On African immigration to Latin America

A Deutsche Welle English-language article pointed me to an interesting new phenomenon, that of African immigration with Latin America as a final destination--most notably Argentina, but also Brazil. I first heard about the phenomenon back in 2009, but this largely anecdotal phenomenon seems to be getting more attention of late.

It's rush hour on Avenida Rivadavia in the buzzing, pulsating quarter of Once in Buenos Aires. On the pavement, street vendors have put up small stands every two meters: Earrings, watches and sunglasses are spread out on big shawls on the floor, they pile up in suitcases, or dangle from umbrellas.

"It's cold," says one of the vendors, rubbing his hands. Koaku Bu Date Rodrigue was born in Ivory Coast. The 25-year-old came to Argentina two years ago.

"My country is in a civil war. I was forced to fight in a rebels' group," says Koaku. "One morning I managed to escape. I made my way to San Pedro port and hid in the container room of a ship." Koaku doesn't remember just how long he had to hide for. When the ship stopped moving he was in Argentina.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Africans leave their home countries. Many want to go to Europe. But the EU has been sealing off its external frontiers.

"I had heard of Europe, but I didn't know how to get there. You need money and you need to know people," says Koaku.

Like Koaku, many Africans are therefore now considering other destinations, such as Latin America. In Argentina, the number of African migrants and refugees has more than doubled since 2005.

The national refugee commission CO NA RE has registered more than 3,000 over the past five years. Illegal immigrants from Africa today make up the second largest group of asylum seekers in Argentina. Most of them come from Senegal or Ivory Coast. Neighbouring Brazil reports similar developments.

Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, it's worth noting, are arguably the two West African countries most closely integrated with global migration flows. A Reuters article goes into greater detail.

In Brazil, Africans are now the largest refugee group, representing 65 percent of all asylum seekers, according to the Brazil's national committee for refugees.

There are now more than 3,000 African immigrants living in Argentina, up from just a few dozen eight years ago. The number of asylum seekers each year has risen abruptly, to about 1,000 a year, and a third of them are African.

"We're seeing a steep increase in the number of Africans coming to the country and seeking asylum," said Carolina Podesta, of the Argentine office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

This is still low compared to the tens of thousands of immigrants who make the journey to Europe each year, but Africans are expected to come to Latin America in increasing numbers.

"It's a search for new destinations," Podesta said, adding that many were being pushed by tougher European immigration and security policies put in place after September 11, 2001.

[. . .] Africans might arrive on cargo ships or commercial planes and then seek asylum or overstay tourist visas. In Argentina, they can obtain temporary work visas shortly after arriving and renew them every three months.

"The migratory policies of the country are very favorable," said Manzanares. "It's a reflection of history. What happened with European immigrants 100 years ago is now happening with African immigrants."

The Democratic Republic of Congo is also a major source of migrants, given the ongoing horrors, while Brazil has been connected with Lusophone Africa--Angola and Mozambique particularly--even since the post-independence migrations.

The accounts of African immigration to Argentina and Brazil emphasize the similarities between this 21st century migration and the migrations from Europe to South America which began in the late 19th century, driven by the search for economic opportunity. (Parallels with the African slave trade that inflicted so much suffering, thankfully, haven't been raised.) The critical difference between these two migrations is that the African migrants number in the thousands, while the Europeans numbered in the millions. This may change--with the increasing difficulty of getting into Europe or even the Maghreb, the relative attractiveness of Argentina and Brazil as immigration destinations, the apparent relative ease of legalization in Argentina, and what may be the beginning of chain-migration networks set up by these first African immigrants, the phenomenon may indeed take on the proportions of the earlier European migration. Certainly it merits watching.

Hein de Haas on migration in northern Africa

A tweet from migration researcher Heaven Crawley pointed me to Hein de Haas, a research based at Oxford whose expertise in migration in northern Africa makes him a perfect go-to person for insight on migration as it affects Libya. His blog post "The real refugee crisis: African migrants trapped in Libya ". Libya is a transit country, true, but perhaps most importantly it's a destination country, and its sub-Saharan immigrant population is particularly vulnerable.

