Some migration-related news links

Al Jazeera has hosted a few interesting articles exploring different kinds of migration. Alia Malek's "Daughters of Diaspora: two Algerian sisters, one in Texas, one in Paris" looks at the experiences of two Algerian sisters, one immigrating to France and the other to the United States, in the very different enviroments of their two adopted countries. Alia Malek's "Shaped by the decisions their mothers made, two cousins grapple with assimilation in both the U.S. and France" notes the substantial flight of ethnic Armenians from Syria to their ethnic homeland, quite possibly the largest post-Soviet migration to Armenia since the end of the Soviet Union. Anna Nigmatulina's "Brazil’s urban Indians confront city life head on, with headdress off" examines how Brazilian indigenous peoples fare in the cities of Brazil, while "Charity offers hope to Mexico's Mixtec elderly" by John Holman looks at how elderly Mixtec left to themselves by younger generations of migrants cope.

Portugal, meanwhile, remains a country of migrations. Bloomberg's Henrique Almeida and Joao Lima "Portuguese With No Pay From Oil Bust in Africa Go Home to No Job" describe how many Portguese emigrants to Angola have been forced to return in the aftermath of the end of the Angolan oil boom, while Raphael Minder's "Azorean Diaspora Can’t Resist the Powerful Pull of Home" in The New York Times looks at how Azorean migrants and their descendants in North America relate to their ancestral archipelago.

Vice's Maurice Chammah described in " Why Are Nigerians Flocking to Work in Texas Prisons?"

a remarkable story of chain migration, from West Africa to Texas, driven by employment opportunities in Texan prisons.

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.

How migration contributed to the meltdown in Côte d'Ivoire

The civil war in the West African country of Côte d'Ivoire is entering its final stages (I hope).

Forces loyal to Ivory Coast presidential claimant Alassane Ouattara laid siege to incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo's residence on Thursday, after an attempt to pluck him from his bunker met with fierce resistance.

Fighting continued in the economic capital Abidjan as Ouattara's forces tried to unseat Gbagbo, who has refused to cede power after losing a November election to Ouattara according to U.N.-certified results.

Sporadic explosions broke the silence in one of the lighter nights of fighting since Ouattara's soldiers arrived in the city a week ago, a Reuters witness said.

A Gbagbo advisor based in Paris told Reuters Ouattara forces had renewed an assault on Gbagbo's residence late on Wednesday with support from U.N. and French helicopters. His statement could not be independently verified.

Ouattara forces had attempted to storm the residence in the upscale Cocody neighborhood earlier on Wednesday after talks led by the United Nations and France to secure Gbagbo's departure failed, but they were pushed back by heavy weapons fire, a western diplomatic source who lives nearby said.

[. . .]

Analysts said Ouattara forces, who swept south last week in a lightly contested march toward Abidjan, could struggle to best Gbagbo's remaining presidential guard and militias.

"Just like in Libya, it's going to take both the rebels and outside forces to push Gbagbo out," said Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, analyst at DaMina Advisors in New York.

This conflict has its roots in the country's demographics, particularly in its immigrant population. Landinfo's Geir Skogseth has a extensive chronology of the crisis and its background. The migration from the Sahel to the West African coast that I blogged about back in June 2006 was one of the most important theme in Ivoirien demographic change.

During the French colonisation, new migration patterns evolved due to the economic development of the southern part of the country. This led to two main migration flows:

1. Urbanisation and rapid population growth in Abidjan fed by extensive migration from the whole country (as well as neighbouring countries – especially Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea). Thus, Abidjan has grown from a tiny village to a city of more than three million in less than a century.

2. Expansion of the plantation economy in the south-western part of Côte d’Ivoire
led to the movement of large numbers of farmers from the north and southeastern
regions (as well as the neighbouring countries mentioned above –
especially Burkina Faso).

As is common all over Africa, several ethnic groups live across borders, and may be known under different names in different countries. For example, the Guéré/Wè are known as Krahn in Liberia, and the Yacouba/Dan are known as Gio.

