Sky News reports:
Why migrants are repaying people smugglers by dealing drugs
'Benny', who was smuggled from Albania, told Sky he felt he had to sell drugs to pay back the person who smuggled him to the UK.
Illegal immigration is not just triggering headline crimes of rape and murder, for as Sky News rightly points out, it also triggers 'undercover' crime like drug-dealing, prostitution and human slavery that only occasionally hits the headlines.
It is a mystery to FNN why the UK state wants to encourage the growth of this kind of crime by failing to stop small boat crossings.
But clearly it does as tens of thousands of illegal immigrants cross the channel every year.
One can hardly blame the illegal immigrants who are desperate to payback their debts to the people-traffickers who manage their crossings.
These unfortunate people have gone from the frying pan into the fire.
Some may be involved in this criminal underworld in other ways - like the women who are deprived of their passports and forced into sex-slavery; women who may even be in the UK legally but are linked to a criminal diaspora just by their nationality.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a21724621/human-trafficking-uk-survivor/
The mystery is why the UK state forgets that it is the state that places people in these desperate situations by enabling their illegal immigration so they may have no other option but to commit crimes even if they may not have been a criminal in their own home countries.
That's the real payback from this kind of misguided political policy.
Sky also reports on 'debt bondage':
Justine Carter, deputy CEO at anti-slavery charity Unseen, told us their caseload has risen "exponentially" since 2018, and last year 44% of their cases involved some kind of financial control.
She said: "Debt bondage is used as a deliberate tool to coerce and trap victims through inflated or manipulated debts.
"I'm very concerned about people who sign up to this because I don’t think they understand the repercussions of being here illegally, which creates specific vulnerability.
"In most situations of debt bondage, you never pay off the debt, so you're beholden to that individual crime gang.
The UK has to communicate more forcefully that this kind of thing is not acceptable in the UK.
FNN well remembers the landing card used to enter Singapore legally that stated something similar to: We execute drug traffickers.
It all starts with communicating the right message.