Let’s remind ourselves that just a week ago the media were abuzz with predictions of a “biblical exodus” towards Europe. Italian and other European politicians stated that Europe should brace itself for the mass arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees on European shores.

As usual, developments on the ground have proven the doomsayers wrong. The large majority of migrants fleeing the violence in Libya are returning to Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, the Philippines, China, Bangladesh and various European and African countries.

There have been some boats carrying some 6,000 migrants arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa, but what few realise is that this is part of the ‘normal’ springtime boat migration of prospective migrant workers from the Tunisian coast. This should not be confused with the much more large-scale overland cross-border movement of migrants out of Libya who wish to return home.

The whole idea of an “immigrant invasion” was flawed from the start. It was based on the misunderstanding that most migrants in Libya are in transit to Europe, while it was already widely known that most migrants had come to Libya to work, and now want to return home.

[. . .]

Of the approximately 2 to 2.5 million migrants allegedly living in Libya (reliable figures are lacking), only 200,000 or so have left. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million, mainly African migrants remain trapped in Libya.

Although there is still a lack of verifiable information, an increasing number of reports suggest that African migrants inside Libya have fallen victim to violence, robbery, imprisonment and, allegedly, murder. Although migrants of many origins have fallen victim to violence and abuse, sub-Saharan migrants run much higher risks.

First of all, sub-Saharan Africans are among the poorest migrants in Libya. The long journey back home involves significant costs and risks of crossing the Sahara desert. What makes them particularly vulnerable is that they run the risk of violent attacks by angry mobs because they are erroneously perceived as “African mercenaries” hired by Gaddafi. There is also evidence of violence and theft by Gaddafi loyalists and border guards.

So, sub-Saharan migrants have now become a potential target of violence from either side of the conflict. This is part of an established pattern of racist violence and discrimination against sub-Saharan migrants in Libya since they started arriving in increasingly large numbers since the 1990s. However, in the current situation of total lawlessness and violent conflict, these risks are higher than ever.

de Haas' 2007 International Migration Institute study "The myth of invasion: Irregular migration from West Africa to the Maghreb and the European Union" (PDF format) is well worth study. He makes the point that so far West Africa is actually not a major source of migrants for western Europe, partly because of the poverty that isolates most of the region from the world economy--countries like Senegal with their long migrant-sending traditions, and partly because traditions of migration within West Africa have been supplemented by migration to a much wealthier Libya unattractive for Arab migrants relative to the Persian Gulf and run by a nominal pan-Africanist. The importance of immigration from sub-Saharan West Africa to North Africa, particularly but not only Saharan areas, is something de Haas brings out nicely. (And boat people, it seems, form only a small proportion of sub-Saharan Africans entering western Europe illegally; most overstay their passports.)

Go, read.

Five noteworthy links

This morning, I thought I'd share five population-related blog posts of interest with you. (It is still morning in Toronto.)

At the Economist's Eastern Approaches blog, notice was made of a recent conference on the plight of the Romani of Romania. There's room for hope, but then, it also seems like the Romanian government and many ordinary people would like the Romani to, quietly, take advantage of Schengen Zone and leave, so lightening the burden. Among other things

No clear consensus emerged on the impact of EU funds on Romania's Romanies, most of whom live in dire conditions. This is no great surprise considering that red tape and ministerial incompetence has meant that only about 1% of the €20 billion allocated to Romania in EU structural funds has actually been spent. Government programmes for the Romanies, such as positive discrimination for universities, barely scratch the surface. Most of Romania's Romanies remain marginalised, with little or no access to healthcare, education or social services.

But the conference did have two interesting outcomes. One was a discussion of an excellent piece of research by the World Bank, which states that the cost of educating Romania's Romanies would be far exceeded by the contribution an educated Romani workforce would make to the national economy. The opportunity presented by the report suggested that all the chatter—by both government representatives and Romani leaders—about strategy, empowerment, consultation, rights, monitoring, community projects, exclusion, research, discrimination and poverty was missing the point.