The migrants going to Abidjan mainly work in commerce, transport, industry and as
artisans, whereas the migrants moving to the southwest mainly work in agriculture –
either as farmers or working on plantations. Most migrants from outside today’s Côte
d’Ivoire came from neighbouring French colonies – Burkina Faso was even
administered together with Côte d’Ivoire as a single entity. Comparatively few
migrants came from Liberia (independent in principle, but under strong American
influence) or from the British colony Gold Coast (Ghana since independence). The
migration to Côte d’Ivoire from other French colonies was encouraged by the French
authorities, and this policy was continued by president Houphouët-Boigny after
independence.

People with Kwa origin, especially Baoulé, were given preference in the colonial
administration, the bureaucracy and in the plantation economy, and this situation
continued after independence. A smaller migration flow in numbers, but with great
political importance, consisted of educated Baoulé and other southerners who moved
from the southeast to other parts of the country to take up administrative posts – in
the educational system, as civil servants and as administrative staff on plantations.

As mentioned above, the migration from outside Côte d’Ivoire has been substantial,
and roughly a quarter of the population of Côte d’Ivoire are people with origin in
neighbouring countries. Relatively few of these migrants have been naturalised, not
the least since this generally was a non-issue until the end of the 1980s. Only then
did a serious debate evolve on whether there should be a difference in rights between
Ivorian citizens and others living in the country. During the colonial period and the
single-party system under president Houphouët-Boigny, there was no difference in
rights to speak of between Ivorian citizens and immigrants, accordingly immigrants
had little incentive to apply for naturalisation, and very few did.

Sadly for Côte d'Ivoire, the strong post-independence economic growth that attracted these millions of migrants disappeared by the 1980s, and in the democratic transition following the death of Houphouët-Boigny, ethnic nationalism via the concept of Ivoirité took hold.

One key to exacerbating ethnic divisions here is the concept of Ivoirité, which means the state of being a true Ivorian. The term manifests itself throughout all levels of society, and is held up by many observers as a root cause of the country's violent downward spiral from its status throughout the 1970s and '80s as the most prosperous, stable country in volatile West Africa.

Many residents from the government- controlled southern part of country say those from the rebel-held north (often identifiable by their names) are not true Ivorians because many have lineage originating in poorer, neighboring countries such as Mali or Burkina Faso. Some southerners also resent that their northern neighbors support northern political figures.

[. . .]

The Ivoirité concept emerged here in the 1970s when many nationals from neighboring countries flooded into southern Ivory Coast to work the manual labor jobs in the coffee and cocoa sectors. Many Ivorians became resentful, feeling the newcomers were coming to take advantage of the financial boom the country was experiencing.

In the 1990s, former President Henri Konan Bédié brought the term to the national stage when he used Ivoirité to gain an advantage over former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara in the 1995 presidential election. He accused Mr. Ouattara, who is from the north, of not being 100-percent Ivorian.

Benoit Scheuer, a Belgian sociologist who made a documentary film called "Ivory Coast: The Identity Powder Keg" in 2001 in which he filmed acts of vandalism and physical violence stemming from Ivoirité, says it was the intellectuals around Mr. Bédié who brought Ivoirité back to into the picture. Mr. Scheuer compares Ivoirité to exclusionary tactics used in other conflicts such as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

The country, he writes in an e-mail interview, has a "political elite that wants power or is in power but has a legitimacy problem (this was the case of [former President] Habyarimana in Rwanda and Bédié in Ivory Coast). In these cases, the elites are going to manipulate the spirit and the mentality [of the citizens] and are going to develop a discourse, a rhetoric of 'them and us.' "

The only virtue that this conflict has is that if Gbagbo is decisively defeated, Côte d'Ivoire might be able to move beyond its sterile north-south conflict and evolve in a positive direction. This, alas, might be a lost cause, with Ivoirité having caught on. In the meantime, as the Inter Press Service's Fulgence Zamblé noted, the Côte d'Ivoire that was once a magnet for migrants from across West Africa has now become a major contributor to refugee flows within West Africa.

