IN BASMANE, a gritty neighbourhood in the heart of the Turkish port city of Izmir, a plump, smartly-dressed young man named Uday flips through videos on his expensive smartphone. In one of them, recorded last summer, a rubber boat heaving with passengers motors toward Greece. On shore a visibly slimmer Uday, then an apprentice smuggler, waves to the migrants on board. Uday explains that he used the videos to convince refugees to choose him and his gang over the competition. “It was to show people the journey was safe,” he says.

Uday, who studied law in his native Syria before escaping to Turkey in 2013, has no qualms about his work as a trafficker. He says he earned about $100,000 in less than a year. “None of my boats capsized. We were helping those people,” he brags. But today, Uday is out of a job. Turkish police have made the migrant trade risky and unprofitable: “These days, you lose more money than you make.”

For much of last year, Turkey looked the other way as an estimated 850,000 migrants crossed by sea into Greece. In November it agreed to stem the refugee tide in exchange for an offer of €3 billion ($3.3 billion) in aid from the European Union, as well as the promise of political concessions such as a visa-free travel agreement. Turkey has since stepped up patrols in the Aegean. Some 92,000 migrants were rescued at sea last year, according to officials in Ankara, and operations against smugglers have yielded 3,700 arrests. In Izmir, taxi drivers face a stiff fine or a prison sentence for taking migrants to the coast.

Interviews with a handful of local traffickers confirm there has been a crackdown. “Six times out of seven, we have to cancel crossings,” complains Badar, a smuggler, weaving his way through the narrow streets above Basmane. He says the neighbourhood is thick with undercover police; avoiding them can delay crossings for weeks. Where he once sent up to 35 people per day across the Aegean, he says, he now manages perhaps 15 per week. His own wife is in Lebanon, and he frets that Macedonia could close its border with Greece, cutting off the migrant flow north to Germany, before they get the chance to cross to Europe themselves. “If my wife were to arrive, I would be on the next boat.”

The wheels of the smuggling economy nonetheless still continue to spin. Migrants huddle inside grimy hotels, waiting for buses to the coast. Jewellery shops trade pawned refugee gold. Sitting outside a hotel last week, Muhammad, a soccer player from Hama, said he and his group had paid smugglers $800 each and were about to cross. “I know I should wait till the summer, when it’s safer. But I don’t have money to stay,” he said. According to UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, 344 migrants drowned or went missing at sea in January alone.

The number of refugees reaching Greece dropped from 109,000 in December to about 60,000 in January, but once the warm weather returns in March it is likely to skyrocket. “Turkey has to get its act together by then,” says a European diplomat in Ankara. Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, says Turkey can do more, particularly in prosecuting smuggling networks. But for that to happen, “the EU must deliver on its commitments”: money, accelerated progress on the visa issue, and reviving Turkey’s EU accession process.

The Turks insist that they cannot seal off the entire coast and that the long-term solution lies in ending Syria’s civil war. But that prospect is as distant as ever. Turkey has already done more for the refugees than any EU country save perhaps Germany. Home to roughly 2.5m Syrians, it has already spent $8 billion on refugee housing, education, and health care. That is a big reason why most Syrians in Turkey have stayed put instead of heading for Europe. (The Syrians now crossing the Aegean have mainly travelled straight through Turkey from Syria; they are not those who have been in Turkey for years.)

But the Turks are starting to close the door. In January they reimposed visa requirements for Syrian nationals arriving in Turkey by air and sea, making it harder for refugees in Jordan and Lebanon to enter the country. All land crossings with Syria are closed, meaning Syrians must be smuggled across the border to enter. Turkey is reinforcing parts of the 550-mile border with fences. Human-rights groups accuse Ankara of deporting over a hundred people to Iraq and Syria, violating international law. Turkish officials deny such charges.

A recent Dutch proposal envisages ending the Aegean smuggling route by quickly returning all refugees to Turkey, and accepting applications for asylum to Europe from there. On Friday Greece declared Turkey a “safe country of return” for refugees from third countries, which could pave the way for such a system. But getting Turkish agreement would require proving that EU countries would accept hundreds of thousands of asylum requests. In the short term, enabling better treatment of Syrian refugees in Turkey may do more to slow the flow. About 300,000 Syrian children in Turkey are not in school, and health care and social services, though theoretically free, are underfunded. In a promising first step, a conference of international donors on the Syrian crisis in London on February 4th pledged $10 billion to meet these needs.

Most important is employment. As of January, Syrian refugees can officially work in Turkey, though some restrictions remain. (No more than 10% of employees in a given business can be Syrian, a requirement that seems hard for small businesses to meet.) A job in Turkey might not dissuade every refugee from braving the sea passage to Greece, but it will deter some. “My plan is this,” says Omar, 25, a recent refugee from Damascus, over tea in Basmane. “If I find work here, I do not go to Europe. Otherwise, I leave as soon as it gets warm.”