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The smuggling of migrants across international borders on routes traversing land, air and sea continues to undermine migration governance and impedes safe and orderly migration. In numerous parts of the world, migrant smugglers have become an integral part of the irregular migration journey, resulting in enormous profits for criminal smuggling networks while reducing the ability of States to manage their borders and migration programmes. Given that it is often covert in nature, migrant smuggling may only become visible when tragedies occur or emergency humanitarian responses are required.Events involving people drowning or perishing inside trucks regularly capture the media’s attention, but these tragedies are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Reliance on smugglers makes migrants particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Migrants who have experienced abuse by smugglers have little effective recourse to justice. In this ever more pressing situation, States are being severely tested in the fulfilment of their responsibilities to protect migrants’ human rights and manage their borders.Against this backdrop, it is timely that we review the current data and research on migrant smuggling, which offers a unique ability to ascertain what is being collected and what can be done to further build the evidence. The report helps to deepen our understanding of the smuggling phenomenon, and provides insights into how responses can be formulated that better protect migrants while enhancing States’ abilities to manage orderly migration.This report is the result of a collaboration between the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and researchers from a range of backgrounds and academic disciplines, and was supported by the Government of Turkey. As a host country of around 2.7 million Syrian refugees and a transit country of hundreds of thousands of migrants in 2015, Turkey – along with many other countries – is experiencing first-hand the considerable challenges in combating migrant smuggling while at the same time supporting refugees in need.This report stemmed from an expert meeting on global migrant smuggling data and research in December 2015 organized by IOM and the Government of Turkey at Koç University in Istanbul. The meeting was attended by officials along with researchers from civil society, academia and the private sector working on migrant smuggling and irregular migration, whose work spans Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia and Africa. The discussion at the meeting underscored the need to better understand migrant smuggling dynamics through data and research, including the possibility of emerging trends in some regions pointing to the expanding reach of migrants smugglers globally. The resultant report is aimed at policymakers, researchers, analysts, students and practitioners working on the complex topic of migrant smuggling. It provides a review that ideally we would be keen to replicate in the years ahead in order to gauge progress on the increasingly important collection, analysis and reporting of data and research on migrant smuggling globally.