The Scramble for Europe E-Book

Stephen Smith

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 343

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

From the harrowing situation of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean in rubber dinghies to the crisis on the US-Mexico border, mass migration is one of the most urgent issues facing our societies today. At the same time, viable solutions seem ever more remote, with the increasing polarization of public attitudes and political positions. In this book, Stephen Smith focuses on 'young Africa' - 40 per cent of its population are under fifteen - anda dramatic demographic shift. Today, 510 million people live inside EU borders, and 1.25 billion people in Africa. In 2050, 450 million Europeans will face 2.5 billion Africans - five times their number. The demographics are implacable. The scramble for Europe will become as inexorable as the 'scramble for Africa' was at the end of the nineteenth century, when 275 million people lived north and only 100 million lived south of the Mediterranean. Then it was all about raw materials and national pride, now it is about young Africans seeking a better life on the Old Continent, the island of prosperity within their reach. If Africa's migratory patterns follow the historic precedents set by other less developed parts of the world, in thirty years a quarter of Europe's population will beAfro-Europeans. Addressingthe question of how Europe cancope with an influx of this magnitude, Smith argues for a path between the two extremes of today's debate. He advocatesmigratory policies of 'good neighbourhood' equidistant from guilt-ridden self-denial and nativist egoism. This sobering analysis of the migration challenges we now face will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the great social and political questions of our time.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Front Matter

Introduction: A View from the Top of the Population Pyramid

Africa: The Mexico of Europe

A ‘Stress Test’ Between Generations

Africa Has Not Yet Taken Off

The Kingdom of Lies

Notes

1 The Law of Large Numbers

Africa: The World’s Youth

Nigeria: Take It or Leave It

Lagos: Half Paradise, Half Slum

The Chinese Model

Demographic Governance

Notes

2 The Island-Continent of Peter Pan

Empty Granaries, Coveted Land

The ‘Birth’ of Youth

Suicides in a Blue Frock Coat

Brothers and Sisters in Faith

Democracy, a Barmecide Feast

Notes

3 Emerging Africa

Trade Secrets

The ‘Gatekeeper State’

‘A Billion Good Reasons’

Identity as a Repertoire

Musa Wo, the Legendary ‘Enfant Terrible’

Notes

4 A Cascade of Departures

The Dilemma of Development Aid

The Draining of Lake Chad

To Live the ‘White Man’s Life’

The Repertoire of Rejection

Zooming in on the

Mare Nostrum

Notes

5 Europe as Destination and Destiny

Don’t Reckon Without Your Host

Plugging a Leaky Dike with Sandbags of Euros

‘Bowling Alone’

Smashing the Actuarial Tables

Beware of ‘Transfers’

‘A Rancour Sharpened by the Winter’

Notes

By Way of Conclusion: Some Plausible Scenarios for the Future

The Obsession with ‘Scenes and Types’

Go See the Other Side!

Notes

Bibliography

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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For Charlie and Anne

The Scramble for Europe

Young Africa on its Way to the Old Continent

Stephen Smith

polity

First published in French as La ruée vers l’Europe © Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2018

This English edition © Polity Press, 2019

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3458-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Smith, Stephen, 1956- author.Title: The scramble for Europe : young Africa on its way to the old continent / Stephen Smith.Description: Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018046811 (print) | LCCN 2018055560 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509534586 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509534562 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509534579 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Human geography--Africa, Sub-Saharan. | Human geography--Europe. | Africans--Migration. | Africans--Europe. | Immigrants--Europe. | Africa, Sub-Saharan--Emigration and immigration. | Europe--Emigration and immigration.Classification: LCC GF701 (ebook) | LCC GF701 .S62 2019 (print) | DDC 304.8/406--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046811

