Airlines are required to pay for the deportation of illegal immigrants they bring in, and the aircraft (or ship) is subject to confiscation if it brings in illegal immigrants.
Smuggler fees are typically much higher than an airplane ticket. Immigrants would much rather pay the cheaper airfare and get the safer travel if they could, but no-one will permit them to board an airplane without entry papers.
There’s a near slave-trading sector of the people-smuggling trade which has a lot of Chinese victims.
As pointed out in DPRK’s post, it can cost up to £10000 to be smuggled from China to the UK. Where does an unskilled Chinese labourer find that kind of money? He doesn’t. So he signs up to a package deal in which an, um, entrepreneur fronts up the cost of the smuggling, and organises it, and the worker commits to working for him or at his direction. This commitment is secured by the entrepreneur retaining the worker’s identity papers and knowing where his family/dependents in China live. The worker has no choice about where he goes; the entrepreneur supplies gangs of cheap undocumented unfree labour to do dirty, dangerous and unskilled work, and arranges the smuggling, the accommodation, etc, etc.
China and plenty of other countries (Vietnam, Albania, Moldova). Debt slavery is used to traffic people into illegal cannabis farms, nail bars and sex work. They don’t all come in such brutal conditions, particularly not girls from the European fringes who are to be bullied into sex work.
The authorities have their hands full tracking down such cases, though there have been a fair few successful prosecutions.
The occupants of the truck may have been Chinese. (Might be behind a paywall, sorry) Latest story says 39 dead, none alive.
Rather more detailed update (and not paywalled):
As we suspected, the immigrants were put into the trailer somewhere in Belgium (probably) before the trailer was delivered to Zeebrugge docks to be loaded onto the ferry. No doubt the Belgian police are concentrating on the route that trailer took and who was hauling it. Many many hours of CCTV to trawl though I guess.
Trailers like this are routinely rented and it seems entirely plausible that the owners of the trailer were totally ignorant of the use it was to be put to. The company that employed the driver, however…? It’s not clear who owned the tractor unit; it may be that firm, or it may be the driver himself, or someone else entirely.
Seems unlikely that the 25 year old driver is the mastermind behind this, he could even have been completely oblivious until after the pickup. He is certainly in some way an accessory to this though and you can imagine the amount of pressure being put on him at this moment to cough up some bigger names.
Latest from the BBC:
Definition of conspiracy to traffic:
Heard an interview with a British economist saying this exact thing. Estimates are there are about 13,000 undocumented workers, many Chinese, working in assorted enterprises in Britain as slave labour. He said they most likely would be stuck in that situation for years or decades and basically held prisoner.
I suspect Chinese are common because there’s a huge pool to draw from, and the people running the slave shops have the connections to run large businesses and speak the same language and understand what motivates their “employees”.
It now seems that at least one of the victims was a Vietnamese girl whose relatives had paid a Chines gang to smuggle in.
Or, possibly, an ethnic Chinese girl from Vietnam?
I haven’t seen her name yet, but it’s not inherently unlikely.
It seems that a number of them were Vietnamese.
From the BBC:
The possibility that occurred to me:
Does anyone remember reading any articles which give a Vietnamese province for any of those who died? If there was one mentioned you might be able to find information about the percent Chinese living in that province.
More detail on the Vietnam connection here:
Moderator Action
Since the conversation has shifted away from the factual question of the OP and is now more of a general discussion about the event in general, I am going to move this to MPSIMS. Please treat the thread as a breaking news thread.
ETA: The thread title has also been updated.
He has been remanded in custody until an appearance at the Old Bailey next month. That won’t be a full trial; he will most likely be remanded again pending a trial next year, when there will surely be some co-defendants.
The police have named two more men they are looking for:
Why exactly don’t these truck drivers - and the ones who drive migrants into the USA - just open their doors every now and then or find some way to let their passengers breathe? There is nothing for them to gain by having their passengers suffocate or overheat.