"Say what the government wants and do what is good for your family": facilitation of irregular migration in Ethiopia

This chapter departs from the widespread emphasis on the business aspects of migration facilitation and the victimisation of migrants by individual criminal brokers and smugglers. We highlight the role of aspiring migrants, their families, and other social relations such as religious networks. In other words, we try to understand migration facilitation from the perspective of both the migrants and their families and emphasise the active roles that kinship, friendship and religion play in the facilitation of migration, which is a departure from seeing the process as a hegemonic statist legal paradigm. We emphasise the agency of the migrants and their families in planning, finding brokers and playing an active part in initializsing the smuggling process and its financing to realise the migrants’ desired future and the wellbeing of their families.