migration | ukwatch.net

The Future of the World - as seen from an airport

Ellie Keen — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:05:32 +0000

Airports are salty wounds, full of tight air and crimson stale tears and often, when sitting rigidly on an Africa-to- Europe flight, I can feel the passengers are wounds inside wounds: bundles of dry nerves in a bath of dry uncertainty.

Later on, from up in the sky, Heathrow airport will seem an obstinate lump of concrete and steel, a formidable excrescence: unwelcoming and even irritated at the arrival of yet another wave of “them”. Inside the austere hall of immigration control of Terminal 2, arriving passengers are separated into two groups, a fluid small queue at the far end for the citizens of the free world and another much bigger section for the rest: the people at the edge. And so they quietly join the human snake locked in a lengthy slow-moving march towards the gates of deliverance. You want to learn about social science? About global politics in the twenty-first century? About the “human predicament”? About the “end of history”?

Well: forget your Ivy league PhDs and your LSE Masters. Skip over your Foreign Affairs subscription and your well-meaning punctual attendance at literary festivals and come spend a day at the arrival gates of Heathrow airport. Try it, sit there and watch humanity in all its countless dimensions. Watch the sweaty frowns, the hopeful sighs, the expectant silences, the occasional glances towards the other world at the far end, that of the lucky ones hurrying past impatiently, showing their passports fleetingly to the smiling official like they were glorified bus passes. And who can blame them? Isn’t that what passports are meant to be? As clichés go ‘The World is a Global Village’ has at least the merit of being nearly true. Indeed, if you chose carefully where your world started and where it ended. If you picked a world that contained the good half of the Northern Hemisphere as well as some appropriate outposts, Australia and the Falklands for example. Then that world would, indeed, be one of breathlessly instant communication, dizzyingly cheap frictionless travel and where you would find an increasingly eclectic yet homogenous cultural diet of MTV-speak and industrialscale spiritual angst. That world would be a global village ….

I’m reminded of a moment last summer, as I sat on the terrace of my family home in a sun-drenched Algiers suburb, fifty pages into another half-hearted attempt to complete War and Peace. I wondered about how things would have turned out had two hundred thousand or so qualified engineers, researchers, professors and professionals not fled my country over the past twenty years. Would a North African Silicon Valley have emerged? Perhaps on the site of a dormant coastal village? A place buzzing with that most potent of mixes: blazing talent and raw ambition? Would that have helped make the planet a teeny bit fairer? Or at least less farcical than it is now? This thought-experiment is set to remain just that: an exercise in outlandish speculation. Half a century after the last wave of liberation movements, the Third World is still haemorrhaging crucial brain-power and the First World is still hungrily (yet not that gratefully) sucking it out. No one seems able or willing to stop this demonic one-way phenomena and the political bankruptcy of the elites in most African, Asian and Latin American countries, crippled by incompetence, mismanagement and good old fashioned greed, has certainly not helped.

At the airport, so many different faces have the same quiet fierceness about them: The Egyptian petroleum engineer with his beautiful daughter beside him singing to herself, oblivious to the life-changing episode she is partaking in, the Sri-Lankan computer scientist, with his neat short hair and his serious gaze, absentmindedly inspecting his knuckles, the Malaysian physicist, with his short-sleeved shirt and worried brows. All of them stand in line waiting, locked between the twin poles of the local oppression back home (whether political, social or economical) and the siren calls of overseas prosperity. The simple truth is that most of the time, job migration is not about choosing a different life: It’s about choosing life. Very often nowadays, photogenic experts line up at TV shows to proclaim the end of borders, the abolition of the nation-state and the brand new age of the international continuum. This humanist fantasy, to which even cynics subscribe tearfully now and then (when watching the football world cup final, for instance) is touching and commendable but a fantasy nonetheless. It may be passably comprehensible to a group of bohemian backpackers indulging in cheerful banter (in Esperanto?) in a Jazz-café on the French-Belgian border but has very little resonance for a destitute family in a Palestinian village for whom leaving their very house is too forbiddingly risky an enterprise.

Is a continuous unidirectional migration flow sustainable forever? Of course not. In fact, several patterns are already emerging: the service sector’s drive towards overseas outsourcing will initially increase, but eventually slow down as the gap in labour costs between the west and the rest closes up. Geography will continue its path towards irrelevance as the location of businesses, once mainly dictated by their physical proximity to suppliers and customers, is now based more on rental cost considerations. Time for a prediction: Over the next hundred years, things are set to proceed along one of two distinct tracks, and it’s all depending on our actions globally as a species.

