Survey the world’s campaigns
to alleviate poverty and improve people’s lives, and a common thread emerges:
People in wealthy countries feel it’s important that people in poor countries
stay at home. Development organizations in Africa, in particular, receive
billions of dollars each year to oversee (often well-meaning and occasionally
successful) programs designed to make “life at home” better for
Africans—whether through running farms in Rwanda, educating teens in Tanzania,
or supporting whole Millennium
Villages (at a cost of $12,000 per
household).
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An immigrant prays
after landing on the shores of Spain's
Canary Islands in a fishing boat.
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One
could go further and argue that if Africans in one particular state or region
migrate or want to migrate, then development in that area hasn’t worked. In his
2007 paper, “Keeping Them
in Their Place: the ambivalent relationship between development and migration
in Africa,” the International Migration Institute’s Oliver Bakewell
wrote that “from its earliest roots, development practice has commonly seen a
reduction in migration as either an (implicit or explicit) aim of intervention
or an indicator of a programme’s success.” Migration, then, is considered
inversely proportional to success in African development.
But
a fascinating new paper from the World Bank turns this logic on its head. “Does
Migration Foster Exports?” has a title with an unnecessary question
mark. According to the authors, migration does indeed foster exports in Africa,
and in numbers large enough that they should catch the attention of development
and policy leaders worldwide. Their findings “suggest that one additional
migrant creates about 2,100 dollars a year in additional exports for his
country of origin.”
Using that estimation, a
half-million more African migrants dispersing throughout the world—a number
equivalent to less than 1/100th of a percent of the world’s population—would
create more than a billion dollars in additional exports for Africa, per year.
The $2,100 is in addition to the dramatically increased salaries African
migrants can expect from moving to countries with stronger economies. It’s also
in addition to the remittances they send home. And it takes into account that
half of all African migrants don’t even leave the continent. With the number of
African migrants in the world having doubled since 1980 to more than 30
million, and given Africa’s expected population
boom in the coming decades, the impact Africans have from a distance
on their home-country economies is only set to grow.
“Migrant
populations play a significant role in opening markets for African exports by
enforcing rules and contracts, and by making products better known in foreign
markets,” Raju Jan Singh, the paper’s lead author, tells me. African countries
tend to have weak legal institutions and therefore loose enforcement of the
rule of law, and African migrants living abroad play an especially important
role in addressing these challenges. The migrants create an “enforcement
channel,” the authors write—settling disputes between traders and imposing
informal sanctions through the diaspora community—and that channel grows “in
proportion to the weakness of institutions in exporting countries.”
If,
for instance, a shop owner in the United Kingdom wants to purchase and resell
Ghanaian fabrics, a member of the Ghanaian diaspora living in London can help
ensure—if not by law then by the threat of shame in her native community—that
the dealer doesn’t get ripped off by sellers from an unfamiliar culture a
continent away. In the case of a country with weaker institutions, such as Liberia or
Cameroon, migrants abroad play an even bigger role in these kinds of
transactions.
African
migrants also facilitate information-sharing. They move to places where locals
may be wary of buying products made in their native countries, and make these
products seem less risky to import. Ethiopian food, for example, has become
popular in certain U.S. cities, and you’ll even find some Americans, especially
gluten-free folks, making their own injera, a spongy flatbread made from a
grain called teff that is native to the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea. That
simply wouldn’t have happened without a thriving Ethiopian diaspora living
abroad and sharing their delicious foods with their new neighbors.
“The
implication is that migration is positive for the home country,” says Singh,
“not only through remittances, but also by opening the export markets, which
sort of dampens the ‘brain drain’ story.”
Indeed,
the loss of human capital is often cited as an argument against the concept of
migration as a form of development. When educated people move away from poor
countries in large numbers, the thinking goes, those countries struggle without
their best and brightest. But the Center for Global Development’s Michael
Clemens has shown
that rather than creating a void, African health professionals leaving home may
actually encourage more people to attempt to duplicate their success by
becoming health professionals themselves. And Columbia’s Jagdish Bhagwati put it well
when he noted that the “‘brain’ is not a static concept. Trapped in Kinshasa,
under appalling conditions, the brain will drain away in less time than it
takes to get to New York.”
Back
in 2007, Bakewell argued that international development has been shaped by one
of the nastier elements of colonialism, which depended heavily on controlling
the movement of locals—from the theft of humans for slavery to forced labor on
African plantations to apartheid-era Bantustans—for the benefit of European
migrants to
Africa.
In
a study
for the Overseas Development Institute, Priya Deshingkar and Sven Grimm made a
similar argument. “Implicit in many agricultural or rural development policies
in Africa is the aim of controlling population movements,” they wrote.
“Policymakers have tended to perceive migration largely as a problem, posing a
threat to social and economic stability, and have therefore tried to control
it, rather than viewing it as an important livelihood option for the poor.”
When
development aims to improve “home,” it is presumed that a better life at home
is always the goal for the beneficiaries. We’re so clear about wanting to
develop countries that we call the places we’re helping “developing countries.”
The goal is to develop a place where people happen to live, rather than to
develop people, wherever they live.
The
trouble with development work that encourages migrants to stay home, or
return home, wrote Bakewell, “is that it assumes that all the actors involved
have a common view of the ‘good’ ends to which the process leads them. It
operates on the assumption that the normal and desirable state for human beings
is to be sedentary.” If improving only “home” is the goal, then, “It is
impossible simply to bring migration into development (such as ‘inserting
migration into the Millennium
Development Goals’) without raising fundamental questions about the
nature of development and how it is put into practice. These include asking
about the conception of the good life in mainstream development goals; the
appropriateness of models of development based on the nation state; and, the
inherent paternalism of mainstream development practice.” For the beneficiaries
of development initiatives, Bakewell added, these “activities may be trying to
maintain a way of life which they would love the chance to abandon.”
These
days, however, a number of economists are making the
case for looser borders as a means of reducing poverty—arguing that
development is about people, not places. And the World Bank’s new study appears
to support this assertion. The report’s authors found that the farther migrants
move, and the more ethnically different their new home from their old home
(both are homes, by the way), the more exports they help create for their
country of origin.
“The
paper would thus suggest that through migration, trade barriers hampering
African trade could be further reduced,” write the authors. “[N]amely that it
would help enforce contract, reduce information costs, and lower cultural
barriers.” Let more Africans migrate, in other words, and Africa will benefit
from substantially increased exports. Some might call that developing
countries.
“Very
few embassies have a good idea of who the diaspora is or where they are. Very
few have continuous contact with them,” says Singh. “So [our paper is] really a
call for African governments to be proactive, and to tap this untapped source
of opportunity.” Destination countries for African immigrants are unlikely to
heed a call for increased migration any time soon, not when authorities are
returning or detaining desperate migrants landing by boat on European shores,
calling African migrants “infiltrators,”
and instituting
new quotas for immigrants. It may thus fall to African governments
to allow and even encourage more of their citizens to leave home and spread
word of their countries’ products to the larger world.
In
2003, the University of Birmingham’s Douglas Rimmer wrote,
“An exacting test of how serious we are about reducing inequality in the world
is whether we are prepared to allow migration into the advanced economies of
people from Africa and other poor areas. By this test, few of the advocates of
international aid are really serious.” Perhaps we’ll perform better on that
test now that we know just how valuable Africans are to Africa—whether from
their old homes or their new ones.
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