Dr. Gabriella Sanchez coordinates migrant smuggling research at the European University Institute’s Migration Policy Centre. She is an ethnographer interested in the everyday dynamics of irregular migration facilitation. Her work (carried out in the Americas, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe) draws from the experiences and perspectives of migrants and the people behind their journeys.

At the MPC she has worked to strengthen the empirical and conceptual base of “crimes of mobility” to increase the understanding of smuggling as part of community life and its economic impact, as well as to document the roles played by women, young people and indigenous communities in the facilitation of mobility. She is the author of Human Smuggling and Border Crossings (Routledge 2016) and co-editor of the 2018 Special Issue on Migrant Smuggling of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.