The first avenue, unfortunately appearing to be the most likely, is for the increased worldwide competitiveness over scarcer resources to lead to an ever shrinking island of the prosperous few in the midst of the ever widening circle of the forgotten many. The world would become a global-scale version of a medieval kingdom. The second option, achievable but requiring altruism of which we haven’t shown ourselves capable yet, is for the economic system to move from its currently lop-sided shape to a stable and efficient set of mechanisms covering the entirety of the globe, rather than the current inconsistent pattern of halfmeasures and selectively-adhered-to international trade laws that we have now. As to what this implies for worker migration, it simply means that we should strive for a world where workers are able to move freely around the globe according to their own preferences and skills but – and this is the part that most miss or choose to ignore – that workers are not under undue pressure (whether internal or external) to adopt a particular choice. In other words, a doctor emigrating from Ethiopia to the US is not a glorious symbol of an idealised free movement of people if her choice to emigrate was the result of an absence of choice.

The freedom and ability to stay are as important as the freedom and ability to move and to go away. Democratic reform towards freer societies (but without the ugly interventionist connotations the word has been cloaked in by the media) is hence a crucial step towards genuine freedom of movement for people in the third world. So. What are we to do? Well, for a start, the third world economic and intellectual apparatus should be given a chance to grow organically. The brain drain has to stop and the sooner the better. Of course this is not going to be painless for the Euro-American (and other developed) economies but it would be wise and it would be fair. Indeed, a decreased migration of skilled workers would lead to more vibrant home economies and eventually to a significant increase in living standards in their countries. The closing gap in average employee remunerations between the west and the rest will itself slow down the migration cycle even further and cement a stable international job markets equilibrium. Those in the developed West who are supporting actions towards a fairer world should understand very clearly that change will come at a price: principally, a reduced level of their own affluence and material wealth – a price too many in the west have decided they can’t afford to pay. But considering the long term consequences of our current global levels of production and consumption, they will have to face the realisation that it’s a price they certainly cannot afford not to.

At the Heathrow Immigration desk a friend of mine was once asked by a benign-looking immigration official what her intentions were after finishing her Politics degree in Britain. “I will possibly do a postgraduate course” she replied neutrally and then, feebly “possibly look for a job here”. The immigration officer looked up for a few very heavy milliseconds and then stoically resumed his scribbling. He has seen her before, a trillion times, with a different name, colour and nationality but with that same weary stare and that same fire at the back of the eyes. She was allowed through. The world will grow as a whole or it won’t grow at all.

Hicham Yezza is editor of Ceasefire, and is currently residing in Colnbrook Immigration Centre having been arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000. For information on the campaign to free him, see Stop the Deportation of Hicham Yezza

European Union Policies and Migratory Pressures

Ellie Keen — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:25:21 +0000

In early October, the Research Directorate of the European Commission asked me to attend and make a brief presentation at an Expert Workshop entitled “Responding to Global Challenges: The Role of Europe and of International Science and Technology Cooperation”. I was careful to explain that I had fought against the Constitutional Treaty in France and written a book highly critical of the present positions of the European Commission. They said they knew that, repeated the invitation and left the subject up to me, so I went.

It seemed to me the most useful contribution I could make would be a proposal that Europe consider the impact of its own policies when examining the phenomenon of mass migration, rather than continuing to treat it entirely as a police-security issue. On the strength of my brief presentation, I was invited to sign up as an “expert” and, along with many of the other workshop participants, to expand my proposal. I am extremely grateful for this opportunity and want to thank the people involved, particularly Virginia Vittorino and Sophie Thoyer. Sophie is preparing a publication from the various contributions but I’ve been very kindly authorised to put my contribution on my site prior to publication.

