It has been laid out by traffickers in an attempt to drag people into a trap with no way out. 

Gangs of criminals involved in prostitution lure young girls with the promise of a job in Europe as a housemaid. 

Young people are attracted through social media, seeing pictures of somebody who has already migrated wearing nice clothes and smiling in front of a monument or a luxury car. 

It is real propaganda aimed to push the people towards Europe and those who are baited are entangled without the possibility of going back. 

Andrea Valdambrini explained in Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano that migrants in fact pay between €8,000 and €15,000 to get to Europe. 

To acquire that sum of money, the majority of migrants need to ask their family for help, or sometimes even the whole community, which ends up going into debt to support those who leave, hoping to be compensated once they reach Europe. 

Others make a deal with traffickers and are forced to stop and work in the countries they travel to in order to repay their debts. 

That explains why the journey can take years, that is, until the migrant is able to repay their debt to the local trafficker and cross the border into another country. 

Like goods, people are passed on from one trafficker to another, risking falling into the wrong hands and disappearing into thin air. 

At the beginning of the journey, very few are aware of what awaits them and once they leave it is impossible to escape from the trap. 

This massive system, set out by criminal networks and human traffickers, is enforced by the propaganda they spread across the Sahel Region (spanning Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad).

It is surprising that the European Union has never attempted to stop it with counter-propaganda aimed to inform the population about the serious risks faced by those who decide to make the journey to Europe. 

It prefers to deal with militias, tribes and traffickers to seal the borders and stop the flow of migrants, but doesn’t try to beat their propaganda and contain the departures by revealing the truth about the perilous journey. 

It is likely that if this truth was exposed, fewer people would be willing to risk their lives and become slaves of traffickers or food for fish.