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Acknowledgements

This book is a labour of friendship. It would not exist without the generous help of those who have seen me through first the process of writing the French original and then the similarly daunting task of producing a belle infidèle in English – an entirely updated and reworked version, purged of (almost) all of my beloved Gallicisms and the scoriae of half-baked thought. In France, Olivier Nora, my publisher at the helm of Grasset, and Ronald Blunden, the head of communications for the Hachette Group (who even made ‘detours’ to my home in North Carolina), have been inexhaustible sources of excellent counsel. In the United States, T. R. Goldman and Sam Fury Childs Daly – a fellow journalist and a fellow Africanist at Duke – have done yeoman’s service to standardize my idiosyncratic English (I grew up speaking German with my mother and have lived outside the US, in Europe and Africa, for forty-five years). In England, Mark Huband – with whom I wrote joint dispatches out of Monrovia in the early 1990s, when the Liberian capital was besieged by Charles Taylor – also offered more than one welcome suggestion. And, finally, Jeremy Harding, a contributing editor of The LondonReview of Books who lives in southwestern France, went through the final draft and laid it all to rest. I owe him more than any words of thanks could convey. In the end, of course, I am solely responsible for the content of this book. Alas, it is less perfect than the support I received, including from my new friends in the making at Polity Books, John Thompson and the entire team.

Further, I want to acknowledge my debt to Richard Cincotta, the director of demographic studies at the Stimson Center in Washington DC, to whom I owe my discovery of the ‘human geography’ of Africa. With kindness and patience, he introduced me to the complexities of his world.

My thanks also go to Charles Piot and Achille Mbembé. Together, we organized two international migration conferences at Duke University, which gathered scholars from across Africa, Europe and North America. This book owes a great deal to their numerous insights.

Last but not least, I will be forever grateful to all the African migrants – in Africa, Europe and the United States – for their trust in sharing their life stories with me. They sent me on the journey that eventually led to this book.

Introduction: A View from the Top of the Population Pyramid

At the Summer Olympic Games in London in 2012, the oldest competitor was a Japanese equestrian, Hiroshi Hoketsu. At seventy-one, he had qualified for the games for the third time. The youngest athlete, Adzo Kpossi, a thirteen-year-old swimmer from Togo, was competing in the 50-metre freestyle. Neither won a medal, but the two athletes did represent opposite ends of the global demographic spectrum. Hoketsu came from a state that since the 1970s has had the oldest population in the world. Kpossi came from a small country in sub-Saharan Africa, a region with the largest concentration of young people anywhere on the planet. That a Togolese girl and a Japanese man represented the bottom and top of the Olympic age pyramid was not entirely accidental, any more than the fact that London, just a few years later, would become the first European capital to elect a Muslim as its mayor, and a first-generation Briton at that. The May 2016 election of Sadiq Khan, born on British soil to parents who had arrived from Pakistan in 1970, was, for some, emblematic of London’s cosmopolitan character. For others, it was a confirmation of their worst fears: they were becoming strangers in their own land. The polarized readings reflect London’s radically changed demographics. In the 1950s, the British capital had roughly the same number of inhabitants as today, but an overwhelming majority of Londoners had parents as well as grandparents who were British. Now, more than half of the city’s inhabitants are either first or second-generation immigrants (Collier 2013: 129).

Ordinarily, the subject of human geography, or ‘demography’ as it’s more often called, tends to make one’s eyes glaze over. Beyond the complicated statistics and age-related cohorts, there is also a question of scale. Demographic changes take place too slowly to be noticed in the day-to-day, until that moment of coalescence when they are suddenly blindingly obvious. ‘It happened, as things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once’, James Baldwin wrote in his 1962 ‘Letter From a Region in my Mind’, referring to his own sudden awakening about the pervasiveness of American racism. Two years after Baldwin’s essay, Peter Griffith, the Conservative candidate in British parliamentary elections in Smethwick, a coal and steel town near Birmingham in the West Midlands, ran on the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour.’ Nationally, after thirteen years in opposition, Labour coasted to victory with a comfortable margin. But in Smethwick, Griffith defeated the Labour MP Patrick Gordon Walker, even though the latter had been widely expected to become the party’s next foreign secretary. At the time, Smethwick was thought to be an anomaly, a short-lived racist flare-up. But after the UK’s stunning June 2016 vote to exit the European Union, Smethwick suddenly stood out like a long-forgotten warning sign. Polish migrants were the referendum’s targets of choice: more than a million had moved to Great Britain in the five years following Poland’s entry into the EU in 2004. Racism, it turns out, is only one form of rejection among many. And Smethwick, now a town where ‘white Britons’ account for only 38 per cent of the population, supported Brexit by a two-thirds margin.1 Among the reasons given by first and second-generation immigrants to explain the vote were, in order of importance: the preference given to EU citizens rather than members of the Commonwealth to settle in the UK; local shopkeepers’ refusal to accept Polish businesses as competitors; and opposition to the neoliberal policies of the European Union.