As many as a million people have fled Côte d'Ivoire's commercial capital, Abidjan, due to intensified fighting. Many people are fleeing to areas in the north, centre and east of the country as thousands of youth answered a call to join forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo; others are trying to leave the country.

Saturday saw a rally of up to 15,000 youth supporters of Gbagbo outside the presidential palace in Abidjan, but the exodus from the city began accelerating following a mortar attack on a market in the northern suburb of Abobo on Mar. 18, which killed 30 people,and wounded 60 more.

UNOCI, the U.N. peacekeeping force in Côte d'Ivoire, said the shelling of the market was carried out by soldiers loyal to Gbagbo, who has refused to concede that his rival, Alassane Ouattara, was the winner of presidential elections last November.

The death toll since mid-December is put at 462 by the United Nations, rising quickly as Gbagbo supporters and loyalist soldiers fight their way into areas of the city identified as Ouattara strongholds.

An estimated 100,000 people have sought refuge in camps and villages in Côte d'Ivoire's neighbour to the west, Liberia. The deteriorating situation will likely also see an increase in refugees fleeing east, across the border into Ghana.

On migration and the future of North Africa

The prominence of migrants in--not from, but in--North Africa brought up by Libya is something that's explored, in three related (and two somewhat surprising) contexts, in Julio Godoy's Inter Press Service article "For Migrants, Crisis Worsens Economic Situation At Home". Godoy began the article by making the point that the flight of millions of labour migrants from Libya to the countries where their remittances were supporting families will hurt things badly.

[International Labour Organization economist] Schmidt told IPS that these workers’ exodus from Libya is increasing the social and economic upheaval in their countries of origin.

"For Egypt and other countries, the return of the migrant workers from Libya is fatal," Schmidt explained. "On the one hand, the migrant workers come to increase the number of unemployed youth, already very high. On the other hand, the remittances they were sending back home, and which supported economically their families, are over now."

The ILO estimates that the total remittances from Libya to Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Bangladesh and other countries amounted to one billion U.S. dollars per year. About half of this money went to Egypt.

Globally, according to World Bank figures, Egyptian nationals working abroad sent 7.6 billion U.S. dollar to their families at home in 2010.

Schmidt warned that without foreign economic aid and an immediately successful national economic policy, Egypt and Tunisia won’t be able to cope with the return of the migrant workers.

"In Tunisia, unemployment jumped to 17 percent after the migrant workers returned home from Libya, up from 14 percent," Schmidt said. Without immediate economic perspectives, Maghreb youth would again leave the country, most likely to Europe, the ILO expert added.

Uncontroversial, the above. The below, now, is quite controversial.

The Maghreb countries cannot cope with the social and economic consequences of the mass exodus from Libya, warned Robert Holzmann, research director at the Labour Mobility Program of the Marseille Centre for Mediterranean Integration. "In the short term, there won’t be a mass exodus," Holzmann said. "But in the middle term, Europe must prepare for rising immigration from the Maghreb region."

Holzmann, an Austrian national, recalled that after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, workers migrated to Western Europe, regardless of the economic reforms carried out in their countries of origin.

"Something similar is going to happen in the Maghreb countries," Holzmann said. "Even the most auspicious reform policies won’t be good enough to create enough jobs to cope with mass youth unemployment. Therefore, the European Union should launch now a new immigration management policy," Holzmann said.

Europe should not be afraid of the new migration. "History shows that immigration can be a positive factor in the development of societies. Despite the bloody causes of mass exodus, migration can be a source of innovation," said Thomas Straubhaar, director of the Institute for International Economics in Hamburg.

