Shady Migration, Undetected Remittance

The shining lights of a city attract rural people, while dilapidation of villages pushes them out. Mobility has become an exit for population strain in many countries, driving the global economy to an ever-increasing dynamic equilibrium. Conventionally, migration is considered as a zero sum game, wherein the host gains as the source loses.

About 30 million Africans have migrated internationally since 2010, according to new research jointly conducted by African Development Bank (AfDB) and the World Bank Group (WBG). This amounts to three per cent of the total population of the continent. The remittance sent back home by the migrants reached 40 billion dollars in 2010, quadrupling since 1990, according to the research.

Challenging the conventional wisdom on migration, the research claims that migration has become a reliable source of revenue for Africa.

Ethiopia is the second top country from where migrants to the United States (US) originate, with slightly more than 140,000 migrants, the research found. The probability that an Ethiopian migrant with a professional degree could obtain a professional job in the US stood at 80pc in 2011.

By way of providing reliable foreign exchange, remittances have become a lucrative sector for poor countries. The case is no different for Ethiopia, which received 387 million dollars in 2010.

The streetlights of New York, Paris, and London might attract people, whispering the fairytale of weaith, but understanding what pushes them out of their birth place is complicated to clearly define, even for the new research. This aspect was skipped by the findings, which simply recommended that migration be managed “properly.”

As the saying goes, “The sheer cost of mobility is bad memory.” The push factors are not pleasant.

At the centre of the matter lies the hopelessness embedded in poverty. Economies do not have the capacity to generate worthy employment for all the needy.

Constrained by poor policy making, backlogs of development demands, and waning competitive advantage, the economic pie of most African countries cannot expand as required. Instead, it was shrunk of patrimony, corruption, and inefficiency.

By contrast, the call for opportunities grows daily with the bulging working age population. As the pie and the population grow in different directions, hopelessness reigns.

Seeing that some find opportunity in adversity, they struggle to do the impossible and make things right. For others, the cost of reaching the green pastures abroad appears less than the cost of making it at home.

So predetermined is the probability of death during border crossings that the value of life is defined by the supply of illegal documents and the demand for economic freedom.

As a mirror image of economics, politics also plays a significant role in pushing people out of the countries of their birth.

In most African countries, the struggle for power is directly related to the competition for resource ownership. All available historical evidence suggests that Africans have failed to capitalise on their traditional peaceful conflict resolution and power sharing systems. As a result, the struggle for resource ownership was at the heart of all the recent conflicts, which cost thousands of lives.

“When the elephants fight, the grass suffers,” according to the saying. So the struggle for power shatters economies, aside from ruining peace and stability. This pushes people to migrate, especially the smartest and the brightest.

Even the most peaceful means of holding office, elections, have become a source of conflict in Africa. With the rest of the world enjoying the fruits of healthy competition and freedom of choice, Africa remained the continent where peaceful power transitions are apparently forbidden.

The lack of government transparency, poor records on human rights, and rampant corruption all says a lot about the means of governance.

So long as power cannot be disentangled from money, the bright days of Africa seem to be further in the future than even conservative estimates. This also goes for the continent’s hoped for brain gain from its brightest migrants.

Social and cultural attitudes of the Diasporas back home also complement the economic and political push factors.

Migration has a positive effect on individual migrants as well as their relatives back home. For a migrant who makes it to the developed world, the end entails employment, education, better healthcare, freedom of expression, and accountability for considerable taxation.

Seeing that cultural socialisation defines individual perceptions of accountability, African migrants express their solidarity for their relatives through remittances.

Remittance has become the largest source of foreign exchange inflows, just after foreign direct investment (FDI), according to the research. It accounted for 2.9pc of the continent’s GDP in 2009, the research found.

Africa might need the remittance money in the short-term, but sustainable development could only be guaranteed if the push factors could be eliminated once and for all. Development, undertaken by the people for the people, matters more to migrants than their conventional paybacks. All of the development demands of Africa, from technology adoption to creation of a vibrant private sector, demand trained human resources more than anything else.

Unprecedented is the new research  which may might change the course of the migration debate. Yet, it would not alter the basics. Africa is still not a conducive place for its brightest minds and the rest of the world is benefitting from it.          

BY GETACHEW T. ALEMU

Getachew T. Alemu is the Op-Ed Editor for Fortune. He can be contacted at getachew@addisfortune.com.

Source: Addis Fortune