Italy: Human Trafficking gang busted

Italian police in the northeastern city of Udine carried out a successful operation titled "Goldfish-2" dismantling a major human trafficking gang in the area.This criminal gang has allegedly trafficked hundreds of illegal immigrants from India and Pakistan into Europe. A majority of the illegal immigrants end up in Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, via countries such as the Ukraine and Russia.

For another assignment in this class, I am looking into human trafficking issues in the United States and abroad. I found an article today on AKI website about the gang bust and after reading it I can see how big of a problem human trafficking is. There is the obvious problem of illegal immigrants entering countries and the effects on the security of their borders. But an additional issue is the standard of living of the immigrants during and after they are illegally transported. This article discussed immigrants entering the European Union coming particularly from Pakistan and India. This issue seems to be on a larger scale than most people realize.

Could their living situation really be so horrible in their homeland that they subject themselves to these dangerous gang members?
Where would the international community even begin to minimize this problem?

In this article, it was mentioned that this gang had headquarters in Moscow, Italy and Slovakia and people working together between the three locations. This is scary to me because this issue is on an international scale. Criminals in different regions, with different laws and different governments, are collaborating to move these people illegally in and out of countries. When I look further into this issue for my project I'm sure I will discover that human trafficking is even worse and bigger than what I can see now.