As the relevant agencies of the United Nations never fail to remind us, we live in an age of vast population movements. Millions of people are making the one-way transition from countryside to city, with the result that more than half the world now lives in an urban environment. Not infrequently, in countries like China, entire villages may be obliterated by mammoth “development” schemes and the inhabitants are relocated, usually under worse conditions. Millions more have been forcibly displaced by various types of armed violence within their own countries and are known as “internal refugees”. Finally comes the group that has already accomplished the rural-urban transition, sometimes thanks to the previous generation, and which, for reasons which remain to be fully explained, are desperate to migrate to foreign countries that they see as promised lands. These candidates for departure almost always seek to enter the wealthy OECD countries. Mexicans and Central Americans head for the United States; North Africans and Sub-Saharan Africans, as well as Eastern Europeans and Central Asians, attempt to cross the borders of the European Union.

I. Defence and illustration of the hypothesis

The brief analysis and research proposal that follow will be confined to the EU but the observations made could as well apply to North America or Australia. Within Europe, responses to increasing migratory pressures have varied from country to country but initially at least, they all treat migration as a security problem, to be dealt with primarily by the police, the coast guard, the prison or retention-centre system and, in extreme cases, the army or the navy.

The common characteristic of their various security approaches is, however, that they have not worked. This, at least, is the case if the definition of measures that “work” are those that reduce or stop the phenomenon of migration, or limit it to well-educated individuals the receiving country is happy to accept. Present approaches have clearly not stemmed, much less prevented the flows of people entering Europe in a variety of more or less clandestine circumstances. To the contrary, they are arriving in greater and greater numbers, often under appalling conditions. More and more deaths in transit are reported yet still they make the attempt. Many more “hidden” immigrants are simply people who arrived on a tourist visa and never left.

Let us ask an apparently simple question: Is out-migration from “South” to “North” on such a scale a “normal” phenomenon? Young people especially want to travel, but few, given the choice, would choose permanently to leave their countries, familiar landscapes, food, childhoods, families, friends, memories, languages….without serious motives. They would especially not risk their lives and gamble their futures in order to cross the borders or reach the shores of Europe, only to be confronted—in case of success—with the life of a marginal “sans papiers”, a paperless person: menial, ill-paid jobs, precarious living conditions, crowded sub-standard housing, no civil rights, possible imprisonment and deportation, racism, xenophobia….

Should we not therefore accept at least the hypothesis that mass migration is not “normal”; that migration candidates would, more often than not, avoid it if they had other options; that the “push factors” causing people to leave their home countries in such numbers require much closer examination than they have so far received? Among such factors should we not also accept the hypothesis that, in the case of Europe [as would be the case for other OECD countries], its own policies may have more than a little to do with out-migration?

Even a quick survey of the literature on migration shows a surprising absence of any such hypothesis. Within my time constraints and in the interests of efficiency, I did not attempt an exhaustive search; I did, however look at the work done by the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research [UNU-WIDER] which has organised various conferences and produced many discussion papers and publications on the issue of migration (1). Other sources examined include the publications of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society [COMPAS] at Oxford University (2) and the twenty years-worth of articles published by the REMI—Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales (3).

None seem even to have considered the idea that European policies might create or reinforce pressures in North African and Sub-Saharan societies to migrate. This also seems true for the impact of United States policies on its southern neighbours, judging by twenty years worth of output by the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington which describes itself as the “only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy and ….impacts on the United States [of migration]” (4).

On one hand we are confronted with the evidence of increasingly desperate people willing to undertake harrowing, dangerous, long-distance journeys—journeys often requiring the life-savings of entire families and sometimes ending in death. On the other hand, virtually all the literature stresses that migration to Europe is caused by “poverty” or “socio-economic deterioration of the situation” at home; or “the growing gap” between North and South. These are the handy, catch-all explanations.

More sophisticated analyses may point also to the lack of security in countries torn by civil strife; improved communications and information systems that give an unrealistic picture of life in the rich countries; social solidarity networks established by and with previous immigrants; the fairly recent emergence of an entire industry of commercial, usually criminal, people-trafficking enterprises devoted to recruiting and smuggling migrants across international borders and so on. Those analyses that invoke “poverty”, “deterioration” and “gaps” do not seem to consider it their business to ask why these should exist on such a vast scale.

Two possible conclusions may be drawn from these remarks. Either [1] European economic/trade policies are universally beneficial to the southern “sending” countries and therefore contribute nothing to migratory pressures or [2] the supposedly benign nature of European policies vis à vis sending countries is the unspoken, quasi-universal assumption of governments, research institutes and academics. Thus the question of possible negative impacts does not even arise. If, however, EU policies are universally beneficial, as in alternative conclusion [1], we ought to be able to find proof to back up that claim—proof that would also be “falsifiable” in Karl Popper’s sense. If, on the other hand, this is an unspoken but unexamined assumption as in alternative conclusion [2], links between European policies and out-migration pressures might be shown to exist but have never been seriously looked for. In either case, but particularly in the second, it would seem that we face a research gap of quite staggering proportions.