What was it that had happened in Great Britain in half a century, or roughly an adult life span? When V. S. Naipaul, the grandchild of an immigrant Indian couple in Trinidad and Tobago, arrived in London in 1950 – then the most important capital of any colonial power – Great Britain had about 25,000 non-white immigrants (French 2008: 66). Naipaul was eighteen years old. Boarding his plane in Port of Spain, he had left his family without looking back, his eyes fixed firmly on his shadow in front of him, ‘a dancing dwarf on the tarmac’. When he landed, he swore that he would ‘show these people that I can beat them at their own language’ (Naipaul 1983: 46, 77), a goal he achieved in 2001 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Naipaul had become both a modern Homer and a wily Odysseus, turning deracination into a wilful opportunity for self-reinvention.

By 2001, nearly 8 per cent of the UK’s population were immigrants, some 4.6 million people, a figure that had risen to 13.6 per cent by 2015, according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics. A lot or a little? Everyone has an opinion, and it is largely a matter for the British to determine the answer, just as the Japanese will decide whether the inhabitants of their country who were born elsewhere – about 1.5 per cent – are too many or too few. And it’s up to Americans to determine whether the US remains a country welcoming ‘your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores’, in the words of Emma Lazarus, engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. Researching and writing this book, I have made no a priori assumptions in favour of homogeneity or diversity as ideals, least of all as moral imperatives. I don’t level criticism at the Japanese for their apparent desire to remain ‘among themselves’ (whatever this means), or applaud the American call to embrace ‘diversity’ (whatever that means, assuming it is still the case). Nor do I question whether the African migrants who feature in this book are fleeing violence and lawlessness, poverty or lack of opportunity, for a better life. Nor do I insist on a distinction between legal and unauthorized migration, or between economic migrants and people seeking asylum under the terms of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees.2 That is the business of signatory states. Not that I think these are trivial issues: on the contrary, they often define a migrant’s destiny, and always frame a discussion that I believe to be essential. My purpose, however, is not to stoke further controversy in debates around migration, but to provide a factual basis on which others can come to an informed view. In particular, I endeavour to assess Africa’s importance as a reservoir of migrants, and as far as possible to predict both the magnitude and timing of this human flow from Africa to Europe. Under certain conditions, which I will lay out in detail, more than 100 million Africans are likely to cross the Mediterranean Sea over the next two generations. As a result, like many European families who had an ‘American uncle’ in the first half of the twentieth century, many African families will have a nephew or a niece in Europe in the second half of the twenty-first century.

Naipaul and a cohort of ambitious migrants, including the novelists George Lamming and Sam Selvon, arrived in the UK from the Caribbean in the 1950s neither as ‘invading foreigners’ nor as ‘innocent victims’. They came as pioneers relying on strength of character in order to build a future that had eluded them at home. They left the land where they had been born to settle in a country that had already been fully formed by a long history of constant adaptation. As we will see, both Naipaul’s new homeland and the ‘dwarf’ from Trinidad and Tobago were transformed in what can be described either as a postcolonial encounter in the shadow of British imperialism or a migratory encounter in the context of accelerated globalization. The two perspectives are complementary. I draw on both in the course of this book.

