Smugglers and Estate Agents: Syrian Refugee Views on Informality in Germany

During the Syrian conflict that sparked after the insurgency in 2011, 5,6 million Syrians sought refuge in other countries. During their life-changing journeys, in order to achieve mobility, Syrians have had to seek illegal services of some intermediaries. These professionals, whom Syrians call “simsar,” are brokers of mobility, across borders and within societies.

For the last ten years, the lives of many Syrian refugees have been extraordinarily mobile—at times even volatile. They have had to move across state borders, as well as between cities, flats, jobs, schools, and maybe most importantly, between worlds where a meaningful life has different qualities. In the meantime, they have also moved between different phases of life: dropped out of school, graduated, became parents or grandparents, witnessed their families grow or shrink.

They have moved between legal statuses: became refugees, undocumented migrants, holders of resident permits or acquired citizenships. They have also moved between social statuses; as they have lost previous credentials, gained new ones, established networks, bought items of social significance, experienced irrelevance of their previous statuses and struggled to accumulate social and cultural capital in new contexts.

Brokers of Mobility

All these mobilities involve interactions with other people, in terms of both assistance and hindrance. Simsar is the Arabic word for middleperson or broker. It is used in various contexts that require intermediaries. Simsars get commissions for the deals they broker between those who do not know or trust each other. Between April 2017 and May 2019, I conducted 21 in-depth life-story interviews with a group of Syrian migrants in Germany, who share a migration trajectory. They had all lived in Turkey for at least six months before fleeing to Germany in 2015-2016. My Syrian interlocutors used the word simsar for real estate agents, employment brokers, forged, fake, or genuine document providers, and the human smugglers, who facilitated their undocumented border crossings. Although in this last case, a more common word was muharrib.

Whichever function they assume, these simsars’ paid services fall into the category of illegal. However, despite this illegality, both in Germany and Turkey, simsars and their clients navigate through relative state permissiveness. All states sanction the acts that fall out of the legal sphere only selectively. They prohibit them at the level of the law but give state officials discretionary power to ignore some of them at the level of practice. This permissiveness is particularly visible at times, like the summer of 2015, when Turkish sea guards turned a blind eye towards the migrant boats crossing the Aegean. However, it also continues under the radar of the public under ‘normal’ circumstances.

Smugglers

Dependency on human smuggling has become the norm for those who cannot obtain or procure the documents needed for travel, while state borders are further enforced through new surveillance technologies and walls. My interlocutors relied on human smugglers on their perilous journeys from Syria to Turkey, and from Turkey to Germany. They had to pay substantial sums and risked being shot at, drowning in dark waters or being detained on the way. Yet, while they acknowledge their journeys’ hardships, they mention the smugglers either very casually, as if they sold them regular bus tickets, or appreciatively. In my interlocutors’ accounts, the smugglers are not pictured as the evil criminals depicted by the media and the states. For my interlocutors, smugglers are the people who fulfill an important function at a critical junction of their lives. 

Other researchers have observed a similar view among migrants and refugees. Luigi Achilli (2018) notes that his research subjects perceived human smuggling as part of a system of protection within the context of asymmetric distribution of power where those who need mobility most have the least opportunities. Such a perception brings migrants and smugglers together as allies to overcome the hindrances that arise from injustice and inequality.

Estate Agents

However, neither the mobility nor the obstacles to mobility end after arriving in Germany. Once my interlocutors obtained the right to leave the mass accommodation centers, they started to look for flats. Berlin is infamously short of low-income housing. Moreover, the discriminatory practices of landlords and real estate companies are well documented. Therefore, the access of refugees to affordable housing is very limited. Language barriers, lack of access to information, and outright racism play a role in this. Under these circumstances, refugees rely on simsars for finding flats for them.

These simsars do the intermediary brokerage between the refugees and the landlords. Their prices range between €2,000-10,000, depending on the location, the apartment’s quality, and the immediacy of the need. Even when successful, finding accommodation in this way left a bad taste in my interlocutors’ mouths. They questioned why they were exploited to have access to the free market of real estate. They expressed deep disdain for these simsars, who sometimes also came out as conmen, yet often kept their promises.

Difference of Perception

This creates a rather interesting question: Why would refugees praise smugglers’ services who are vilified by states but feel disdain for real estate agents, who perform a potentially less ‘bad’ function in their new homes? I could derive the following tentative answer from their stories: Crossing a border is a one-off event and in the case of my interlocutors it is achieved with success. The social boundaries they come to face in their new countries, on the other hand, have to be overcome any day and every day. They are the barbed wires and barricades one has to jump over regularly, and with the knowledge that another one is waiting just around the corner.

Overcoming the obstacles on the way to social mobility is an infinitely dreadful and repetitive task. The smugglers who make border crossings possible provide refugees with a sense of ‘existential mobility’ (Hage 2009) – an experience of time that is fluid and flowing towards a future. The employment and housing brokers, on the other hand, remind them that they might be stuck in the conditions their new countries offer. Hence comes the respective deference and disdain.

This text is based on the article “Temporal Intersections of Mobility and Informality: Simsars as (Im)moral Agents in the Trajectories of Syrian Refugees in Turkey and Germany” that has recently been published as part of a special issue of Migration Letters on “Transnational (Im)mobilities and Informality in Europe” edited by Ignacio Fradejas-García, Abel Polese, and Fazila Bhimji.

Hilal Alkan is a researcher at Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin.

References:

– Alkan, Hilal (2021). Temporal Intersections of Mobility and Informality: Simsars as (Im)Moral Agents in the Trajectories of Syrian Refugees in Turkey and Germany, Migration Letters 18 (2), 201–213.

– Achilli, L. (2015). “The smuggler: Hero or felon?”. Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Migration Policy Briefs, no. 10. http://cadmus.eui.eu//handle/1814/36296.

– Hage, G. (2009). “Waiting out the crisis: On stuckedness and governmentality”. In G. Hage (ed.). Waiting Carlton: Melbourne University Press.