Obviously one does not want to fall into the trap of the “mono-causal explanation” for any phenomenon, but in the case of such a major policy preoccupation for European governments and citizens as migration, surely it is worth examining seriously the impact of EU policies on population movements. Surely experience so far shows that the security-police approach is at best partial; at worst a failure and that root causes have not necessarily been identified, much less taken into consideration and dealt with.

European decision-makers of all political persuasions recognise that migratory flows from South to North constitute a problem area. These decision-makers should welcome more precise knowledge and assessment of the impact of European policies, not merely on Southern governments, but also on the lives of communities and the vast majority of Southern populations that constitute the human pool from which migration springs.

The overarching goal of European policy towards the sending countries should be that of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm”. A courageous research programme has the duty to assess such harm, if it exists, and if so, to devise means to eliminate it and replace it with positive approaches. Nothing could improve the stature of the European Union with its Southern partners more than this. It is true that Europe, like any other political entity, has many constituencies to satisfy as well as many economic and political interests and cannot be expected to abandon them. Some of these constituencies and interests may, however, be quite limited in importance and of short-term value only. They could and should be replaced by the approach once known as “enlightened self-interest” which deserves a revival.

What might be the elements of such a research programme? Here follows a non-limitative “catalogue” approach. North-South research teams would be needed to deal with them. I wish to state at the outset that my own biases will be evident in some of the suggestions put forward for research work. I do not believe in “objectivity” in the social sciences and I have done too much work over past decades concerning the impact of certain Northern policies on Southern societies to put forward proposals for the EU with a “neutral” attitude.

This being clear, the key areas of European policies to examine concern debt and structural adjustment, trade [particularly with regard to food and agricultural goods] as well as tariff structures; subsidies, commodity prices; fisheries, the impact of European transnational corporations; Economic Partnership Agreements [EPAs].

On the side of the migrant-sending country governments, one should also consider incentives not to cooperate with the EU and even to encourage migration either overtly or tacitly. Southern governments know very well that remittances sent home by migrants constitute a substantial component of their revenues and that they relieve the poverty of a great many of their citizens and villages. For several countries, emigrants already represent their most valuable export. Governments know too that the “export of people” mitigates their own severe unemployment problems. For these governments, it can only be an advantage to have in particular fewer discontented, unoccupied young men around to cause trouble. These governments are only too happy for these people to be outside, not at home.

In addition to these present North-South aspects, particularly those linking the EU and North/Sub-Saharan Africa, one should also study and plan for the longer term impacts of climate change. We already know that drought-prone areas are set to become even drier and water-stressed populations will necessarily increase. In the same way, already humid areas are likely to experience more rainfall and floods. The rise of coastal waters will also create untold numbers of climate refugees seeking relief at any cost and severe weather events are slated to increase, with all their attendant dislocations.

II. European policies with possible or likely immigration-inducing impacts

1. Debt

Despite modest reductions, outflows from South to North remain a heavy burden on Southern countries and hamper their development. Research must quantify this burden and assess the current value—including monetary and non-monetary value—of reimbursement to individual EU countries and to the EU as a whole. What is the level of funds “sterilised” by debt repayments and therefore unavailable for development? What are the real impacts of debt-induced structural adjustment packages, particularly the privatisation of public services and export-orientation, particularly of agriculture? The debt “crisis” is in fact a chronic illness and ideally the EU should, with the help of research, devise a quick, clean, democratic, non-bureaucratic, corruption-free, “once-for-all” plan that can put an end to a problem that has festered for easily a quarter century.

Debt was accumulated for a variety of reasons; the borrowed money came from both public and private sources but in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, they were overwhelmingly public. Loans to oppressive regimes have been estimated at about $500 billion worldwide [including $22 billion to apartheid South Africa]. One would need to examine the “odious debt” aspects [jurisprudence since the 1920s distinguishes legitimate from “odious” debt, the latter going to dictators either with no benefit to the population or serving to oppress that population further]; but the recommendation here would be for cancellation of all types of debt (5).