Three key scenes define cross-border migration. The first is the moment of abandonment, with departing people fuelled by frustration and ambition, oppression and opportunism: most often, the mix is neither pure nor simple to analyse. The second scene – the trial – transforms these fugitives into heroes, either tragic or triumphant, as they endure the various obstacles that bar them from reaching the promised land. Finally, the third scene – ‘incorporation’, the last stage in any rite of passage – is defined by a wager on the part of immigrants as well as their future fellow citizens that they will find common ground to inhabit together. That is to say that the act of migration is not simply realized upon arrival in a new land; its success or failure can be determined only after a period of time, sometimes only by the second or even third generation. The act of immigration engages the migrant and their descendants as much as it engages the country that eventually becomes, more or less, their home.

Africa: The Mexico of Europe

This book explores the human geography of Africa, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. It offers a living tableau of Europe’s neighbouring continent and reaches a conclusion that may well be controversial: Young Africa will rush towards the Old Continent in an inversion of Europe’s ‘Scramble for Africa’ at the end of the nineteenth century. Only this time, the initiative comes from the people, the demos, moving en masse to redraw the world map. European imperialism, by contrast, was driven by a small, influential minority who inspired a new imperial imaginary fostered by a revolution in communications – ‘high-speed rotary presses, automatic paper folders, linotype machines, news photography, railroads, and telephones’ (Berenson 2011: 9–10). The poor and disenfranchised European masses read the ‘penny papers’ but left in droves for the Americas, and not for Africa. Indeed, from a demographic perspective, European colonialism in Africa was a failure, even if you include its settler colonies – which, in fact, were few and far between. In 1930, the number of European citizens from the major colonial powers – Great Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium – living in Africa was fewer than 2 million, about 2 per cent of their total population and less than 1 per cent of Africa’s population at the time (Ferenzci 1938: 230). On the other hand, as we will see, the current ‘repopulation of the Earth by new cycles of migratory circulation’, as the Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembé puts it (2016: 8), is driven by popular demand.

In 1885, at the conclusion of the Conference of Berlin, which established the rules for the colonial partition of sub-Saharan Africa, Europe’s scientific prowess, industrialization and modern armies made it the most developed continent in the world. It counted some 275 million inhabitants, not including Russia. Africa, with six and a half times the surface area, had only 100 million inhabitants, and was the least developed continent in the world. Relatively isolated by the Sahara Desert (a land mass as vast as the continental United States), uncooperative trade winds and the scourge of malaria – ‘the most formidable guardian of Africa’s secrets’, according to the Arab explorer Ibn Battuta – Africa’s interior had barely been mapped. At a time when the aspiration ‘to reign on earth’ was taken literally, when Christianity and the Enlightenment cult of progress were ardently proselytized, when other continents were already conquered and previously closed countries like Japan had been forcibly opened to ‘free trade’, it would have taken a minor miracle for Africa to escape European domination.

It would be equally astonishing if Europe were not acutely concerned with the next massive South-North migration rippling across the globe from the less developed regions of the world. Between 1960 and 2000, South-to-North flows rapidly accelerated, with the total number of migrants tripling from 20 to 60 million (Collier 2013: 50).3 Except for the Maghreb, whose inhabitants left almost exclusively for France, Africa has so far played only a minor role in these migratory waves, which emanated mostly from Asia and South America. Sub-Saharan Africa was still too poor and marginalized to play a part. And it is still relatively poor: in 1960, a little more than half its population lived in absolute poverty; today that figure is a little less than half, according to the World Bank. Yet at the same time, the population south of the Sahara has more than quadrupled, jumping to more than 1 billion in 2015 from some 230 million in 1960. It is also more and more in step with the rest of the world, to which it is now connected by satellite television stations, mobile telephones and broadband technology. Half of the continent’s population now has access to 4G telephony or the internet, through fibre-optic submarine cables enabling video streaming and the downloading of vast quantities of other data. And, finally, emerging from this sea of poverty is a real middle class. Some 150 million African consumers now have a disposable income equal to anywhere from 5 to 20 US dollars per day. Not far behind are another 200 million people with a per diem income of 2 to 5 dollars. In short, a growing number of Africans are in the global information loop and can muster the resources to seek their fortune elsewhere.

