal immigration is very efficient.
They use it in Africa as well as America.
The first thing when you offer a service is to convince clients
that they're being offered the best service at the best price.
In Tijuana, this was the job done by John Doe, a former cartel member.
I am someone from the streets, I am from the streets.
I hang around where a lot of immigrants come from,
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia.
Many people from different countries come here and I end up meeting them.
I talk to them.
I have several friends, female friends who work in bars.
I let them know who I'm looking for, immigrants who want to cross.
They'll right away call me on the phone and I'll go and meet with them.
That's how I get the clients.
It's through barmaids or prostitutes.
They're just my helpers who help me
because they know that they'll get some small cash.
It's not a lot, we're not talking about $1,000 or even $500.
We're talking about anywhere between 100 pesos
which is like five dollars.
They know, they watch everything, each highway, people come in and go.
They know everything.
Other people come from the US on the weekends,
they follow them around and see what they're doing.
They watch everything.
Everything is watched, everything.
In Africa, it's the same thing.
Touts hang around train and bus stations.
I met some young people at the Niamey train station.
They recommended a place.
I told them that I wanted to be in a normal place.
They answered: "Come with us. We are going to Libya."
"Everything is great in Libya."
"If you work, you can get by."
"If you work well, you'll make good money and you can build a good life."
I said okay.
I asked them in which station we could catch a bus to go to Libya.
They said there wasn't a station, you went through people to enter Libya.
That's because if you take the bus to Libya,
you can't enter as you don't have papers.
Soliciting on the street is a method that's disappearing.
It's become useless compared to a much more effective platform,
the Internet.
With social media, people are communicating with each other
on where to find the smugglers, or what are the routes today, or tomorrow?
That's because of course, there are also police actions trying to cut the routes.
There is very much a discussion within social media
in order to get this to happen.
On social networks, people advertise their roads
saying that their roads are safer than the competition.
They keep these websites up for a week or so to attract customers.
Then discussions take place outside the net.
Then other web pages reappear a week later with pretty much the same offers.
Why don't the criminals
use the same technological and other opportunities as we all do?
We would need to also appreciate
that this part of the business is changing rapidly.
What has not changed are the contraband channels.
It's only natural that cartels and other criminal organizations
are invested in migrant smuggling.
Staying off the authorities' radar is a skill they've mastered perfectly.
Alvaro Rodriguez Gaya
is the head of strategy and outreach at Europol, the European police.
What we see is a clear link, what we call poly-criminal activities.
Migrant smugglers came from previous criminal activities,
drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and plenty of others.
We see this in the Mediterranean Sea.
Organized crime groups using vessels from time to time
for drug trafficking or weapons trafficking
and some others for facilitating illegal immigration of migrants.
Sometimes you can see both commodities in the same vessel.
Criminal networks possess sales reps to attract customers
and the infrastructure to offer the service they want.
For the mafias, it's a complete success.
According to Europol statements,
more than 90% of the migrants are using the services of the facilitators.
It means that almost every single migrant
is using in any of the steps of the movement from the source countries
toward the destination countries, the services of the migrant smugglers.
It's a golden business that has many clients
and they are practically obliged to call upon criminals.
The only problem is that migrants don't all have the same means.
A large part of them are extremely poor.
That doesn't matter if you offer an ala carte service.
This business contains all the elements
to make it one of the most profitable for organized crime.
The quality and comfort of the service they offer
depends on the price the client will accept.
It's a business and above all, it responds to the market's rules.
We are doing research on smuggling migrants globally
and we can see that it is really that prices are following the demand.
If there is a large amount of people coming to one place
and they need to go somewhere else,
the prices get up when the demand is high.
It is like any other market.
It is really the same type of market as usual.
In some areas, there are real price lists.
If you want to do this, then this is the price,
and this is the price.
It is quite professional.
It can be like a travel company.
Some offer an all-inclusive service.
Everything is paid from the beginning to the end with a guaranteed result.
The $10,000 amount is for in-car,
that is through a car, a vehicle crossing,
and that is almost 99% sure that the person will get to his house.
We deliver straight to the door of the person who has paid that money.
If you want to fly in,
they'll jack it up to 15, $20,000, they'll put you in an airplane.
