As the demand for people-smuggling services is high in Fujian province, the snakeheads are correspondingly very active there to the extent that they advertise publicly for workers required for overseas factories. They smuggle people to the West through the use of fake passports, visas, bribes or by transporting their human cargo in lorries and ships.

People smuggling, as distinct from human trafficking, is a global trade estimated to be worth 10 billion dollars, transporting approximately 4 million people per year. As the borders are made more migrant-proof, smuggling becomes more expensive which means that the people who succeed are those with the most means and not necessarily those in the greatest danger. The quality of their journey depends on how much they have paid. A ‘no frills’ journey can take ages, the conditions are dire and sickness and death are distinct possibilities. Some people pay up to £20,000 to get across international boundaries, which could net £1 million to smugglers for a cargo of 50 people in the back of a lorry.

Although many of the people who use the services of ‘agents’, ‘coyotes’ or ‘snakeheads’ may be genuine refugees as defined by the Geneva Convention, they are all considered to be illegal immigrants because they have been smuggled in to evade the immigration controls of the country in question. There have been tragic stories of increasing numbers of African migrants coming to Spain in dangerous boats, of deaths of Mexicans and South Americans trying to evade America’s increasingly harsh border and migrants trying to enter the UK, most notably the suffocation of 58 Chinese people in a lorry, found in Dover in 2000.