The Effects of Restrictive Migration Policies on Human Trafficking

  1   INTRODUCTION The present thesis analyses the connections existing between human trafficking, one of the most serious crimes perpetrated all over the world, and the migration phenomenon. In particular, we will try to detect the consequences produced on the trafficking phenomenon, first of all by migration policies adopted in countries of destination, and then by the general approach assumed towards immigration by receiving states’ institutions and the whole societies in which migrants end to live and work in. Migration policies, as we will see, have not a direct influence on the amount of migrants who daily move to try for a better life elsewhere, nor on the concrete factors that push them to leave. What is instead debatable is the range of consequences that these policies have on how the migration process takes place, and the actual conditions in which migrants find themselves before, during and after their travel to an unknown destination. The movement of a person from one country to another is rarely a simple operation: the access to another country is regulated by definite norms included either in a law of that country or, as the transnational movement involves at least two countries, in an international agreement between them.