They'll fly you to where you want to go depending on how much money you have.
They have people who work for airlines and the government.
There are people who work for immigration who make it so that with $20,000, $25,000,
you can buy an original green card, but with a different name.
Many people are paid.
Many people in high places are paid for that amount.
That money was not just distributed to the people to whom I gave the money.
That was distributed to higher-class people,
immigration, law officials here in the side of Mexico
and also in the United States.
The service offered adapts to the migrants' means.
Since no profit is too small,
there's a range of services for every budget.
They told me: "No problem. Do you have the money to do it?"
I told them, a little bit…
They said: "How much do you have?" I told them I didn't know.
There, you mustn't say how much you have because if you say you do
they will always tell you that it's not enough.
If you have a lot of money, they will ask you for all of it.
It depends, of course, on different indicators and factors.
If this is summer time, winter time,
there is for the migrants how much they want to pay.
That's because even in the Mediterranean Sea,
we see that the smugglers are offering a different class of boats.
They have really unseaworthy condition rubber boats coming from China.
Sometimes they don't even have a life vest.
They don't have anything or even gasoline for the trip.
Of course, depending on what you want to pay
and the services you want to pay for, this is what you are going to get.
There were 135 people on the boat, I remember that number very well, 135.
Packed in 50 horsepower inflatable boats, 135 people…
It was so crowded.
I didn't even know what a life jacket was.
It was in the Mediterranean Sea that I first saw a life jacket.
I didn't know what a life jacket was before.
To maximize profits,
traffickers use the resources of migrant assistance networks,
especially the boats they use to cross the Mediterranean.
In any case, overloaded inflatable boats
have almost no chance of lasting through the entire crossing.
Inflatable boats cannot venture into the high seas,
so they discreetly sail along the coasts of Libya and Tunisia
and then cross into international waters as soon as possible.
The captains then use satellite phones to call the boats that are near for help.
It was a telephone that could call from anywhere.
I was completely overwhelmed, I can see him making calls.
He was making calls in English.
He said that we were in the Mediterranean Sea: "Come help us!"
Then I saw a big boat that came out of nowhere, it was a really big boat.
I heard a voice on the telephone that said: "We see you."
"We're coming to save you"
When the driver saw the boat coming towards us,
he threw his telephone into the sea.
The big boat came closer, and when that big boat was next to us,
I saw the European Union flag on it.
We keep a close eye on what is going on in the Mediterranean Sea.
Plenty of Syrian migrants and refugees
are getting into the European Union by using a route not coming by sea
because this is the cheapest way.
The most dangerous one, and also the cheapest one.
Whatever the path taken to reach their destination,
for many migrants, it's always too expensive.
The journey is spread out over several years.
You have people paying at every step.
That means from one country to another, they work a little bit.
They expect payments of money through banking systems
or Western Union and others.
They're expecting money
to continue the journey until the next stage.
We know that to get from Brazil to here, it costs between 4,000 and $8,000
because on the way there's Nicaragua
and you have to pay again and again until you reach Mexico.
When you are in Costa Rica,
the amount is $1,200 to cross to Honduras.
You have to know how to negotiate.
It's the same road.
You travel by truck or boat.
It's more expensive by truck.
You have the same problems, whether it's a boat or a truck.
In another situation, migrants become temporarily complicit
in the same traffic they are victims of.
Of course, there are some cases where migrants,
I'm talking about the Mediterranean Sea, for instance.
They don't have to pay to be transported from Libya to Italy
because they are trained for one day on how to drive
and how to be the crew of these boats.
It's cost-free because they have to operate the boat.
Of course, they are not part of organized crime groups.
It's an extremely sensitive situation,
not only in Libya but, as I said, what is going on in the desert?
Of course, if we look at our borders within the European Union,
we have some cases already where people were dying on the highways
of the European Union, between Austria and Hungary,
between Serbia and Romania.
We did see that two years ago,
more than 70 people died in a really crowded van without oxygen.
We are talking about minors, pregnant women, and they don't care.
They are commodities for them.
If they have to kill someone,
if they have to put 70 people inside a van, they will do it.
The reason these criminal organizations exist is to make money.