Holzmann oversimplifies things substantially: Slovenia has been a net receiver of immigrants since the 1960s, for instance, while Romania has been consistently an exporter of migrants long predating the Communist era. The different post-Communist countries now in the European Union have followed different trajectories, from the former Hapsburg lands' emergence as net destinations for immigrants to the emergence of Lithuania and Latvia as net exporters of working-age migrants on alarming scales. Expecting there to be continued pressure for migration from the Maghreb to Europe for the next decades does seem plausible, mind, in light of the income and other welfare gaps between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, the intimate human and other links between the two shores, and the need for immigrants in some sectors of European economies. I'd suggest that it isn't so much the plausibility of the migration that Holzmann describes that's debatable so much as the reaction to it.

The final element of migration in the Maghreb that Godoy explores, raised by Holzmann, is perhaps the most unexpected: the emergence of the Maghreb as a destination for immigrants.

One of the many social and economic puzzles of the Maghreb region is that despite high national youth unemployment, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from sub-Saharan African and Asian countries could find jobs there, especially in the construction sector.

"For the local, relatively well-educated youth in Libya, Tunisia, and other countries in the region, jobs in the construction industry were not attractive," Schmidt explained. "For Sudanese or Bangladeshi immigrants, these jobs were the only alternative to feed themselves and their families at home."

Why not? Labour forces are never perfectly mobile within a country, and even within a country with very high unemployment there were be unpopular jobs. Hein de Haas noted in 2005 in his profile of Morocco at MIgration Information that not only were migrants in Morocco coming from outside Africa, but that many were staying. North Africa may be substantially less developed than Europe, but it's substantially more developed than West Africa.

Recently, even migrants from Asian countries, such as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, have transited through Morocco via the Saharan route. They are mostly flown in from Asia to West-African capitals. From there, they follow the common Saharan trail via Niger and Algeria to Morocco.

Although most migrants consider Morocco a country of transit, an increasing number of migrants who fail to enter Europe prefer to settle in Morocco on a more long-term basis rather than return to their more unstable and substantially poorer home countries. Probably several tens of thousands have settled in cities like Tangiers, Casablanca, and Rabat on a semi-permanent basis, where they sometimes find jobs in the informal service sector, petty trade, and construction. Others try to pursue studies in Morocco.

Yet sub-Saharan migrants face substantial xenophobia and aggressive Moroccan and particularly Spanish border authorities. Since most of them have no legal status, they are vulnerable to social and economic marginalization.

In September 2005, a Moroccan newspaper compared sub-Saharan African migrants to "black locusts" invading northern Morocco. Frequent round-ups have occurred in immigrant neighborhoods and in improvised ad-hoc camps close to the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and larger cities, and unauthorized migrants are regularly deported to the Algerian border.

There is evidence that a substantial minority of immigrants to Morocco have migrated for reasons that fall under the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. However, the Moroccan government assumes that virtually all sub-Saharan immigrants in Morocco are "economic migrants" on their way to Europe.

This means asylum seekers are rejected at the border or deported as "illegal economic immigrants" even though Morocco is party to the 1951 Geneva Convention, has a formal system for adjudicating asylum applications, and has an Office of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Bureau des Réfugies et Apatrides - BRA) to assist and protect refugees.

The emergence of Maghreb as a destination for immigrants has been explored in the French-language press, for instance in the algerie-dz.com article "L'Algérie devient une terre d'immigration" ("Algeria becomes a land of immigration") or bladi.net's "Le Maroc face au défi de l’immigration subsaharienne". Suffice it to say that if the rest of the Maghreb is following Morocco in hitting a demographic sweet spot with a peaking proportion of working-age adults, combining it with dynamic jobs-intensive economic growth, the attractiveness of the Maghreb for West Africans will only increase. Central Europe is transitioning from net emigration to net immigration; why not? In his later studies referenced here, de Haas suggested that immigrants are already quite numerous in Maghrebin border communities, for instance in the Algerian Saharan city of Tamanrasset with its links to the Tuareg straddling the North/West African frontier and on trade routes.

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.

On Libya as an immigration country

The large numbers of refugees crossing from Libya into Tunisia or Egypt has been prominently featured in international news media. Over at BAG News photographer Alan Chin has a couple of photoessays from the border-region up (1, 2), the below evocative picture being located at the second post.