The Global Sociology blog examines the migration of soccer players from player-sending countries and regions (Africa, Latin America, eastern Europe) to player-receiving countries. It illustrates how "individual trajectories shape up to be [. . .] a function of interaction with specific social networks and human intermediation, social capital, economic and speculative interests, competitive advantages and structured inequalities in the world-system."

* The platform space: the first country to which the player comes from (often the periphery or the semi-periphery)
* The stepping stone space: the country from which the player gains access to a “big league” country (for instance, less dominant European countries in the European football world)
* The transit space: the country the player passes through and leaves and where the level of competition is what he is used to
* The relay space: the country where the player was loaned before he returned to either the stepping stone or the transit space
* The destination space: the wealthiest and most prestigious leagues and clubs (England)

At his New England History blog (New England being the northeastern part of the Australian state of New South Wales, not the American region), Jim Belshaw describes how demographic changes--accompanied, of course, by all manner of changes including fluctuation gender roles and theological and institutional innovation, with hostile and confused reactions to these prevailing--helped undermine the Methodist and Roman Catholic religious communities in his region (and, I suspect Australia, as most of the industrialized world).

In the Australia of 2009, it is hard to believe that majority of the Australian population once lived outside the capital cities. The decline in country Australia began in the nineteenth century, but accelerated during the twentieth century and especially in the period after the Second World War. Uralla really suffered - by the 1960s and 1970s even its main stores had closed.

This decline reduced the population available to the Methodist Church. However, the Church's decline was accentuated by other factors. A key was the social structure of the Church itself. To survive, the Church had to reach out beyond its now middle class base; it could not because of the attitudes of its membership and especially its senior laity. Dempsey quotes case after case where those in the lower middle and working classes with some connection to Methodism dropped out because they felt excluded.

[. . .]

The mass Australian mass migration program that began at the end of the Second World War brought to Australia more than a million non-Irish Catholics. The Church and its orders such as the Ursulines struggled to build and staff the schools required to educate the new arrivals. Then came waves of change and reform that swept the Church and confused the laity, but even more so the religious whose entire life had been built around previous structures.

At the Discover=hosted blog Not Rocket Science, Ed Yong reports on a study demonstrating that there is discrimination against people of Senegalese background in the French labour market. And if anything, relatively positive stereotypes of the Senegalese might mean they're doing better than other groups.

Khadija Diouf had a well-known Muslim first name and an obvious Senegalese surname and had worked with Secours Islamique, a humanitarian organisation. Marie Diouf had worked for its counterpart Secours Catholique and had an obvious Christian first name. And Aurélie Ménard had a typical French name with no religious connotations and had only worked for secular firms.

In the spring of 2009, Adida collected ads for secretarial and accounting jobs from the French national employment agency and grouped them into pairs, matched for area, sector, company size and position. For each pair, both received Aurélie’s CV while one received Khadija’s and one received Marie’s.

The results were striking. Marie Diouf got a positive response on 21% of her applications; she was clearly an employable (if fictional) young woman. But Khadija Diouf – her exact equal in virtually every respect – got callbacks from just 8% of her applications. For every 100 interviews that Marie was called for, Khadija was summoned for just 38. Even after Adida included a photo on the applications (the same one, showing a woman who was clearly not North African), she found the same bias.

Carl Haub at the Population Reference Blog's Behind the Numbers wonders whether, in light of continued low fertility rates and profound ambivalence towardss immigration, economic rationales might mean Germany could adopt a more open policy towards immigrants, perhaps using something akin to Canada's points system to accumulate skilled migrants.

[A}ccording to a study conducted by Bernd Raffelhü, [. . .] not only are immigrants being sought to fill technical positions in German industry but, throughout their lifetimes, they actually contribute more to government coffers than they take out. The German economics minister also stated that German companies are clamoring for workers.