They're more than just agencies for illegal and dangerous travel
because they quickly discovered all of the advantages
they could derive from a fragile, solitary population
who would never complain to the authorities no matter what.
This is the unique aspect of this market.
Mafias are not content just to rip off their customers.
They've also perfected methods to turn them into merchandise.
Criminal networks have found a way
to make even more money off the migrants' backs.
Here again, whether it's in Mexico, Libya, or elsewhere, it's the same procedure.
They'll pay the smuggler.
The smuggler will start bringing them across.
Suddenly there's somebody else that supposedly is random,
but they're working together with the other smuggler.
They hold up the people and kill some of them.
They charge them again.
It's a horrific situation.
They had told us to be very careful when we get to Chihuahua
because there's a lot of kidnapping going on right now.
The cartel, Juarez, is picking up people left and right.
They told us to be really careful,
but they never did tell us to get rid of the red bags.
Red bags that immigration gives you.
A red bag with all your paperwork from the immigration courts.
They give you two boxes, two socks and two underwear extra
so you can have something to wear when you get deported.
We walked in and as soon as that white truck pulled up,
I knew what it was because the passenger jumped out of the truck.
He had a nine-millimeter in his waist and he had a dagger in his right arm.
He grabs my shirt when I turn around, puts a dagger to my back,
and he scratches me.
He puts it right here somewhere, there's a scratch somewhere.
I don't know where it is, but somewhere right here,
where he put the dagger and grabbed me.
The driver grabbed me and threw me in the truck.
When they threw me in the back of the truck,
he got his nine-millimeter and told me to duck.
He told me to get down.
He grabbed me by the back of my neck and pushed me down.
We got to that ranch.
They took us into the kitchen, through the kitchen door.
Right in the kitchen door, there was a lady sitting there.
She had seven or eight cell phones on top of the table
There were two or three bottles of whiskey and tequila,
I don't know what it was, and they had a big plate full of cocaine.
She had four of the cartel guys with her, the sicarios.
Each country had different prices.
The farther south you are from Mexico,
the higher their prices are to release you because they kidnap you.
If your family doesn't send the money when they tell them to they will kill you.
In Mexico, kidnapping migrants has become commonplace,
especially because authorities have yet to understand the scale of the phenomenon.
I know about kidnaps, at least ten of them per week,
asking between $3,000 and $5,000.
We are talking about $50,000 in profit for organized crime,
for a crime that the government denies.
It's a perfect crime, to kidnap migrants.
The government said it's not happening.
At the time when they were beating them up so damn bad I got up from my knees,
I pushed one of the guys away and I was pulling them towards me.
Then this guy kicks me in the face and knocks one of my teeth out.
The same sicario that put me in the truck, pulled out the same dagger at the time.
He stabbed me and it went in through here and then shot out through right here.
There's no way you can defend yourself against these fucking people.
You can't report it to the police officers as they work for the same goddamn cartel.
You turn yourself in.
When we arrived in the country, we were picked up by another smuggler.
They told us to call our families and ask them for money.
Otherwise, they would kill us.
I talked to my mother on the phone.
She was happy to know that I was alive.
She couldn't raise so much money, so I waited.
I was beaten every day,
and I had almost nothing to eat.
If you are a migrant and you want to pay for crossing the Mediterranean Sea,
you are going to face things that you've never imagined.
This is something that I personally got from the migrants in Niger, for instance.
We are talking about kidnappings.
We are talking about assassination in Libya.
We are talking about people who because they're sick,
the Libyans shoot them in their heads.
Many traffickers are now engaged in money extortion.
They make videos, they torture people, they film them,
and they send the videos to the family.
They call the family.
You can hear the person being beaten and shouting, help, help, help!
Just so that the family transfers extra money to bank accounts.
A smuggler shouted my first name, he told me to come over.
He said to me: "Come here you son of a bitch!"
I went and he said:
"Take this phone, call your family."
I took the telephone,
but I told him I didn't have any family to call.
He said: "Are you screwing with me?"
"Stop jerking us around."
"Call your family or you are going to be in a world of hurt."
I begged them and told them I didn't have any family.
That I had left home, that I didn't have any family.
He translated that into Arabic and his boss got mad,
and they started to beat me.