A very high proportion of these refugees aren't Libyan citizens, but rather, immigrants of greater or lesser permanency, illustrating the extent to which Libya's oil-driven economy made it a society of mass immigration.

The refugee agency says some 55,000 people have arrived in Egypt in the last 10 days, one-third of them Asian workers. Fifty thousand others, including 2,000 Chinese, have entered Tunisia. And it said a group of people from Bangladesh, Thailand and Pakistan were marooned without papers in a no-man’s land between Libya and Egypt.

Meanwhile, UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said those who remain in the Libyan capital Tripoli may not get badly needed aid because it’s too dangerous there. Aid groups fear that food stocks will run out as the violence continues between President Moammar Gadhafi and rebels who are fighting to oust him.

“Libya’s economy was strong compared with countries further south,” said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, an IOM spokesman in Geneva. “A guesstimate would be about 1.5 million migrants in Libya before the current trouble. They were working overwhelmingly in the informal sector.”

Migrants from countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines, he added, were usually registered and came with documents and contracts. But now they, too, are scrambling for the borders and begging for help to get back home.

Those who have fallen through the cracks the most, Chauzy said, are West and Sub-Saharan Africans lured by Libya’s relative prosperity.

The millennia-old migrants' routes connected the west African interior with the Libyan coast were supercharged via Gadaffi's pan-Africanist flirtations, as described in a 2004 Washington Post article.

During the 1990s, in the name of African unity, Gaddafi opened the borders to tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans to live and work in Libya. For the past four years, resentment over the policy has led to occasional riots and frequent bitter confrontations between the immigrants and Libyans.

In effect, the problems mark the end of an officially ordained dream.

Last month participants at an African Union meeting in Libya's coastal city of Sirte, Gaddafi's home town, rejected his proposal for a continent-wide army. A few days later, the General People's Congress, a consultative assembly that meets annually, ratified laws to restrict immigration and to expatriate Africans and other immigrants who live in Libya but have no steady jobs.

"You have work, you stay. You don't, you go home," said Giuma Abulkher, a government spokesman. "There will be strict controls."

The closed door is part of a shift in Libyan priorities. After decades of presenting himself first as a leader of the Arab world and then the African continent, Gaddafi has turned to the West. He is giving up chemical and nuclear weapons programs and declared that Libya would no longer support rebel movements across the globe. The United States is moving to restore diplomatic and trade relations cut off during decades of hostilities. Libya plans to privatize its state-dominated economy.

Shutting out other Africans will probably prove popular. In a closed, politically fearful society, opposition to Gaddafi's immigration policy is one of the few outward signs of discontent with his government. While Libyans are usually reluctant to openly discuss such issues as democracy, succession and economic policy, the immigration question provides a vent for complaints that quickly spill over into expressions of general unhappiness.

"It's about time. How can we have all these poor people here when we are poor ourselves?" said Osama Tayeb, a tout at a chaotic taxi stand in the old city. "First we help revolutionaries everywhere, then we give Libya to the Africans. Enough of this. Libya for the Libyans."

Mohammed Mabrouk, a waiter, blamed immigrants for a wide variety of societal problems -- crime, prostitution, dirty streets. "Look, they get away with everything. We could not touch our African brothers. They bring drugs, they smuggle people. We don't need this," he said.

[. . .]

About 600,000 sub-Saharan Africans are estimated to live among Libya's population of 5.5 million. They were lured by a relatively stable currency and jobs that many Libyans, in their highly socialist economy, decline to do. They sweep streets, work in restaurants and peddle a dizzying collection of merchandise -- cosmetics, pirated recorded music, clothes and secondhand auto parts. Raggedy men selling single articles of clothing and knit caps stand in line inside an arched stone gateway to the old city.