Often, immigrants are portrayed as a burden on the state budget. The study concluded that that was true in the past but well-trained immigrants in higher paying fields make an immediate contribution through taxes and increase the size of the consumer market. Given their younger age than the workforce in general, such benefits can begin immediately. While it is true that some immigrants will take lower paying jobs that Germans themselves no longer want, an increased emphasis on skilled workers will fill many gaps. The study also recommended that immigrants and their children must integrate into German society, a point recently made by Chancellor Merkel, so that Germans do not feel that their country is becoming too multicultural.

Co-blogger Scott Peterson, at Wasatch Economics reports on how Ireland's economic catastrophe has reawakened the old trade of emigration, this one directed to countries like Canada and Australia which have escaped the worst of things. The strict rules that potential destination countries have established, Scott notes, aren't going to help things.

On the difficulties of emigration in Senegal

One theme we at Demography Matters have explored in the past is the substantial new phenomenon of Senegalese migration to Spain. Two news articles on some of the problems the people living in communities dependent on remittances face jumped out at me.

The Spiegel International's Dialika Krahe has an article, "The Second Niodior: Spanish Wages Keep African Island Afloat", examining how the island of Niodior off the coast south of Dakar is critically dependent on remittances in order to meet the demands of the villagers at home for a better life. The migrants are willing to take enormous risks to reach their destinations.

Those who believe that there are too many foreigners in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain perceive someone like Mamadou Ndour -- a man who has left Niodior Island for Europe's coast -- as a threat to peace and prosperity on the Old Continent.

Ndour works in a gigantic greenhouse in Roquetas de Mar on the Spanish coast, where he is currently crouched over, cutting zucchini from low-growing vines. "You cut one off, throw it in the box and look for the next one. You spend the whole day bent over." The French words in his head have gradually given way to Spanish ones. He laughs when he confuses the two languages. "€30 ($42) for eight hours," says Ndour. "This isn't what I had expected in Europe."

Ndour, 31, a tall young man, is wearing a light-brown T-shirt that's frayed around the collar. He has been living in Spain as a clandestino, or illegal immigrant, for the last three years. "It's hard work," he says, as he tosses the green vegetables into crates under the watchful eye of a Spanish farmer. He says that he was able to send his parents €150 ($214) recently.

Ndour was a fisherman back in Niodior. The little money he earned was enough to pay for food, but not enough to buy medication for his parents. And it wasn't enough to make a wife happy one day, he adds.

[. . .]

Niodior is a test case of sorts, an island whose sons working in Roquetas de Mar in southern Spain are its most important source of income. Month after month, more of Niodior's young men disappear, traveling in their wooden boats to the Canary Islands, where they are then taken to the Spanish mainland. Almost every mother in the village now has a son living in Spain.

[. . .]

Since the economic crisis began, says [a migrant], unemployment in Spain has risen so sharply that they are no longer just competing with each other, but more and more frequently with Spaniards who come to Roquetas de Mar to earn money under the table. The unemployment rate among migrant workers in Spain rose to 27 percent in 2009, compared with 16 percent in 2008.

[. . .]

The next young man who plans to embark on the trip from the Senegalese Niodior to its counterpart in Spain is Sita Thiare, Moussa's younger brother. "I know that the trip is dangerous," says his father. When a family doesn't hear anything from a son for a year, he is declared dead and the imam is invited to participate in a ceremony. The father says that he knows of many families that have lost sons. "But we are all counting on Sita," he says, adding that he will have the money saved up for his passage in a few months, Inshallah.

The French-language Rue 89's Aurélie Fontaine, meanwhile, examines in "Au Sénégal, la solitude des femmes d'émigrés" ("In Senegal, the loneliness of the wives of emigrants") how some of the people left behind, while benefiting from remittances, are trying to cope.

Seated on a beige leather sofa, his long legs dangle over the armrest. C'est dans son salon qu'Awa (les prénoms ont été changés) déroule sa vie de femme mariée à un « modou-modou », comme on appelle les émigrés au Sénégal. It was in her living room that Awa (all names have been changed) lives out her life married to a "modou-modou," as migrants are called in Senegal.