When they hit me,
I always tried to protect my head and neck.
Once again, it's all profit for the traffickers.
The victims will never go to the police to complain.
At least those who survived.
However, the worst is yet to come.
Another trap is waiting for the migrants.
Since Libya has become a no-go zone, another business has appeared
or rather reappeared.
As soon as you get close to Libya,
there is a tremendous amount of violent trafficking,
sexual exploitation of women and torture for most men to extort extra money.
There are no more nice people.
I'd say when you arrive in Libya,
you deal with well-organized criminal networks.
Having arrived in Libya, Moussa didn't have any more money
or any family that the mafia could extort.
Kidnapped the first time,
he was sold and resold to slave traders for six months.
He'd become a piece of merchandise like any other.
They took me into a big courtyard.
In this courtyard, I only saw Africans like me.
They were all very weak,
I wondered if some were still breathing.
Some were hurt, and many of them were yelling.
Others didn't understand what was happening to them.
Others could no longer speak.
Sometimes, people came and spoke Arabic.
They lined up three young girls and three young boys.
They came to buy us.
He took the person he wanted and he bought them.
He paid the Libyans and then he left with the person he had bought.
I didn't want to believe it but we were a business.
We were merchandise, I had become a slave.
A lot of people are dying in detention.
A lot of people are tortured in detention,
74% of people say they have suffered torture and detention in Libya,
and 84% saw people executed in front of their eyes.
There are terrible conditions in Libyan prisons,
either in the hands of the authorities or in the hands of the traffickers.
Just concerning Libya,
the High Commissioner for Refugees estimates
that only 20% of the migrants arriving in Libya
make it to the shores of Europe.
Migrant exploitation doesn't stop there.
If some are clients or merchandise, others are simply long-term investments.
People can actually travel
and be brought from one place to another
without any money because all is done with debt.
This debt is the reason why persons could be exploited
because in the destination, the traffickers can tell the victim
that actually you owe me such and such much money.
This is usually thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars.
That's why you need to work for me for free,
for the next five years or ten years, or whatever it is.
You have to realize that the traffic doesn't stop in Libya.
It continues in Europe.
When I go to Italy, and you can see it in other countries,
France, Switzerland, and Germany.
When we see these Nigerian women working as prostitutes
who often have their documents confiscated by traffickers
who put them in a situation of slavery for 15 to 20 years,
these women have 20 clients a day.
This is an investment then.
This could be said, okay, if I invest,
I bring these 100 people from Ukraine to Canada,
this is just an example, even though it has happened also.
Even though they don't have money, I invest and pay for everything for them.
Then for the next five years, I can exploit them.
Then the calculation is actually, that the business is profitable
and they can profit from it.
Migrant smuggling takes a variety of forms
and concerns millions of people around the world.
It's an extraordinary profit source whose scale is difficult to imagine.
We're talking about billions.
Today we know that trafficking of migrants and refugees
brings more money to Libya than the sale of oil.
This is what is said in the Libyan community.
It's a very important source of income.
Financial investigation is one of our priorities
and it's also a priority for the police within the European Union.
There is a huge challenge
for the law enforcement community at the EU level
because most of the payments made by the migrants
are by using these underground banking systems, Hawala.
A Hawala is a kind of trust loan.
In concrete terms, it's a money transfer where no money actually moves.
The money doesn't leave the country,
but it's compensated by another service that's legal this time.
For example, a smuggler in Libya must pay $10,000 to his accomplice in Italy.
Just a simple phone call to a hawala agent,
and the agent will give the money to the recipient.
This agent now owns an honor debt
and can ask the debtor to buy $10,000 worth of merchandise in their own country
and to trade it legally.
This system works
because of the absolute trust the members have for one another.
If we try to track the money,
of course, we will come up with the big fish.
Nevertheless, as I said,
it is difficult because by using these underground banking systems,
sometimes there is no trace of how this money was paid.
They are based on confidence between different people.
so we are talking about payment
of relatives in origin and destination countries,
and there is no trace to monitor,
only the statement of the migrants or the statement of smugglers.
There are hundreds of millions of dollars going on because that little town,
like I tell you, it's a small town, and that was just one house.