The situation is reminiscent of Mexico in the 1970s. Before then, only a tiny fraction of the population could scrape together the wherewithal to cross the Rio Grande and settle in the United States. But as their country crossed a threshold into relative prosperity, more and more Mexicans decided to depart. Between 1975 and 2010, 10 million Mexicans migrated to America both legally and illegally. In all, including their children born in the United States, Mexican-Americans now form a community of some 30 million people, about 10 per cent of the US population. If Africans followed that example between now and 2050, the Afro-optimistic leitmotiv of ‘Africa Rising’ would, quite literally, become a reality (cf. Mahajan 2008; Radelet 2010). At the end of a sustained African migratory wave, Europe’s population would include some 150 to 200 million African-Europeans – counting immigrants and their children – compared with just 9 million today. In a little more than thirty years, between one-fifth and one-quarter of the population in Europe would be of African descent (Millman 2015).4

An absurd fantasy? A sensationalist prediction? History is never written ahead of time – past events can be grossly misleading, or misinterpreted, while different demographic projections as well as the magnitude and duration of future migratory patterns can vary significantly. Moreover, Europe may not be the quasiexclusive destination for Africans that America was for Mexicans. Comparisons are also less apt because Africa is not a single country neighbouring Europe, and the Mediterranean is a far more redoubtable body of water to cross than the Rio Grande. On the other hand, in 1975, the population of America was three and a half times Mexico’s then 60 million inhabitants, while today it is still two and a half times larger, although the Mexican population has doubled. Even if we take into account all of Latin America, with its 600 million or so inhabitants, the migratory pressures on the United States are much weaker than those facing Europe. Today, the European Union (including the United Kingdom) has some 510 million inhabitants, while there are 1.3 billion people in neighbouring Africa. In thirty-five years, that asymmetry will have grown enormously – there will be an estimated 450 million Europeans and some 2.5 billion Africans. As the population of Europe continues to age, Africa’s demographic will continue to trend in the opposite direction. By 2050, two-thirds of Africans will be less than thirty years old. Put another way, for every European in their fifties, there will be three Africans, two of whom will be in the prime of life.

I can imagine how Europeans might quake at the thought. Their fears are by no means groundless, as I try to show towards the end of this book. But I was impelled to write it not as a demographer – I am not – or an alarmist Eurocentric – I am not – but as someone who has spent most of his working life engaged with sub-Saharan Africa, reporting its news as a journalist, and later researching its less eye-catching realities as an academic. I do not lie awake at night trembling at the prospect of an ‘Africanization’ of Europe (which, in any event, has been underway since the 1920s). Rather the reverse: the very real possibility of an exodus from Africa haunts me because I find it hard to accept that the continent could become an abandoned hulk in the eyes of its teeming youth – so demoralized by their prospects on the one hand, so robust and dogged on the other – that ever larger numbers would head for the Mediterranean. That would be a bitter admission of defeat. Yet I am forced to acknowledge that sub-Saharan Africa’s foreseeable future, over the next two or three generations, is overshadowed by the monolithic nature of its demography and the pressure that seems likely to exert in favour of migration.

A ‘Stress Test’ Between Generations

The youthfulness of sub-Saharan Africa – a lasting consequence of the unprecedented demographic growth that began in the years between the two world wars – is crucial. Right now, more than four out of ten people on the African continent are less than fifteen years old5 – a fundamental fact whose implications are difficult to grasp. The consequences arising from an age pyramid, 40 per cent of which comprises children or young adolescents, are as manifold and unforeseeable as it is challenging for a European or American to imagine life on just one or two dollars a day – a frequent reference in the development literature. In France, a country with a relatively high birth rate compared to the rest of Europe, the proportion of the population below the age of fourteen is still less than 20 per cent, half the rate of Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa, four out of every ten inhabitants were not yet born when the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001; eight out of ten inhabitants were not born when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Because the average age is so low, the continent’s collective experience is foreshortened by the sheer size of its demographic youth bubble. With the voting age at eighteen or older in fifty-three of fifty-four African countries, the continent’s collective future will scarcely be determined by the majority of its citizens: at any moment you choose to look at it, half the continent’s population is too young to vote. And by the time this half of the population accedes to voting age, another half of the population without the right to vote has been born. The upshot is that democracy appears more an age-based privilege than a majoritarian right.

