Against the backdrop of push-pull and social network theories on migration
and criminological theory on human smuggling, this article tries to
answer the questions of why and how Angolan asylum-seekers migrated to
the Netherlands since the end of the 1990s. The study shows that the
migrants can be described as opportunity seeking migrants, rather than
survival migrants. Most migrants made no use of typical human smugglers
during their travel. They rather used assistance from their social network
and made use of the services of middlemen, called
esquemas, on an ad-hoc basis. In this article it is argued that archetypal large smuggling organisations
in Angola have not evolved because of the existence of these highly
informal networks. Support is found that both push-pull and social network
theories can contribute to explaining irregular, asylum migration.