You can imagine how many houses
are out through Mexico and the border from there,
all the way down from Tijuana to Texas.
Imagine how many miles that is, how many houses and cartels there are.
How many sicarios, how many kidnappings, how many killings?
Everything's going on at once.
Imagine how much money is coming through.
That's just human trafficking.
Imagine how much money they're getting
when they're pumping in all the ice, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana.
Heaven knows what else they're passing through.
This is very popular because we're talking about $10,000 an individual.
You're talking about, let's say, ten people here,
ten people a few miles away.
We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars here.
I could tell you the most I ever collected that I was paid for was $20,000.
That was the most that I was paid.
The rest were lower than that.
I never went beyond 20,000 in one day.
I'm talking about one day's work.
Nothing is done on this border, nothing is done on any other border,
from this coast to the Gulf Coast, if it's not through a cartel.
There are different cartels.
There's one cartel here, there's a different one in Juarez.
There's a different one in Matamoros, there are different cartels.
Each cartel has its organization, but nothing is done on this border
without the permission of the cartel or without their orders.
They control the border.
What we see on a daily basis,
is how organized crime groups operate coordinated.
The business model of the smugglers
who are operating in the Netherlands, Italy, or Spain,
have close communication and they are closely linked
with other actors belonging to the same networks.
They operate in the disembarkation points, in the hotspots in Italy or in Greece,
as well as in the embarkation points, you can name Syria and Turkey,
and therefore in the origin or source countries.
There are well-organized crime groups operating from A to Z.
Of course, because this is an increasingly organized crime group business model,
there are also some links with some other criminal areas.
What I have always said is that trafficking isn't somewhere there,
trafficking is here, and it is a problem for all of us.
It is a problem which is around us.
You, me, him, everybody here has seen a trafficking victim.
Probably without knowing about it.
It is a problem that is happening around us.
It's not something that we can externalize somewhere to the developing world,
Africa or some other regions.
The exploitation doesn't happen in the illegal sector at all.
If you think about most of the victims,
they are actually exploited in the legal sector.
In restaurants, in hotels,
in agriculture, in the fishing industry,
in whatever we can think of like shops, and this is totally illegal.
Moreover, it's completely invisible to the population.
In contrast, there are those who make it to Europe
but who have no other choice
than to band together until their situations evolve.
These profits criminal networks but French ones this time.
Doctor Laurinne Cisse works for the organization
Doctors Without Borders.
It treats patients during the day in makeshift camps, in the heart of Paris.
We consider that they are newcomers.
Unfortunately, it happens that some are in extremely long procedures in France
with nonresponse situations.
They've been waiting for an extremely long time,
but there are still a lot of newcomers arriving every day.
Every night when the NGOs leave the field,
they leave it wide open for other organizations.
There are definitely a lot of things that happen underground,
mostly at night and in the evening.
When we talk to them, you can sense that there are things happening,
people who have their eyes on them.
It's complicated to tell what's really going on.
However, we do know that young adults and minors are extremely vulnerable,
and are constantly approached by trafficking and prostitution networks.
To avoid seeing this situation repeat itself,
there's more and more talk about moving refugees' administrative requests
to their country of origin or neigh boring countries.
It's an initiative that's existed since 2014
so that those forced to leave their countries
are able to do so legally.
There's this saying that people don't have to cross borders.
It's a crime, they can use legal ways.
Finally, the legal ways don't work.
Eighty-five percent of the people who arrive in Libya pass through Niger.
How many refugees have been relocated
from Niger to the rest of the world in 2014?
Zero, 2015, zero, 2016, zero, 2017, one refugee.
You have to be serious.
Either we set these legal alternatives for people who are refugees
with maximum security control so as to protect hosting communities,
or we remain silent on these legal channels
because today they don't exist.
The more migrants there are,
the more countries will shore up their borders to limit mass immigration.
It's a trend that's happening worldwide.
The only real and indisputable consequence of this policy
is the extraordinary profit that criminal organizations will make.
By promising that no border and no wall can keep them out,
mafias will continue to reap huge profits.
Moussa got his papers and resumed his studies
in a work-study program to become a mechanic.
Efraim never returned to the United States.
He lives in Tijuana, where he works in a reception center
that helps deportees.