Their headdresses and wool or cotton robes indicate origins across a wide swath of Africa: Nigeria, Ghana, Chad, Mali, Somalia, Sudan and Congo. Some of the migrants come to make the perilous journey to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea. Last summer, 200 Africans traveling to Italy by fishing boat drowned when their rickety craft capsized. During peak summer season last year, as many as 2,600 Africans arrived each month by boat on the Italian island of Lampedusa, an isolated stop between Libya and Sicily.

Later on, as part of his turn to3wards the West Gadaffi later signed accords with Italy which triggered the regime's very harsh controls over illegal migrants. The marginalization faced by this community was dramatically worsened when Gadaffi, not trusting his regular army, instead recruited thousands of sub-Saharan Africans as mercenaries to use against his subjects. These seem to have been pawns.

"A man at the bus station in Sabha offered me a job and said I would get a free flight to Tripoli," said Mohammed, a boy of about 16 who said he had arrived looking for work in the southern Libyan town only two weeks ago from Chad, where he had earned a living as a shepherd.

Instead of Tripoli, he was flown to an airport near the scruffy seaside town of Al-Bayda and had a gun thrust into his hands on the plane.

[. . .]

In halting Arabic, Mohammed, the young Chadian, tried to explain how he had ended up on the wrong side in somebody else's revolution.

Mohammed drifted into Libya looking for casual work, like many sub-Saharan Africans, perhaps with the hope of eventually finding people smugglers who would take him across the Mediterranean to Europe.

"I wanted a better life, not war and destruction," he said. He insisted that he had been treated well since his surrender, with regular meals, and said he hoped he would be allowed to return home soon.

"I didn't really know what was going on. They told me to do these things and I was really scared when the shooting started."

Al Jazeera and All Africa both carry reports of sub-Saharan African immigrants, whether legal or otherwise, being subject to attack by angry Libyans.

The Egyptians seem less vulnerable, likely becaquse of their perceived similarities to the Libyans, their lack of involvement in the revolution, and perhaps because of the concentration of this Egyptian migration beginning in the 1960s professional categories of employment. These Egyptians are still returning to their homes, however, hitting the economy of their homeland further.

"Losing these remittances will of course make the situation worse here," Rashad Abdu, a professor at the University of Cairo, said. "Libya is an important and close destination for hundreds of thousands of Egyptian workers who could not find jobs in their country."

About 1.5 million Egyptians work and live in Libya, and send an estimated 1.5 billion Egyptian pounds (US$254 million) in remittances back home every year, according to the Egyptian labour ministry. Many sought work in Libya because the local economy could not absorb them.

"The sorry thing is that it will take most of these people a long time to find jobs in their home country," said Saleh Naser, chairman of the Labour Section at the independent Egyptian Chamber of Commerce. The chamber is composed of company owners and businessmen who try to coordinate the government and the business community.

"The only way out now is for the government to try to open new markets in the Gulf for these people," he said. According to the Chamber of Commerce, an estimated 10 percent of Egypt's 26 million working population are unemployed.

Egyptians working abroad remit about US$12 billion annually to their country. The state-run National Planning Institute, however, expects a decrease during the third quarter of the current financial year because of political turbulence in the Middle East.

Protests against the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt forced the Central Bank to shut banks for more than three weeks; they only resumed normal operations on 20 February.

The sorry thing is that it will take most of these people a long time to find jobs in their home country

"Egypt has a budget deficit and a government debt load that are teetering on the edge of sustainability," says think-tank Stratfor and the fall-off in remittances will only make matters worse.

Some of those who have returned are the family's sole breadwinner. According to 59-year-old Youssef Fawzi, his son Marwan, used to work in Libya, and household would now struggle without that financial support.

The Egyptians working in the east of Libya, adjoining their homeland, seem to have been able to escape. The Egyptians working in the west, along with other migrants, seem less fortunate.

More than 100,000 people have fled Libya in the past seven days. As the final battle for Libya looms, the crowds of escapees become bigger and more desperate.

Almost half of them have come through this narrow stretch of road leading across the northern Sahara into Tunisia. There are teams of Chinese oil workers in identical uniforms, large packs of Bangladeshis, scatterings of Japanese, and mostly thousands and thousands of Egyptians, who have provided the bulk of Libya’s labour force for years.