This rapid generational turnover in sub-Saharan Africa has repercussions for every aspect of society: from questions of war and peace to those of democratization, the economy and the labour market, education and public health. If two-thirds of the world’s HIV-positive people live in sub-Saharan Africa, along with two-thirds of the world’s child soldiers, it’s not because HIV/AIDS is an ‘African malady’ or that war on the continent is ‘endemic’. The explanation, rather, is that a high proportion of youth means a larger number of people who are more sexually active and less cautious, especially when they’ve already dodged death in a thousand other ways. And in the absence of more peaceful alternatives, some swell the ranks of armed movements as foot soldiers. They’re fighting what was known in the European Middle Ages as guerre guerroyante – war for war’s sake or war as a way of life.

A population pyramid with a broad base – the term ‘youth bulge’6 is often employed – also erodes the principle of seniority, one of the bedrock social and cultural rules of sub-Saharan Africa. Seniority involves the prestige, privilege and authority normally awarded, ipso facto, to the elderly – especially to men – who have lived long enough to have a large, extended family or clan; who rise to positions of power and accumulate after many years a particular aggregation of knowledge that we refer to as ‘wisdom’. ‘In Africa’, according to Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s oft-cited phrase, ‘when an old person dies, it is a library that burns’. But the elderly are also gerontocrats, hoarding opportunities at the expense of young men and women, before ceding their place to the next generation. The tension in contemporary Africa between the old and the young is acute. The old are the gatekeepers of a supposedly stable but actually moribund world held in place by flagrant injustices. The young yearn for equality and – propelled by constant disappointment and mounting frustration – threaten to bring the old order down on the heads of their elders.

For sub-Saharan Africa’s two majority groups with minority rights – young people and women – the social contract is laced with inequities. And they are no longer patiently waiting their turn for more power and prosperity. Either by force of arms or the ballot box, new forms of digital knowledge or new articles of religious faith, from Pentecostal to Islamic, millenarian to Islamist, these ‘social cadets’ are struggling for emancipation. If they succeed, they will dislodge their elders. If they fail, they will look elsewhere to graduate to adulthood. Transcontinental migration is their best and most likely option. Whatever happens, Africa’s ‘moral reproduction’ is already compromised by a numerical mismatch. Even assuming everyone over the age of sixty were automatically wise, the ‘old sages’ make up only 5 per cent of the population, a number that is simply not big enough for norms and values to be transmitted to the continent’s young population. In the sub-Saharan slums, nine out of every ten inhabitants are less than thirty years old; they have only their peers as mentors in a life that can aspire to no more than simply ‘getting by’. Like capillaries of globalization, these young people are plugged into the outside world by all the modern technology that is foreign to their elders. Their actions exacerbate what Jean-François Bayart has labelled the ‘historic extraversion’ of their continent (2010: 133). They are alienated in their own land.

The numerical mismatch between young and old in sub-Saharan Africa is the main driver of a massive uprooting. Ancestral cultures are barely celebrated now except at festivals subsidized by international donors who otherwise are doing everything in their power to pulverize centuries of indigenous African tradition and globalize the continent. As a result, Africans escape through the satellite dish or the internet; their ‘elsewhere’ begins long before they actually set out for it: a nearby town, a national or regional capital in a better-off neighbouring country, and eventually Europe, America, China … In Togo, which has almost 8 million inhabitants, one adult in three entered the US government lottery for a residence permit – even though the ‘visa lottery’ contains just 55,000 green cards for the entire world, offered to ‘diversity candidates’ from countries with low immigration rates to the United States.7 In neighbouring Ghana, 6 per cent of the population – 1.7 million people out of 28 million – applied for the programme in 2015 alone, and that proportion was even surpassed in Liberia (8 per cent), Sierra Leone (8 per cent) and the Republic of Congo (10 per cent).8 Across the whole continent, according to a 2016 Gallup Institute survey, 42 per cent of all Africans aged fifteen to twenty-four, and 32 per cent of university graduates, said they wanted to emigrate.9 Surveys conducted in 2017 by the US-based Pew Research Center in four of the top ten countries of origin of sub-Saharan migrants now living in Europe and the United States – Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and Kenya – have corroborated these findings. At least four in ten respondents in each country declared their intention to migrate, if they had the means and the opportunity, including a staggering three-quarters of those surveyed in Ghana (75 per cent) and Nigeria (74 per cent), Africa’s most populous nation with an estimated 190 million inhabitants.10

