Why do some migrants experience protection from smugglers, while others face neglect or abuse? As irregular migration intensifies and border regimes harden, the stakes of these relationships have never been higher. While recent scholarship challenges the portrayal of smugglers as inherently violent, it often overlooks variation in migrant experiences. Drawing on 32 in-depth interviews with Gambian migrants, this article examines how smuggling enterprises’ organizational structures shape divergent outcomes. I develop a theory of endogenous institutions to explain how protective norms emerge—and how they are disrupted by state interventions such as police raids. I show that the relationship between smuggling modality and migrant protection is impacted by the intensity of externalization: where repression is low, iterative and embedded smuggling networks sustain accountability, but under high enforcement, secrecy erodes these mechanisms. By linking smuggling business models to migrant experiences, this study contributes to debates on criminal governance, informal institutions, and postcolonial migration governance. I show how actors deemed ‘criminal’ are in fact building systems of governance shaped not by lawlessness, but by the policy architectures of border externalization.

Research on irregular migration too often misses the journey itself. Studies of prospective migrants capture aspiration but not experience. Studies of successful arrivals reconstruct journeys filtered through relief and settlement. Neither sample position reaches the phases of transit and return where migration governance is most intensely felt and least visible in policy-centered analysis. This article argues that studying returnees, defined here as migrants who attempted irregular journeys and came back, whether through deportation, voluntary return, or failed crossing, opens an epistemic site that origin- and destination-centered designs cannot access. Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews with Gambian returnees conducted through a locally embedded partnership, combined with over 1,000 regional transit surveys collected by the Mixed Migration Centre across West African transit hubs, the article demonstrates what a returnee-centered, multi-scalar design makes visible. From this vantage point, migration governance appears not as coherent policy but as a lived sequence of encounters with fragmented authority, negotiated intermediaries, and enforced waiting. These are conditions actively produced through border externalization rather than incidental to it. The article details three interlocking methodological choices that enable this perspective: sampling returnees as epistemic actors rather than policy subjects; pairing retrospective narration with distributional survey data to trace how individual decisions emerge within structural patterns; and building field access through locally embedded Gambian partnerships rather than international organizations, which shapes not only who can be reached but what they are willing to say. Each choice responds to a specific blind spot in conventional migration research designs. Together they offer a transferable framework for studying governance in corridors where affected populations are mobile, criminalized, and structurally hard to reach, and where the methods used to study them are never neutral.

How does governance evolve and what are their long-term implications on power dynamics between states, states, and social actors and between social communities? This question goes to the heart of political science. Criminal economies, such as human smuggling, offer the opportunity to examine these questions in a new light. Human smuggling has become an international political phenomenon that has implications affecting political violence levels, interstate relations, and even intra-state politics. Political scientists’ research can improve state responses to human smuggling, including interstate cooperation.

Why would a migrant use a smuggler despite the criminalization? To answer this question, I focus on West African migrants traveling illicitly to Europe drawing on 32 qualitative interviews with returnees conducted across The Gambia in June 2022 and on a quantitative survey of over 1000 migrants from 24 West African countries. The Mixed Migration Centre (MMC) conducted the survey in early 2020 in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.

European migration management policies are undercutting West Africa’s free movement practices. In response, the human smuggling industry blossomed. Policymakers describe smugglers as violent lawbreakers preying on hapless migrants, who need protection. To protect migrants, policy makers criminalize the act of smuggling. They inform the migrants of the dangers of smuggling. Yet, despite more deterrence, migrants continue to rely on them for their journeys. This runs counter to the intent of the criminalization policies, and presents a puzzle:

Assumptions underlying current migration policies do not align with the lived realities of migrants. The data challenges notions that migrants are ill-informed on the dangers of the criminalized journey or that smugglers are perceived as criminal actors. This research informs our understanding of the migrant-smuggler relationship and migrants’ vulnerabilities as they travel.

Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

This research examines the drivers and experiences of irregular migrants through a mixed method approach. The essays focus on the migrant experiences with a smuggler while migrating clandestinely, on what drives migrants to hire smugglers, and on what drives changes in rates of asylees arriving in Europe. The goal of this research is to deepen our understanding of migrants’ experiences before and during migration, and challenge assumptions underlying current migration policies. This research examines undertheorized aspects of governance, both formal and informal, and its impact on structuring migrants’ choices. I examine the question of governance from various levels.

I research the macro-level effect of poor governance as a push factor for migration. Then, I investigate the phenomenon of governance at the meso-level as a facilitating and constraining factor of the migration journey. For the latter, I investigate how migrants relate to migration policies, and how the illicit economies that facilitate migration self-organize. I look at the meaning making of the state-led migration policies, and then I examine the informal institutions that determine the migration experience. Additionally, this dissertation questions some of the defining categories in academic research and policy approaches. The two main binary that I critically engage the categorization between the forced migrant and the economic migrant, and the theoretical division between structure and agency-based explanations for migrant experiences of violence.

This research examines how diasporas influence home-country politics amid democratic backsliding and shifting migration policies. Fieldwork will focus on identity and political mobilization in transnational contexts. I’m Principal Investigator of the project Turkish Diaspora’s Electoral Influence in a Foreign Policy Context which explores why Turkish migrants in Germany support an autocratic regime despite living in a democracy. Funded by the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation. Fieldwork was completed in summer of 2025. We’ve added a survey component making this research mixed-methods.

Research in progress.

Funded by Kathryn Wasserman.