Three years after the apex of the European refugee crisis, the European Union’s immigration and refugee policy is still in utter disarray. In July, Greek officials warned that they were unable to cope with the tens of thousands of migrants held on islands in the Aegean Sea. Italy’s new right-wing government has taken to turning rescue ships with hundreds of refugees away from its ports, leaving them adrift in the Mediterranean in search of a friendly harbor. Spain offered to take in one of the ships stuck in limbo, but soon thereafter turned away a second one.
Behind the scenes, however, European leaders have been working in concert to prevent a new upsurge in arrivals, especially from sub-Saharan Africa. Their strategy: helping would-be migrants before they ever set out for Europe by pumping money and technical aid into the states along Africa’s main migrant corridors. The idea, as an agreement hashed out at a summit in Brussels this June put it, is to generate “substantial socio-economic transformation” so people no longer want to leave for a better life. Yet the EU’s plans ignore the fact that economic development in low-income countries does not reduce migration; it encourages it. Faced with this reality, the EU will increasingly have to rely on payoffs to smugglers, autocratic regimes, and militias to curb the flow of migrants—worsening the instability that has pushed many to leave in the first place.
THE FIRST WAVE
How did we get here? In many ways, European leaders are still grappling with the impact of the refugee crisis that has shaken the region since 2015, when record numbers of people landed in Greece, Italy, or Spain after crossing the Mediterranean Sea in rickety, overcrowded boats. Arrivals leaped from 60,000 in 2010 to 280,000 in 2014 to over one million in 2015. In 2014 and 2015 alone, more than 7,000 died while making the perilous journey across the sea, leading Pope Francis to describe the Mediterranean as a “vast cemetery.” Almost 80 percent of the newcomers sought protection from conflicts in the Middle East. A smaller contingent came from central Africa, the Horn of Africa, and countries such as The Gambia, Nigeria, and Senegal, most without an entry visa.
Still recovering from the 2008–09 global recession, struggling to contain a debt crisis in Greece, and facing renewed fears of terrorism, the European Union was ill prepared to handle the new arrivals. Europe’s migration rules meant that gateway countries—such as Spain, Greece, and Italy—were disproportionately charged with processing asylum requests and were soon overwhelmed. Attempts to distribute asylum seekers more evenly across the bloc’s member states failed spectacularly. Meanwhile, populist far-right parties quickly gained ground across Europe, fomenting fears of an invasion by unassimilable refugees. Fearing political losses, centrist parties hardened their stances on immigration, promising to end the crisis.
Europe’s proposed investments in African education, vocational training, and even infrastructure will not be enough to achieve the growth required to locally absorb the next generation of African labor.
Even though some leaders, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, initially took in many asylum-seekers, they quickly took steps to contain the number of new arrivals. In 2016, the EU struck a deal with Turkey, which tightened controls along its coastline and stemmed the tide of people crossing over to Greece in exchange for a pledge of six billion euros in EU financial assistance. Several countries, including Hungary, also put up fences along sections of their borders. As a result, the number of sea arrivals has declined sharply, to under 70,000 over the first eight months of 2018. European leaders nonetheless remain anxious to discourage further arrivals and are looking southward across the Mediterranean for solutions.
DON’T MOVE
So far, Europe’s response to migration from Africa is taking two forms. First, in what some governments have billed as a “Marshall Plan with Africa,” Europe is recalibrating its development assistance to eliminate some of the “root causes” of migration, with a focus on education, unemployment, and high fertility. Second, and more immediate, the EU is clamping down on African migration through ramped up border security, data collection, and technical aid to African strongmen such as Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir and various Libyan militias. Yet neither of these two strategies will work—at least not in the way leaders in Brussels or Berlin intend.
For one, this is a matter of demographics. Today’s most mobile people are not Africans but Europeans themselves, who make up 8.25 percent of the world’s emigrant population against Africa’s 2.89 percent. And of the sub-Saharan Africans who do move, the vast majority stay in Africa. A small number live in refugee camps; most others move to neighboring countries to support their families, with little intention of ever migrating to Europe. This is likely to change, however. Sub-Saharan Africa’s young and fertile population, which today is about 40 percent larger than Europe’s, will be six times the size of Europe’s by 2100. Even if fertility rates drop soon, the momentum for population growth will continue as today’s children reach adulthood. Generating employment opportunities for them will require unprecedented economic growth—not just in one or two countries for a few years, but across the continent for multiple decades.
Europe’s proposed investments in African education, vocational training, and even infrastructure will not be enough to achieve the growth required to locally absorb the next generation of African labor. If anything, they will instead create conditions for further mobility: research suggests that economic growth in low-income countries tends to increase rather than reduce migration. As the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants has pointed out, moving costs money, especially on risky and clandestine journeys. The most desperately poor are usually not in a position to bear these costs. Yet even modest increases in wealth and education provide more people with the resources and tools to move.
Eventually, economic growth will slow emigration, but those days are decades off: our analysis of UN data indicates that migration usually begins to fall only when a country’s GDP per capita reaches about $11,000—many orders of magnitude above most African countries’ current levels of development. Indeed, only a handful of countries on the continent are anywhere near this threshold. According to the World Bank, The Gambia’s GDP per capita in 2017 was a mere $483, Somalia’s around $500. Even Nigeria, the richest of the major refugee-sending countries in the region, still had a GDP per capita of under $2000.
In short, the legacies of colonialism, weak governance, and misguided aid policies will continue to push Africans to move for the foreseeable future. Some will be absorbed by wealthier states on their own continent, such as Botswana and South Africa. Yet both of these countries are increasingly hostile to African migrants. And as long as earning potential between Europe and Africa differs dramatically, some will head north. Even if the proportion of Africans on the move does not increase, their absolute number will.