In 1997, the then Washington Post Africa correspondent, Keith Richburg, in his book Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, raised a hue and cry when he congratulated himself on the deportation of his African ancestors to the New World, where, despite discrimination and other hardships, they managed to succeed. To greater consternation, he wondered how quickly an African slave ship docked in a West African port would fill up with volunteers for a voyage to America. Twenty years later, Africans are routinely piling into frail skiffs at their own risk to cross the Mediterranean.

Africa Has Not Yet Taken Off

2015 was a record year for migration to Europe, occasioned by wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, recorded that 1.256 million people immigrated to Europe that year: a million reached the continent via the Mediterranean. According to Frontex, 200,000 came from Africa; the International Organization for Migration put the figure at twice that number (IOM 2018: 38, 407). Except for Somalis and South Sudanese, who are fleeing broken states, and Eritreans escaping a ruthless dictatorship, the lives of these departing Africans are rarely in imminent danger or subject to systematic repression or famine. More often they are simply looking for a better life for themselves and their children – ‘simply’ not implying here that their decision is a free choice, given their frequently punishing circumstances. The number of Africans attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe has remained more or less constant both before and since this latest ‘migrant crisis’. In 2016, while their total number fell to one-third the level the year before – from 1 million to about 360,000 – the number of Africans arriving via the main maritime route, most of them from Libya, grew by 20 per cent to some 180,000 persons.11 That is in line with the level of documented arrivals from all routes every year over the last decade. Since 2007, 2 million Africans have arrived in Europe, or roughly 200,000 per year. According to the IOM, these 2 million have added to a ‘stock’ of African migrants in Europe, estimated at 9 million in 2016. That number was less than 900,000 in 1960, the year many African nations became independent. By 1997 it had risen to just 3 million, two-thirds of whom were from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

Since the 1990s, three major trends have characterized migration from Africa to Europe. First, the proportion of migrants from the Maghreb has continued to decline as North African countries have completed their demographic transition from big families with short life expectancies to smaller families with longer life expectancies. At the same time, emigration from countries south of the Sahara has increased in proportion to their growing population: there are now roughly 1 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa compared with about 300 million in North Africa. In addition, the percentage of Africans migrating within their continent, to another African country more prosperous than their own, has dropped by comparison with the numbers leaving the continent: between 1990 and 2013, there was a threefold increase of Africans moving within Africa, while those leaving altogether jumped by a factor of six (IMF 2016: 2). Finally, African migratory patterns have become globalized, extending well beyond the four major colonial powers – France, Great Britain, Portugal and Belgium – and now encompassing the whole of Europe as well as the United States, Canada, even China and the countries of the Arab peninsula.