“We’re getting out because we’re scared, but also because there won’t be any paycheques for a long time. We know there won’t be work until there’s a new government, which could be months from now,” said Haji Abasi, who took his wife and two small children on the frightening road journey from Libya.

At this point, there is no violence along the three-hour drive from Tripoli to the border. Only at the border crossing is the solid green Gadhafi flag visible, a last stand for the regime, held by some of Col. Gadhafi’s most loyal security staff.

But the border guards – who systematically seize cellphones from refugees, strip them of their memory cards, and sometimes harass and humiliate the escapees – are not the final threat to the exhausted people carrying their possessions in oversized bags.

That came after the Libyan border, when on Sunday the Egyptians were blocked by aggressive crowds of Tunisian protesters who tried – usually successfully – to stop or sharply slow the flow of Egyptians, allowing only families and injured people through.

The protesters include residents of the nearby border town of Ben Gardane, who feel that they are being overrun with tens of thousands of homeless Egyptians, and members of the local revolutionary committee who believe they are helping the Egyptians by drawing attention to their plight and encouraging the Cairo government to send rescue airlifts.

“We don’t have any more space to accept the Egyptians – we are blocking the border until the Egyptian authorities find a solution for their transportation,” said Lutfi Tabeth, a member of the Ben Gardane revolutionary committee.

It became a frightening and dangerous scene on Sunday afternoon as several thousand Egyptians charged the border, pushing through the Tunisian protesters and attempting to charge into the camps, only to be stopped by Tunisian soldiers who raised their rifles and forced them to sit on the street, closing the border again.

At this point, assuming the stabilization of the Libyan situation I feel safe only in predicting the gradual return of the Egyptians and the further marginalization of sub-Saharan Africans in Libya. With these communities' association with a hated leader's brutality, however unearned and unfair, it seems safe to assume that sub-Saharan Africans will not do well at all.

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.

On climate change and migration

The American law blog The Volokh Conspiracy is an unusual place to find guest blogs about migration driven by environmental change, but Matthew Kahn, author of the book Climatopolis does have a guest post there. He argues--as he does here, for instance--that migrations triggered by climate change need not be catastrophic, and in fact can be quite manageable or even net economic pluses. A central point of his analysis is that all cities will not be effected equally.

Not all cities will suffer equally from climate change. There are over 300 major cities to choose from in the United States. A city such as Seattle may suffer much less. An implicit assumption throughout Climatopolis is that there will always be some safe area where our cities can thrive and we can migrate to. If the entire 7 billion people on the planet lived at Hong Kong’s density then we would need 1.1 million square kilometers of habitable land. This represents just .7% of the world’s land mass.

Suppose that California’s coastal cities suffer greatly from climate change due to the combined punch of sea level rise, hotter summers, drought and rising electricity prices. Self interested households will see that California cities are no longer great places to live and they will “vote with their feet” and migrate to other cities that have suffered less from climate change or perhaps even gained due to warmer winter temperatures.

[. . .]

Our ability to migrate means that urban places can suffer while urban people continue to prosper. Within the New York City metropolitan area, New Jersey employment centers may gain if Southern Manhattan and Wall Street are under siege from sea level rise. Land owners in Southern Manhattan will suffer but workers at downtown Goldman Sachs would not.

Kahn even suggests that these migrations, from areas heavily impacted by climate change to areas not-so-heavily impacted, could through the reallocation of labour into more vibrant and/or rejuvenated environs. If the proper human connections exist, of course.

Growth economists have long argued that human capital (attracting and retaining the footloose, skilled) is the key for a nation or a city to enjoy sustainable growth. If a city such as Los Angeles loses its quality of life edge, then the skilled will move elsewhere and firms will be less likely to move to Los Angeles. Similar to a neighborhood with high crime or bad schools, local real estate prices will fall. The owners of such assets will bear the incidence of this “new news”. While real estate values would decline in cities deemed to be increasingly at risk, there are other cities that could actually experience a windfall. Today, you can trade one home near UCLA for 100 Detroit homes. In 2070, will this exchange rate still hold or will there be parity?

