“In October 2009, the cargo ship the Ocean Lady arrived off Vancouver Island, Canada, carrying 76 Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka. Less than a year later, the Sun Sea arrived with 492 more. These events were not treated as humanitarian crises, but as national security threats. The Canadian government framed the arrivals, led by a minister who publicly alleged the passengers included "terrorists," as an abuse of the refugee system. This narrative of securitization justified the immediate detention of all adults, the separation of children from their parents, and the multi-year imprisonment of passengers, some of whom were singled out as smugglers and spent years in detention.
This lecture argues that such responses are not anomalies but central features of a global "war on human smuggling." In an era of record forced displacement and the near-total absence of legal migration pathways, human smuggling is often the last resort for those seeking safety. Yet, anti-smuggling policies serve as a politically expedient, blunt cudgel. Mobilized in the name of protecting refugees and national security, they allow prosperous states to manage asylum at a distance, evade their protection obligations, and shift responsibility to the Global South. These policies, I contend, are not the solution to smuggling; they are the problem.
My central argument is that anti-smuggling policy functions as a method of forced displacement. By creating a powerful "criminalization narrative"—a simplistic script of evil smugglers and vulnerable migrants—states perform a discursive sleight-of-hand. They displace public attention from the structural violence of their own border controls, which create the market for smuggling in the first place, onto the dangers of the journey itself. This "displacement as method" legitimizes the expansion of migration controls and the externalization of asylum, all while appearing to uphold the rule of law.
To challenge this, we must first recognize that what we call "human smuggling" has not always been criminalized. The actions of historical figures like Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler, or the Underground Railroad conductors—acts of humanitarian assistance we now celebrate—could be construed as smuggling under today’s laws. By recovering this history and exposing the political function of the antismuggling regime, we can reframe the debate. This allows us to see that the real issue is not the smuggler, but the state-manufactured systems of deterrence that make perilous journeys the only viable option for so many, ultimately displacing both people and politics.”