Loans on the books to Low Income Countries [LICs], amounted in 2004-2005 to about $523 billion worldwide. Africa’s external debt, including that of North Africa, had by 2004 reached $300 billion with $227 billion for Sub-Saharan Africa alone. These sums are quite small by international standards but insuperable for Africa: in 2004, Sub-Saharan Africa was paying back $28.000 a minute [$15 billion a year] in debt service, according to World Bank-OECD figures. All the LICs taken together were then paying back $100 million a day/ nearly $70.000 a minute.

As of July 2005 at the time of the Gleneagles G-8 Summit, 28 countries had been assured of $56 billion in debt relief and 18 very poor countries, including 14 in Africa, were promised total cancellation. In such severely indebted countries, the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs] will take 100 years to achieve on current trend lines. Civil society campaigns like that of Jubilee 2000 have led to pressure on the creditor governments, yet relief promised has always been very slow to translate into reality because the target countries are obliged to undertake further periods of structural adjustment before cancellations take effect. At least 65 countries have been estimated to need complete debt cancellation in order to have even a chance of meeting the MDG targets. This would cost the creditors about $80 billion/year. G-8 and other meetings tend to make spectacular announcements which turn out on closer examination to be misleading or remain unimplemented (6).

Intimately linked to the debt crisis is the enormous burden that capital flight from Africa has imposed on this poorest continent. Recent work by Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce of the University of Massachusetts reaches the conclusion that Africa’s wealthy have, during the period from 1970 to 2004, exported a total of $420 billion, nearly double the total debt burden of Sub-Saharan Africa in 2004, which in 2004 was $227 billion. Most of this money was not acquired legally. With the interest this capital could have accumulated over the 35 year period, the authors estimate the total loss to Africa at $607 billion. How complicit were European banks—and how lax might European governments have been—in allowing or encouraging this chronic drain? (7)

2. Structural adjustment

Beyond assessing the amounts presently owed, research should summarise the vast literature on the impact of structural adjustment policies accompanying debt, put in place by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, working in close cooperation with the United States Treasury. The elements of structural adjustment [also known as “Washington Consensus”] policies have been frequently and exhaustively studied; dozens if not hundreds of case studies exist on the impacts of high interest rates, export orientation and market liberalisation, privatisation; ‘cost-recovery’ [fee-paying] including fees for schools and health care—particularly detrimental to women and girls—and so on. These policies have caused increased hunger and deprivation, smaller numbers of children in school, chronic unemployment and hardship; millions have had to fall back on the informal sector (8). Although local populations benefitted little or not at all from the borrowed money, most of which went to the middle and upper consuming classes, “white elephant” projects, arms purchases or private accounts abroad; these populations have been obliged to pay it back with their sacrifices.

We already know that debt cancellation is affordable. Research would need to examine the amounts owed to specific EU countries and the total amount over which Europe could have an influence [including sums still owed to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund]. The sources for such work exist: the World Bank, the OECD and the London Club and the Paris Club are the main ones—although this researcher has found the Paris Club to be singularly uncooperative, indeed contemptuous of external requests for information. A mandate from the EU would undoubtedly be required to gain access to its data.

As for the Bank and the Fund, the IMF could continue to sell its gold without upsetting markets—indeed it would help to calm the sky-rocketing prices for the precious metal. As for the Bank, even if it were to write off all the debt owed to it by all the LDCs, it would simply return to its capital levels of 1997, when it was flourishing. The Bank has 400 percent more capital than it needs to keep the triple AAA rating for its bonds [all three of the best-known rating agencies rated its bonds AAA in 1997]. In addition, for the past 15 years, the Bank has made over a billion dollars a year in profits. European voting shares in the Fund/Bank amount to 16 percent for Germany, France and Britain alone, plus another 14 percent if one counts the groups presided by Belgium, Netherland and Italy. Surely 30 percent of the voting stock gives the EU enough influence in these International Financial Institutions to push for complete cancellation for North/Southern African debtors, based on solid research of the improvements that could be expected in these countries once freed from debt bondage.

