Drawing on the migration and visa databases from the Determinants of International Migration (DEMIG project) and the Global Bilateral Migration Database (GBMD), this paper explores the evolution and drivers of migration within, towards and from Africa in the post-colonial period.
Contradicting common ideas of Africa as a ‘continent on the move’, the analysis shows that intra-African migration intensities have gone down. This may be related to state formation and the related imposition of barriers towards free movement in the wake of decolonisation as well as the concomitant rise of nationalism and inter-state tensions. While African migration remains overwhelmingly intra-continental, since the late 1980s there has been an acceleration and spatial diversification (beyond colonial patterns) of emigration out of Africa to Europe, North America, the Gulf and Asia.
This diversification of African emigration seems partly driven by the introduction of visa and other immigration restrictions by European states. Contradicting conventional interpretations of African migration being essentially driven by poverty, violence and underdevelopment, increasing migration out of Africa seems rather to be driven by processes of development and social transformation which have increased Africans’ capabilities and aspirations to migrate, a trend which is likely to continue in the future.
In recent years, irregular migration from Africa to Europe has received extensive attention. Sensationalist media reportage and popular discourses give rise to an image of an ‘exodus’ of desperate Africans fleeing poverty at home in search of the European ‘El Dorado’. Millions of Africans are believed to be waiting to cross to Europe at the first opportunity.
The three assumptions underlying such argumentations are that African migration is: high and increasing; mainly directed towards Europe; and driven by poverty and violence. Representations of extreme poverty, starvation, warfare and environmental degradation amalgamate into an image of African misery. Irregular migration occurring from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb to Europe has also increasingly been defined as a security problem associated with international crime, trafficking and terrorism.
Not only media and politicians, but also scholars fuel the image of a rising tide of poverty-driven African emigration. For instance, Myers argued that the current flow of ‘environmental refugees’1 from Africa to Europe ‘will surely come to be regarded as a trickle when compared with the floods that will ensue in decades ahead’.
The problem is, that such ideas are based on assumption, selective observation or journalistic impressions rather than on sound empirical evidence. The focus of media, policy and research on irregular migration, smuggling, trafficking and the high death toll amongst trans-Mediterranean ‘boat migrants’ reinforce the impression that African migration is essentially directed towards Europe and driven by despair.
Notwithstanding the increasing availability of survey- and interview-based micro-level data on African migration, data availability remains extremely patchy and is generally focused on migration to Europe from a limited number of better-researched African countries, such as Morocco, Senegal, Ghana and South Africa. What has been particularly lacking so far, is macro-data that allows to map the overall evolution of the migration patterns from, to and within Africa over the past decades. This is not only important to gain a more fundamental insight into the factual evolution of African migration and to verify the validity of common perception of massive and increasing African migration, but it would also allow to contribute to the scholarly debate on the determinants of migration.
A Guest Editorial