Large Fishing Dragnets Catching Small Fish: Anti-Migrant Smuggling Policies in Chile
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University of A Coruña
Spain -
University of Tarapacá Chile
Abstract
By oversimplifying the complexity of human smuggling and facilitation phenomena, anti-smuggling policies in Global North countries have acted as large fishing dragnets that catch small fish, since they frequently focus on minor cases and punish migrants’ relatives and communities, solidarity networks and activists, as well as migrants and asylum seekers themselves. This concerning scenario shows that the anti-smuggling model that has been widespread since the early 2000s is failing on multiple fronts. This article explores anti-smuggling policies and practices in Chile to investigate whether they reproduce the same shortcomings observed in Global North countries. Relying on a variety of qualitative and quantitative empirical data, this study focuses in particular on the performance of the Chilean criminal justice system in this field and the characteristics of the cases and individuals being criminalised. The article contributes to crimmigration and border criminology debates by examining the criminalisation of migration in an under-explored Global South region.
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Author Biographies
José A. Brandariz is a professor of criminal law and criminology at ECRIM, University of A Coruna, Spain, and a research adjunct professor at the Department of Law and Legal Studies of Carleton University, Canada. He was a member of the executive board of the European Society of Criminology (2016-2019) and an associate editor of the European Journal of Criminology (2018-2022). In addition, Prof Brandariz chaired the European Criminology Oral History project of the European Society of Criminology from 2018 to 2025. Having been particularly active in European and international research projects, he is also the current co-editor of the Routledge series in Criminal Justice, Borders and Citizenship.
Romina Ramos holds a PhD in Social Sciences and is a faculty member at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Universidad de Tarapacá, Chile. Her research is situated within the field of mobility criminology, with a particular focus on migrant smuggling, human trafficking, transnational organised crime, and migration and border control policies in Latin America. She has conducted empirical research on criminal justice system responses to these phenomena, combining criminological and socio-legal approaches with qualitative methodologies. She is currently Associate Director of the Millennium Nucleus on Criminal Complexity and participates in academic networks devoted to the study of complex crime and South American cross-border dynamics.