Many argue that debt cancellation would simply lead to renewed indebtedness. One can, however, show—although research on these aspects is still thin—that when debt cancellation does occur, the money is on the whole well-used, for schools, clinics, immunisation, access to water…. [data exist from Tanzania, Uganda, Benin, Mozambique….]. The EU, if it were to require that African governments associate their own people in the choice of priorities for spending the money freed up by cancellation, could insure that savings on debt repayments were used wisely everywhere.

Indeed, in exchange for complete cancellation, the creditor countries of Europe should have the right to demand that the recipient governments be accountable to their own people for spending the savings. Some variant of the participatory budgeting process used in many Brazilian cities could be used; one could also call for the election of a council composed of people elected on both a geographical and a sectoral basis [i.e. farmers, workers, entrepreneurs, women, civil servants…] to sit alongside the government and determine the spending priorities.

Some argue that it is not possible to impose “conditionality” on these sovereign governments, but this argument is spurious given that IMF-Bank conditionality has been imposed for decades. Democratic conditionality could simultaneously contribute to solving many governance issues in recipient countries. Where such formulas have been tried [Brazil, Tanzania…] waste and mismanagement of funds is reduced to virtually zero. A small UN Agency—or a European agency—could dispense the sums concerned to the central bank of each debtor country; the government assisted by the Council of its own citizens would determine how to spend it. If the UN solution is chosen, the one that dispenses the international “airline ticket tax” proposed by the then president of France Jacques Chirac and accepted so far by about 15 countries could do such a job; this agency is called UNITAID.

Debt cancellation ought normally to create huge numbers of jobs in the LDCs as well as allowing for much higher spending on health, education and other necessities. It would contribute to job creation in Europe as well, as former debtor countries began to be able to spend on capital goods, rather than on economically sterile interest payments.

3. Commodity prices and trade

One of the most perverse impacts of debt is the export syndrome. All the indebted countries must earn hard currency to pay the interest owed and must therefore export. Particularly in Africa, indebted countries tend to export the same narrow range of primary products with the result that they produce more than markets can absorb and thus push down prices for everyone. Commodity prices have been declining since the 1970s. Lower prices paradoxically encourage overproduction because countries strive to keep their income stable by exporting even more. Subsidies of northern countries, i.e. US subsidies to its cotton producers make matters worse and appeals to the World Trade Organisation do little good.
The share of commodities [oil excluded] in world trade has declined from one-third to one-quarter since the mid-1990s. Because of mass privatisation under structural adjustment policies, governments no longer have the tools to manage carryover stocks or control quantities produced and traded. According to UNCTAD, fifty low income countries are dependent on 2-3 commodities; 39 are dependent on just one. The terms of trade are set massively against raw material producers, with the result that they must export one-third more today than in 1975-85 to buy the same quantity of manufactured goods.
Although China’s purchases have recently improved the prices of primary products somewhat, particularly for metals [which are never produced by smallholders but by large, usually foreign mining enterprises] the declines for cash crops have been consistent, e.g. an average 5.1 percent/ year for coffee; 6.9 percent for cocoa; 3.4 percent for cotton, since 1977. A Ugandan coffee farmer receives 14 cents a kilo for beans; the coffee in a UK supermarket eventually costs the consumer $26.40/kilo. [Figures from 2005, to be updated]. European tariffs are low to non-existent for raw materials but high when goods are processed in the producer countries into more elaborate goods. Poor countries cannot compete in processing their own commodities because they face these high barriers. The European “Everything but Arms” policy has, however, been a positive step which could inspire further ones.

4. European trade policies and exports to Africa

Subsidies in the North can contribute to ruining small farmers; see for example the impact of the above-mentioned US cotton subsidies on African producers. EU agricultural production is subsidised to the extent or about a billion euros a day: what proportion of those subsidies relate to products exported to African markets at prices below true costs of production? We need to know much more about the impact of European trade on small farmers and nascent industries in Africa, particularly the dumping of subsidised products. Some studies, particularly on dairy products, tomatoes and chicken, indicate that exports from Europe at unbeatably low prices have decimated local producers and processing industries [e.g. tomato paste production in Ghana]. There is probably more literature concerning NAFTA’s impact on Mexican farmers than on EU impact on their African counterparts. [NAFTA has ruined at least 350.000 poor Mexican farmers in the poorest States as cheap, industrially produced US corn has flooded Mexican markets].