The couple has a 3 year old boy. His father has never seen him. Without papers, he could not return to Senegal and run the risk of not being able to return. Meanwhile, phone call and daily video uploads maintain the link the link. : Awa asks:

"In ten years of marriage, we have lived only four months together. Without this separation, how many children could we have had? How many things could we have done?"

[. . .]

Her story is that of most women of Louga, 200 km north of Dakar, the capital. It's in this city of 200,000 inhabitants that emigrants are most numerous.

Pushed by their family, by their friends, many young girls believe that marrying a modou-modou will take care of their wants. And if the global economic crisis has complicated this pattern, ideals remain stubborn. Awa relates:

"Between themselves, the girls say: 'If this is not an emigrant, did not marry him. Some even leave their boyfriends for a modou-modou they barely know."

The model is so deeply rooted in society and in the Fouta region (northern Senegal), "the men complain about not finding women because they are not immigrants," said Fatou Sarr Sow, a sociologist and migration gender specialist migration.

[. . .]

15 000 to 20 000 men in the region of Louga are in Europe (Spain, Italy and France) and 5 000-6 000 in the U.S., according to Amadou Fall, Deputy Mayor of Louga. The young people are fleeing unemployment rate of 60%.

As in the West during the wars, a large majority of the city's population consists of women who have not seen their husband for two, four, six or even ten years.

The effects in subsequent generations on this disruption of family life will be worth studying.

Why Haitians are not going to go to Senegal

This news item certainly raised some eyebrows.

Senegal is offering free land to Haitians wishing to "return to their origins" following this week's devastating earthquake, which has destroyed the capital and buried thousands of people beneath rubble.

Senegal's octogenarian President Abdoulaye Wade told a meeting of his advisers that Haitians are the sons and daughters of Africa, because the country was founded by slaves, including some believed to have come from Senegal.

"The president is offering voluntary repatriation to any Haitian that wants to return to their origin," said Wade's spokesman Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye late Saturday following the president's announcement.

"Senegal is ready to offer them parcels of land - even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it's just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region," he said.

He stressed that Wade had insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area - not in the country's parched deserts.

Waye even went so far as to proposed the creation Haitian homeland in the African continent, on the grounds that these members of the African diaspora deserved an African home.

Waye's remarkable proposals were motivated by pan-Africanism and by a belief in the real existence of an African diaspora, created by the forced migration of millions of slaves from the African continent mainly to the Americas but also to the Arab world, eventually forming small minorities in some countries (United States, Mexico, Argentina), pluralities or even majorities in others (Brazil and Cuba in particular), or overwhelming majorities in others, as in Haiti and most of the other island societies of the Caribbean. This sentiment played a non-trivial role in Africa, with resettled slaves creating Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries, Marcus Garvey and many other black intellectuals and politicians in North America and the Caribbean advocating pan-African sentiments, and several of the independent states produced by decolonization actively trying to encourage the return of members of the diaspora, as in Ghana.

The Castle of St. George d'Elmina and other infamous abodes of the "doors of no return" mark the paths of slaves destined for the Americas. The current Ghanaian government has swung these "doors" back open, hoping to persuade American and Caribbean descendents of the slave trade to live in Ghana.

Meanwhile, Ghanaian citizens continue to emigrate to North America, Europe, and other parts of Africa. The economic, political, and social woes of the past three decades have created a new diaspora of Ghanaians searching for opportunities elsewhere. As a result, Ghana is often highlighted as a nation struggling with the effects of brain drain.

This sentiment continues, with the African Union trying to actively involve members of the African diaspora in its affairs and the growth of lobbies in the diaspora (TransAfrica's opposition to South African apartheid being a case in point). Ghanaian journalist Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr. applauded Senegal's proposals, contrasting it unfavourably to Ghana's position.

In any case, whether the most expedient thing to do is for many an emotionally devastated and psychologically traumatized Haitian to simply jump aboard the next flight from Port-au-Prince or mount the deck of the next ship to weigh anchor at Port-au-Prince, no pun is intended here, of course, and literally abandon the virtual shipwreck that is present-day Haiti, after some three- to four-hundred years of staking up domestic existence in the erstwhile Hispaniola, is really beside the point. What matters more than all else is the prompt and timely demonstration of great and enviable leadership such as admirably exhibited by Mr. Wade at Haiti’s most vulnerable and desperate moment.