[. . .]

Does this same optimism hold in the developing world? In the United States, there are a large number of cities scattered across various geographical regions. In other nations such as Bangladesh, there is unlikely to be the same menu to choose from. As “environmental refugees” seek out safer havens they may cross political boundaries into nations where they are not welcome. Developed countries could ease adaptation in the developing world if they loosen immigration restrictions. Migration also represents an upfront investment that requires resources. The poorest of the poor may be unable to move and not to have the information or social networks concerning potential beneficial destinations.

I agree with Kahn to a certain extent. Back in June 2009 I blogged about climate change-driven migration in West Africa, noting how there were already well-established traditions of migration to and from the Sahel to the West African coast, and these these migrations played a significant role in economic growth in littoral states like Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Could a substantial migration of skilled Californians rejuvenate a Detroit notable for a decent locatino and very low real estate prices? I don't doubt it. If climate change-driven migration isn't a sudden process, but rather takes place on time scales on the order of decades, it needn't be unmanageable.

But. Kahn's analysis assumes that there is little possibility catastrophic runaway change with effects as outlined by Sublime Oblivion's Anatoly Karlin at the link previous, or that if it does happen the consequences will be manageable. This strikes me as optimistic. Le monde diplomatique observed that in 1998 the expected influx of very large numbers of Kosovar refugees into Albania threatened to destabilize an already shaky economy, while in 1999 the consequences of the Kosovo catastrophe weighed heavily on the entire western Balkans region. If, say, the Netherlands is significantly flooded, what would happen? Where would the Dutch go? What would happen to the Eurozone economy? If California enters a long period of economic decline precipitated by a worsening climate, what will happen to the American economy? If Shanghai floods, or has to protect itself, what will happen to the Chinese? Et cetera. The loss in infrastructure investments alone, never mind symbolism/morale, would be serious indeed.

The political and social consequences of migration of this scale also need to be considered. In Côte d'Ivoire, the migrations from the Sahel were eventually used for political and economic reasons to trigger xenophobia among the Ivoiriens de souche, leading to more than a decade of civil war and division. The decades of net migration from the Sahel did benefit Côte d'Ivoire, but the country experienced a meltdown nonetheless. The factor of xenophobia is less of an issue in some countries and regions than in others--the American population may be mobile enough to cope--but it still has to be considered. In the example of Bangladesh, source of perhaps tens of millions of migrants in India who often act as cheap labour, fears of Bangladeshi immigrants' links to terrorism and flee Assam won't help things in the case of future mass migrations.

And then, there is the question of what people who need to migrate but don't have the connections necessary to successfully migrate--or even migrate at all--will do. What will be done?

A few Friday links

Today's my day for links-writing, I suppose, but in my defense I've got quite a lot of good ones!

• Continuing yesterday's United Arab Emirates theme, rising immigration and the advance of the demographic transition among Emiratis is projected to diminish the Emirati share of the UAE's population from 20 to 15% over the next two decades.


• Immigration and high birth rates mean that Sweden's population is projected to reach 10 million in 2021.


• Birth rates in Wales are rising, straining existing maternity and childcare services.


• Birth rates in the United States fell by 2% in 2008, perhaps because of the economic crash.


• Immigration has helped boost South Korea's population by a half-million, significantly more than projections had indicated.


• Despite a very low birthrate, and ongoing depopulation in its northern regions, Romania's population is projected to be fairly young by European standards in 2030.


• Some 13% of Maliens have emigrated from their country, most living in neighbouring nations like Côte d'Ivoire but with substantial contingents in Europe, especially France.


• In French, the Canadian Press notes that Québec's birth rate has reached new highs, with nearly 89 thousand births this year, although the fertility rate has remained stable, with the population expected to reach some 9 million.