European Union officials will be aware of persistent Northern NGO criticism of the EU’s present trade policies, whether in the WTO or in the various bilateral/multilateral agreements and EPAs [Economic Partnership Agreements] all of which contain detailed investment, raw-material access and government procurement provisions. The overwhelming bias towards the interests of European transnational corporations and the latter’s influence over EU trade policy seems in little doubt. EPAs have been challenged by a few African countries [Senegal, South Africa] but most are acquiescing.

The very least the Commission could do would be to monitor the actual behaviour and impact of European transnational corporations, particularly raw-material extractors, in the migrant-sending countries. On the occasion of the EU-Latin American Summit held in Vienna in May 2006, the Enlazando Alternativo [alternative summit] commissioned studies by Latin American NGOs and researchers on the impact of European TNCs in Central and Latin America. Their eye-witness reports yielded a wealth of information and, it must be said, highly negative results for local populations, whether the companies concerned were engaged in mining, utilities, agricultural, paper or financial industries.] (9)

5. Fisheries

The fish catch along the western coast of Africa has plummeted and small fisherman can no longer make a living. Many say that the depletion of stocks is due to overfishing by European industrial trawlers. Small fishermen are said to be selling their boats to the people-smuggling rings that use them to try to take migrants to the Canaries. The situation may be similar for countries bordering the Mediterranean. Aside from anecdotes, we know very little about this phenomenon.

Addendum: policies for which the EU is not directly responsible but which further impoverish migrant-sending countries.

Free trade: Initially, the World Bank announced that developing countries would see massive benefits [over $300 billion/year] from genuinely free trade. Under pressure from economists elsewhere, the Bank was obliged in successive stages to scale back its estimates to a mere $16 billion, half of which was expected to go to Brazil and Argentina. The most that the poor countries are likely to see from more free trade is a 1 percent increase in GDP over the next 10 years. (10)

The WTO has claimed that the stalled “Doha Development Round” would provide real gains for the South. However, the North, including the EU, has so far proposed granting access for only 97 percent of each southern country’s goods. This may sound generous, but due to the reliance of so many Southern countries on a very limited number of products, the North can easily place what each country can produce economically in the category of the 3 percent remaining. [NB: All the EPAs put forward by Europe are “WTO Plus”].
WTO banana decision: It may already be soon enough to assess the impact on local producers of the WTO ruling on the EU-ACP banana dispute. The preferential regime by which Europe guaranteed to purchase a set quantity of bananas from ACP countries was ruled WTO-illegal: Europe does not have the right to give any privileges to ACP countries and must accept, for example, the bananas produced on plantations by US transnational corporations like Chiquita Brands, in Ecuador or Central America. What has been the effect of this decision on poor ACP farmers? Has it increased their tendency to attempt migration?
Multi-Fibre agreement: The end of the Multi-Fibre agreement gave China a huge advantage in textiles. Chinese exports have had a large impact in Europe itself, but in the South, the effect has been devastating. Textile industries in places like Bangladesh, Cambodia or Central America are unlikely to recover. In Morocco, the industry has already shed hundreds of thousands of jobs. These unemployed workers are going back to kif [drug] production or attempting to emigrate. Can the EU do anything to mitigate these impacts? Clearly in this case, they cannot be ascribed to Europe’s own policies, but should they influence the EU’s attitude within the WTO or in other international-system and/or trade regimes?
Financial crises: Even before the present market turbulence and incipient recession stemming from—but not confined to—the subprime crisis, financial meltdowns have taken a heavy toll. The International Labour Organisation has estimated that over 90 “serious financial crises” occurred between the beginning of the 1990s and 2002, with great loss of economic security, jobs, livelihoods and savings. The ILO definition of “serious” is that the value of the currency dropped by at least 25 percent in a single month and that this drop was at least 10 percent greater than the fall of the previous month. In other words, these are crises in which the value of peoples’ bank accounts, insurance, social security, pensions, and so on fell by at least 35 percent within the space of two months. COUNTRIES OF THE AFRICAN CONTINENT IN THIS CATEGORY WERE [to be supplied from the ILO report called Economic Security for a Better World , 2004,to which I do not have access at the moment].
Climate change: Surely the impact of rapid climate change is no longer in doubt and needs no more research per se. The IPCC has established that dry/humid areas will become more drought/flood prone, that extremes of temperatures and secondary impacts will strike the vulnerable in the South with greater force than in the temperate zones of the North. We have already witnessed catastrophic floods in Sub-Saharan Africa and know that stresses of all kinds will multiply. Here is a perfect opportunity for European S&T to propose clean and abundant energy systems [particularly solar] for the South, in an all-out development effort to change not just the South but also Europe’s own energy scenario. For the moment, palliative and relief programmes will be more necessary than ever.