In making his landmark offer, President Abdoulaye Wade made it pointedly clear that his was not simply a humanitarian gesture for which Haitians needed to be eternally grateful but, rather, one that was logically and immutably dictated by historical reality: “Haitians are sons and daughters of Africa[,] since Haiti was founded by slaves, including some [who are] thought to [have hailed] from Senegal.”

Needless to say, Mr. Wade clearly appears to have been fully aware of the fact of the bulk of the ancestors of modern Haitians having originated largely from between Eastern Volta and Western Niger. Still, for the erudite Senegalese premier, an African identity is decidedly more of a corporate, or collective, feature than being merely a topical or geographically parochial phenomenon. Such inclusive stance is no happenstance at all, coming from a bona fide native of the land and nation that produced such intellectual and cultural giants as Messrs. Cheikh Anta Diop, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Alioune Diop and Sembene Ousman.

The major problem with all this in terms of migration to the African continent, apart from the very salient fact that "black" identity is an exceptionally amorphous thing with potentially very little or no relevance to the people whose allegiances it claims and the reality that "African diaspora" as a catch-all term actually effaces the very real fact of multiple stronger diasporic identities under its aegi, is that there's no economic incentive for Haitians to go there. According to 2007 data, Haiti ranks 149th in the world on the Human Development Index with a rating of 0.532. Senegal, one of West Africa's most developed countries, ranks 166th with a HDI of 0.484. Notwithstanding Senegal's somewhat greater income, this will not create a significant Haitian movement to Africa, especially with much closer and richer potential destinations like the United States and Canada. Besides, this kind of sentiment tends to not amount to anything serious--pan-African sentiments certainly haven't improved the reception given to migrants from the Sahel to coastal West Africa. Waye's proposals have been generally criticized by Senegalese and so, partially retracted.

On how Senegalese migrants measure risk and why they still migrate

It's a well-known fact that Senegalese and sub-Saharan migrants who try to make it to Spain by boat can easily encounter potentially lethal problems en route.

The sight of desperate developing world immigrants turning up on the beaches where Europeans routinely visit to sunbathe is becoming increasingly common in the Canary Islands. Spain says some 11,000 people, mainly sub-Saharan Africans, have arrived in the Canary Islands so far this year.

Hundreds of people are thought to have died on the perilous crossing since new routes from distant Mauritania and Senegal opened up at the end of last year.

Last week alone four dead immigrants were found in two of the vessels that reached the islands, which lie in the Atlantic some 100 miles off north-west Africa.

Other vessels, usually carrying between 50 and 100 people, are believed to have sunk without trace on the voyage north along the coast of Africa and west to the Canary Islands.

One boat that got lost was eventually washed up, four months later, on the shores of Barbados, on the other side of the Atlantic. Eleven petrified corpses of would-be immigrants, thought to be from Senegal, were found on board.

One strategy aimed at diminishing the flow of migrants, adopted by the Spanish and Senegalese governments, has been to emphasize these very serious risks in the hope of deterring migrants. As Jørgen Carling and María Hernández Carretero argue in their paper "Kamikaze migrants? Understanding and tackling high-risk migration from Africa" on the basis of a Senegalese village known for producing migrants, however, factors as various as the identification of Europe as a land of jobs, to the need unemployed young men to be masculine risktakers, to beliefs that risk can be managed. Carling and Carretero's conclusion makes what's obvious, really, quite clear.

Risk acceptability is mediated by life opportunities. This explains how an option as dangerous as pirogue migration may seem attractive to young men with few realistic alternatives. The assumption that all migrants undertake highrisk migration because they are oblivious to the risks is misleading and may result in ineffective migration management policies. Instead, our analysis suggests that high-risk migration is perceived as a unique opportunity. Accepting the risks involved should not be seen as fatalistic behaviour. On the contrary, the risk-taking of pirogue migration is seen as purposeful and morally justifiable behaviour.