On March 12th, 2023, an activist reported having heard from a group of four migrants who had managed to cross the border from Ventimiglia all the way to Nice, France. However, for 4 people who make it, dozens don’t; the militarization of the border is not correlated with a decrease of immigrants in France, but only with an enhanced reliance on more dangerous crossing practices. One of them is that of “passeurs”, (in English, human traffickers) very controversial figures in the dictionary of immigration. During our border presence we have also encountered some:


February 12, 2023 "Around 14.15 a man, whom we highly suspect to be a passeur, arrived at the border and engaged in a brief random conversation with us in Italian. He was wearing expensive clothes and said to have spent the last 9 years working in Ventimiglia and that he originally was from an Arabic speaking country. One of the two refugees whom we had been speaking with in the last minutes implicitly “accused” him of being a passeur. After that, the alleged passeur said to the two guys “venite” (come), they followed him into his car and they left together. He came back 15 minutes afterwards and did the same thing with 3 other refugees. After another 10/15 minutes, the same two initial refugees arrived walking, explaining that the passeur had dropped them on the road a few meters after taking them in because they had no money with them."


On March 28th, 2023, 13 smugglers were arrested in a joint operation by the Italian and French border police, called “Operation Pantograph”, as migrants were smuggled via trains directed to France and hidden in different parts of the trains, including the electric pantographs on top of the railway cars, with a high risk of electrocution. We visited the bridge by the Roya River in Ventimiglia to ask people who reside there what they thought of the operation. Many said that the operation was a façade, the police had taken people randomly, that they weren’t traffickers but just migrants residing like them under the bridge. We don’t have the information to corroborate this statement, but we do want to underline the seemingly arbitrary arrest practices, the failed disclosure of the charges and proof of accusation from the side of the police.


The police is one among the very few state-affiliated institutions that deals first-hand with migrants. Maria Picarelli, an independent volunteer in Menton whom we interviewed, underlines the lack of the state’s presence at the Franco-Italian border which does little to ensure that the people pushed back to Ventimiglia are provided with accommodation, legal aid, decent sanitary and living conditions. This leaves everything in the hands of local NGOs, who, despite constituting a supportive net of (more or less) 25 associations who, last year, distributed 45000 meals, have limited resources and energies. A paradoxical consequence of the state’s negligence towards the needs and rights of the “sans papiers” and of the police’s behaviors is that people on the move see themselves forced to resort to smugglers and to ask them for help. Several people have emphasized the fact that they have been put in danger, blackmailed or scammed by smugglers, as reported in the testimony below.


On February 12th, 2023 we met a 17-year-old Egyptian boy who had been pushed back by the French police despite a document stating that he was a minor. He was going to France to live with his uncle who lived there and allegedly had legal papers. While he was on his own in Ventimiglia, before trying to cross the border, two Tunisian men came up to him and claimed to be able to help him cross the border. They said that they would bring him a car, and that they would drive him across the border. He was holding 500 euros and his phone in his hand. Without his consent, the two Tunisian men snatched the money from his hand. He then gave his phone to the two men, as they claimed that was the price to pay to cross the border. The two men never came back and hence he lost his phone and all his money.


Picarelli expressed the idea that it’s not so much the presence of migrants but the closure of the border that produces effects such as the presence of violence and smugglers. She has been living in Menton since 2011, so she has seen the transition from a Schengen to a post-Schengen system. “At one point, there were about one hundred sixty thousand people in Ventimiglia, it’s clear that the city couldn't handle it - she says. The whole trafficking thing was set up because of it: if there wasn't this problem of border closure there wouldn't have been smugglers. There wouldn't have been all the abuses and violence because people can't cross. (...) Everything will be this way so long as this border will continue to be closed”.