Does the UK need to pay more attention to tackling corruption as an enabler of illegal immigration and human trafficking into the UK? Professor Robert Barrington and Dr Shahrzad Fouladvand of the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption (CSC) investigate. A longer version of this blog will be available next week here as a CSC working paper.
The UK’s new government, both like its predecessor and many other governments around the world, is faced with the challenge of controlling its borders. What role, if any, does corruption play as an enabler of illegal immigration and human trafficking into the UK? Corruption research – both theoretical and empirical - suggests that borders are extremely high risk for corruption, but there is a paucity of data and the UK’s institutional response has been weak. Given the high political profile of illegal immigration in the UK and elsewhere, it is a conundrum that so little attention has been paid to working out the extent to which corruption is a problem, and how to reduce it.
What is illegal immigration?
We can break down the term 'illegal immigration' into component parts, including:
- people smuggling in various forms (such as small boats crossing the Channel and cramming people into refrigerated lorries)
- legitimate travel but with illegitimate documentation (e.g. arriving on a plane at Heathrow with a fake passport)
- illegally obtaining genuine documentation (e.g. by a fraudulent application)
- permeable transit arrangements (people notionally passing through a country but then actually staying).
Historically, new illegal arrivals, including unaccompanied minors and those in vulnerable groups, aimed to stay under the radar when they arrived. A recent development has been their willingness to give themselves up on arrival, entering a lengthy processing system from which they may hope to emerge with the right to stay in the UK. This means that the corruption risk has also shifted. The focus of such immigrants is now on getting to the UK at all costs and not on how to survive undetected in the grey economy. Once arrived, the risk of corruption is also heightened as applicants enter a bureaucratic process populated by officials who have strong discretionary powers.
A grim sub-set of illegal immigration alongside the people smuggling is human trafficking - in which people are traded against their will (by various means including fraud, deception, abduction and coercion) and often moved across borders by serious organised crime (SOC) groups and then exploited into various forms of modern slavery.
What role does corruption play in UK borders?
Across the world, research tells us that corruption is one of the reasons that people are so easily able to cross supposedly secure national borders, to gain the right documentation, or to speed up the processing of an application. Yet this is seldom discussed in the context of UK immigration and the UK's rising numbers of illegal immigrants and human trafficking.
Although we do not know with any certainty how much of a problem corruption is, or how far illegal immigration might be reduced if corruption were tackled effectively, three recent stories highlighted in UK media shine a spotlight on why corruption in relation to UK borders needs to be better understood.
- An asylum seeker was told by an immigration official that for a bribe of £2,000 he could secure the relevant paperwork and approvals for UK residency. We might assume this was not the first time the official had tried such a thing.
- A border officer at Gatwick airport passed sensitive information about anti-smuggling operations to an organised crime group (OCG). This particularly highlights the role of OCGs in lucrative cross-border trade (in people and goods).
- A border officer in Portsmouth assisted a London-based OCG to pass through his booth at Portsmouth with 15 kilos of Class A drugs, showing how easily penetrable borders can be with the right inducements.
All three cases involved public officials acting corruptly, with OCGs involved in two of these examples. For OCGs, corruption is simply a means to an end with a calculable risk-reward ratio. In most cases, we can assume the calculation is that the risk of getting caught is fairly low.
How does the UK compare with other countries?
Surprisingly little is known about border-related corruption around the world, although it is widely acknowledged as being both prevalent and a high risk. As summarised by a 2018 paper from the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, “interest in border related corruption is largely limited in the literature to the issue of corruption in customs. It is mainly the economists who focus on this issue and try to clarify the relationships between tariffs and corruption”. Sequeira, Djankov, et. al (2014) studied corruption in ports and borders - mainly focusing on Africa - and concluded that “the empirical and theoretical academic literature on border corruption is surprisingly limited.” The situation had improved little by 2019 when Jancsics noted how “despite the growing importance of border-related corrupt activities, the concept of border corruption is still underdeveloped” (Jancsics 2019).
Jancsics wrote further in 2021 that in many countries “customs and border protection agencies are perceived as the most corrupt government institutions. Officers in those organizations have more opportunities to participate in corruption than do employees in other law enforcement agencies” (Jancsics 2021). This is reinforced by a UNDP Report in 2021 which concluded ”across all stages of contemporary forms of slavery, cross-border trafficking is most prone to corruption” and that “trafficking networks tend to build layers of protection within the institutions they are more likely to need”.
The UK’s own national Anti-Corruption Strategy 2017-2022 rated Borders as one of four priority areas but, with a new government and challenging policy decisions ahead, governance to tackle UK-border related corruption requires significant review
This blog is continued in Part Two, available to read here.
