Last month, The Times of London reported on a new smuggling route running from Iraq into Libya and across the Mediterranean towards Lampedusa and Crete. The piece describes the hardships, sometimes extreme, that some of those making the treacherous journey face. For many years now, Libya has often been the focus of, or at least a part of, this ongoing story.
In Europe, the argument often fixates on enforcement and what authorities should be doing at the border. What is regularly overlooked is why this particular trade has grown quickly in Libya, and what would make it shrink. Part of the answer is in the role of unpaid labour, a key element of the transnational people smuggling trade. This trade is resulting in people being held at unofficial holding facilities for migrants, something which occurs in Libya, but is by no means unique to it.
Many of these people are then being ‘put to work’ as part of their fee. This is tragic and destructive for those involved. It is also an indication that the position is more recoverable than it appears. Smuggling money does not evaporate because a European interior ministry disapproves of it. It disappears when other work pays better and more reliably.
Libya has done this before and in the recent past. Before 2011 the country held around 2.5 million migrant workers, drawn to an oil economy that needed hands in construction, health, services and farming. Egyptians, Sudanese, Tunisians and others came to work in Libya, not to queue for a boat out of it. The subsequent conflict inflicted significant harm on this pull factor as the nation’s oil industry was thrown into chaos.
Encouragingly, and despite this, much of that pull survives. The International Organization for Migration counted 939,638 migrants in Libya at the end of 2025, the highest figure it has ever recorded. 77% of them are in work. This already makes Libya one of the larger labour markets in North Africa. What it needs now is employers, contracts, investment and protections that convert demand into ordinary jobs.
A more diverse economy will prove key to maintaining momentum. In Benghazi there is a prime example of this in action. Tetra Pak have teamed up with Zulfa Food Industries, a subsidiary of the Alushibe Holding Group, to build a 140,000sqm food production facility near the city. The complex, due to begin production later this year, will produce milk and juice on a scale previously unseen in the country.
Ahmed Gadalla, the Libyan Industrialist who founded the Alushibe Holding Group, has previously pointed to the Middle East and North Africa being one of the most beverage consuming regions of the world. Historically, much of these beverages have been imported. As a result of Zulfa, domestic capacity can now step in and take on some of the load. Perhaps most importantly, the complex will create thousands of long-term jobs.
Projects like Zulfa will not resolve migration on their own. Twenty projects like Zulfa might. Combined with other projects springing up across the country, they are the beginning of something the smuggling economy has never had to compete against: large, visible employers who need workers and pay them on time.
Looking more broadly, industrial investment and a stronger Libyan economy will not alone end Europe’s migrant dilemma. Anyone promising that new factories in Libya would empty the boats is claiming too much. However, for the hundreds of thousands of migrants already inside Libya, whose plans are more open than the debate assumes, it offers a potential alternative. Simply put, secure, paid employment with long-term prospects changes the equation about whether to risk a dangerous, illegal journey to European shores.
Set that against what has been tried so far. Libya, Tunisia and Morocco have received billions of euros and a great deal of equipment for external border control. It is by no means a zero-sum game, but if some of this investment was aimed at industrial manufacturing, food production complexes, refineries, ports and the contractors who build them, then it could reach payrolls rather than the network of unofficial holding complexes.
Libya has what that competition requires: hydrocarbon revenue, a young workforce, a potentially large pool of migrant labour, a reconstruction programme measured in decades and a location that makes Europe an obvious customer. The task is not really to build a labour market, but to give the one that already exists a proper industrial base to stand on. It is a slower answer than a patrol boat in the Mediterranean, but a far more durable one.
