BizAims

Illegal immigrants living in states and cities that have adopted strict immigration policies are packing up and moving back to their home countries or to neighboring states.

One motive of illegal immigration is to escape civil war or repression in the country of origin. For example, people in Germany that were considered minorities fled their country in fear that they would be oppressed and arrested. Non-economic push factors include persecution (religious and otherwise), frequent abuse, bullying, oppression, and genocide, and risks to civilians during war. Political motives traditionally motivate refugee flows - to escape dictatorship for instance.

Other cause of illegal immigration can be poverty. This is the case in the United States, where illegal immigrants traditionally have entered the country in search of wages higher than those achievable in their home countries.

Here are presented some pictures, took at frontiers in and around the Balkans during the year 2007, that reveal the methods that desperate people a necessitated to accept from human-trafficking gangs to get to Europe. For being smuggled to Europe each illegal pays up to £10,000. Annually around 50,000 illegal immigrants are thought to be passed through Balkans. Thus such a trade is estimated to worth more than £4billion a year.

Here two men are hidden inside the front seats of a Mercedes, with their heads squeezed into the plastic head rests. The human-traffickers were supposed to be sitting right on top of them, so the immigrants had hoped to be smuggled into Europe. Their plan failed as the men were all caught at a border crossing in the Balkans.

This image shows a man hidden under the bonnet of a car with his body curled dangerously around the engine.

In a third, an illegal immigrant hidden himself within a car’s dashboard.