Just like drug dealers, who no longer hesitate to advertise on social networks, migrant smugglers exploit online platforms to sell their services, reported French daily Le Figaro.
“Clandestine departure for Turkey and Europe. 100 percent guarantee,” says one of the posts, for example.
The newspaper contacted one of the men via another application, WhatsApp. In Istanbul, faced with an Iranian interlocutor who reported the concerns of his friend, a candidate for immigration to Europe, the trafficker responded: “Don’t worry! I fix it in less than a week. It’s as simple as drinking a glass of water.”
He explains to prospective clients that he sells stages of the journey, or an “integral formula” bound for Paris, Rome or Berlin, at 7 500 euros.
According to a Turkish lawyer interviewed by Le Figaro, “it’s a real industry”. He describes “the institutionalization of a formerly informal practice which today is being self-promoted on social networks”. This is so, because the sector of activity is “less dangerous than drug trafficking, where dealers risk up to twenty years in prison”.
“If arrested, the smugglers pretend that they are ordinary refugees in an irregular situation. At worst, they are sentenced to a few months behind bars, or they are expelled,” continued the lawyer.
And while human traffickers and migrants have been complicit in their nefarious dealings, a French politician from the Macron party, has surprisingly stated that no migrants are implicated in criminal enterprises.
Known for his openly accommodating positions with regard to massive immigration, the elected official from LREM maintains that no asylum seeker had ever been linked, in France, to crime.
.@Aurelientache : “Donnez-moi les titres de presse qui montrent que les migrants font de la délinquance !” pic.twitter.com/JZ4rqlek4j
— Damien Rieu (@DamienRieu) January 23, 2020
At a time when so-called “refugees” have been arrested for possible acts of terrorism, the remarks of Aurélien Taché could pass for a provocation. On LCI, this week, one of the most immigration-oriented LREM elected officials, an advocate for a multicultural France, had asked to be given “headlines which show any asylum seeker who has committed delinquency”.
Some Internet users did not take very long to unearth the facts on this matter.
Last August, L’Est Eclair reported the case of a man, who had been unhappy that he had not yet received an apartment. The migrant had trashed the Red Cross premises in Troyes. He was arrested by the police.
In April, according to Ouest-France, a 26-year-old Afghan man was convicted by the Sables-d’Olonne court for exhibiting himself before two minor girls in the street. He then entered the parents’ house and insulted them.
In January 2020, the website actu.fr reported that a man “from a country at war” was convicted for the assault of a bus driver in Aurillac, last November. In the three cases mentioned, they were asylum seekers.
And beyond the borders of France, the cases have been piling up. In March 2018, in Germany, a migrant claiming to be Afghan was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a student, reported Le Dauphiné.
In the UK, last August, the Metro newspaper reported that a 29-year-old man had stabbed a 21-year-old Briton to death who had repeatedly refused his advances. He had been sentenced to life.
The most sordid example is the rape, which a disabled woman suffered on several occasions in Chemnitz, Germany, in 2018, according to information from the newspaper Junge Freiheit. Again, these were three asylum seekers.