According to a UN study published in 2000, the European Union will need to welcome almost 50 million immigrants by 2050, about 1 million a year, just to keep its current population constant (United Nations Population Division 2000). The study assumes that the population will continue to age, and that the ratio of working-age adults to dependants – children and the retired elderly – will drop from 4.3 to 2.2. If the goal is to stabilize the working population in the EU – that is, people between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four – then roughly 80 million immigrants will be needed by 2050, the equivalent of 1.6 million a year (this, of course, doesn’t factor in the proportion of the European workforce that artificial intelligence will have replaced by then). Even after the dramatic influx in 2015, however, Europe is not prepared for numbers of this magnitude. Immigration remains a political minefield, both on ‘upstream’ issues like entry requirements and border controls and ‘downstream’ concerns involving numerous, sometimes conflicting, models of social integration. In Poland, to take one example of a country that propounds the concept of ‘ethnic homogeneity’,12 the threshold of tolerance was crossed long ago and a ‘Fortress Europe’ mentality is seen as the sine qua non for survival. For others, notably Germany, ‘welcoming’ people in need is a categorical imperative, and any attempt to question the unqualified acceptance of migrants is viewed as Fremdenfeindlichkeit or xenophobia.13 Supporters of a ‘dispassionate’ debate point out that with the ageing of Europe’s own population, the only way to maintain its present standard of living is to stock the continent’s offices and factories with brains and brawn from elsewhere (but, again, we run up against the possibility that the surge in artificial intelligence is already providing for this shortage). If their viewpoint appears more rational, it is only because it eschews the Manichean view of all or nothing – ‘our borders are either open or closed’. But it brings its own set of problems with it. First, family reunification. Given the size of the average African family, the ratio of working-age adults to dependants in Europe will not – as intended – improve but deteriorate: many more younger children in Europe will require day care, health care and education. Then there is a sort of biopolitical ‘Taylorism’, the theory of scientific management that chops up workers into discrete parts – bodies for the factory, brains for the office – a theory that works to the advantage of the employer. Only in this case we are talking about men and women who must find their place in their host country, not just in the workforce. Who pays for the extra costs – the language courses, the housing subsidies, the many expenses that arise as the immigrant moves through the stages of arrival and absorption? Neither the Left nor the Right has any difficulty landing these ‘negative externalities’ on the tax payer. For the purpose of greater equity, a far more coherent strategy would be to pass the costs on to employers in the form of a Pigovian tax, named after the British economist Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1957), who first came up with the idea of a corrective tax to recoup the social costs of production.

‘Migration has been politicized before it has been analysed’, according to Paul Collier, the co-director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford and the author of Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World (2013: 246). He laments the fact that the immigration debate poses a choice between Scylla and Charybdis – in this case either a closed-door or an open-door immigration policy – instead of seeking a navigable passageway between the two by adopting an actual immigration policy. If an influx of foreigners is the nightmare scenario that some have imagined, how have countries like America and Australia been able to create such prosperity? On the other hand, if immigration is the only lifeline for an ageing society, how has Japan survived with no external inputs? Collier believes that the unconditional freedom to settle wherever one wants is ‘the stuff of teenage dreams’: taken to its logical extension, it would mean that the whole world would move to the country offering the best opportunities, the greatest wealth, and the best prospects for the future. According to Collier (2013: 16), the blind spot of such a utopia is the possibility that the wealthy would likewise decide to settle ‘freely’ in some parts of the Third World. And then, of course, we would hear the cry of ‘colonialism has returned!’

The Kingdom of Lies

Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europe paid little, if any, attention to its demographic decline and the challenges of a rapidly ageing population, deliberately ignoring what was all too obvious. The inversion of the age pyramid in Italy, Germany, Spain and Greece – where for the first time in history the number of people over the age of sixty surpassed those under the age of twenty – attracted the attention of just a handful of demographers already monitoring the situation.14 In March 2000, when the heads of state and governments of the European Union gathered in Lisbon to decide their strategy for the coming decade, neither the EU’s changing demography nor its incipient immigration tensions figured on the agenda. That they failed to address this rapidly developing issue is all the more astonishing given that Brussels is home to a greater percentage of ‘third-country’ immigrants than almost any other city in Europe. From 2000 onwards, half of the children born in Brussels had immigrant parents, and Muslims represented one out of four inhabitants under the age of twenty-five (Laqueur 2007: 14–15). Politicians, of course, were not the only ones with their heads in the sand. Journalists, columnists and academics, the people who help shape public debate, ceded discussion of the social discontent around immigration to the extreme right and nascent populist movements. Working in their own bubbles, they appeared blithely unaware of the growing social media storm gathering under their noses. Americans, it seemed, could be quicker than many Europeans to take up the challenge. In 2005 Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post