Conclusion

During and after the decolonisation process, formerly colonised and/or dependent countries produced many brilliant and charismatic leaders [present at Bandung and beyond….]. These countries formed political groups like the Non-aligned Movement or the G-77 [which later numbered well over 100 countries]. From the 1970s in particular, they called for a New International Economic Order; various UN documents like the 1981 “Brandt Report” seconded many of their demands. It looked for a time as if there might finally be a fairer distribution of wealth in the world and greater opportunity for emerging nations. The North was obliged at least to pay lip-service to the demands emerging from a newly confident South.

In 1974 at the FAO Rome World Food Conference, Henry Kissinger [fresh from engineering the fascist coup in Chile] intoned that “Within a decade, no child will go to bed hungry, no family will fear for its next day’s bread…” Other conferences followed and the South thought, with some justification, that it was making progress. Gradually, however, the North, led by the United States, brought the situation back under northern control. Other dictatorships besides that of Pinochet were introduced and supported by the North and former colonisers often underpinned undemocratic and repressive regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Jamaica in 1981, the newly elected Ronald Reagan put a stop to the process of New Economic Order and greater autonomy once and for all.

The European Union as a comparatively new political entity has the opportunity to break with this past and show that it can not only cooperate but act as an advocate for permanent, equal partnerships in the South. Every ruined farmer, every unemployed youth, every fisherman without a livelihood is a candidate for migration. Europe can stop cutting off avenues to prosperity and development with its policies and make migration less necessary.

Naturally it would have to disappoint some more or less powerful European lobbies in the short term, but the benefits for Europeans as well as for the people of the South would be enormous. A fortress-Europe policy will not work and, under present circumstances at least, an “open borders” policy is politically unacceptable. The only other options are to reinforce the unsuccessful police-security-expulsion response or to study present European practices and decide to eliminate abuses—using research results to buttress the case. Otherwise, no one—particularly no European official—should profess surprise as they witness the steady flow of incoming migrants.

Notes

(1) UNU-WIDER, “Seminar on International Migration and Development: Patterns, Problems and Policy, United Nations, New York, 12 September 2006; or UNU-Wider seminar in 2001 on “International Migration and Poverty; also Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “What Fundamentals Drive World Migration?”, UNU-WIDER Discussion Paper no.2003/23. The ongoing WIDER project on Refugees, International Migration and Poverty is co-directed by George Borjas of Harvard and Jeff Crisp of the UNHCR.

(2) www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications. There are ten subheadings of various types of publications.

(3) Revuee Européenne des Migrations internationales – Keyword search.

(4) www.cis.org Founded in 1985, the Center defines itself as non-partisan and non-profit; “pro-immigrant, low immigration”; that is, it aims for fewer immigrants and a better welcome for those who do come. The “Right Wing Watch” of People for the American Way considers the CIS as a rightist organisation. It is thus all the more surprising that CIS has shown no apparent interest in US policy contributions to “push factors”.

(5) Patricia Adams, Odious Debts, Probe International, Earthscan, Toronto, 1991

(6) Susan George, A Fate Worse than Debt, Penguin, London 1987; Susan George, The Debt Boomerang, Pluto Press, London, 1992; Patricia Adams, Odious Debt, PUBLISHER DATE; more recent figures regularly published by the Comité pour l’Annulation de la Dette du Tiers-Monde-CADTM, www.cadtm.org

(7) Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce, Tax Justice Focus, the quarterly journal of the Tax Justice Network, First quarter 2008, Volume 4 no.1,

(8) In a memorable presentation, A.T. Moussa Tchangiri,
director of the magazine Alternative in Niger, at the World Social Forum in Bamako [January 2006] described in fine detail how forced privatization policies [of transport, cereal stock-holding, veterinary services, etc.] had directly contributed to widespread famine in that country.

(9) http://peoplesdialogue.org/en/node/39

(10) Kevin Gallagher of Tufts University, who also attended the EU meeting that gave rise to the present series of papers, including mine, has written decisively on this issue.