Migrations in question

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This sentence has little meaning if you don’t have a reference point. Do you count absolute numbers? Or percentages? How are we counting migrants? Does someone stand at the border keeping track?

While we can find a common definition of migrants (see previous module), there are various ways how we can count migrants. Here we provide some examples:

• Population surveys
• Visas and residence permits
• Registrations (immigration and emigration)
• Data collection at borders (e.g. Eurodac)
• Big data (e.g. social networks)

There are advantages and disadvantages to all of them, with some being more precise tan others while some also provide information for reasons for and consequences of migration and others just providing numbers.

The earliest year for reliable sources for migration numbers used today as a reference point is 1970. Since then migration has been counted and numbered more frequently. When talking about migration numbers, we tend to focus on absolute numbers – 281 million international migrants in 2020 – and we see that the number has increased since 1970. Yet, when we focus on the evolution of the proportion of migrants compared to the world population (which has also increased), the figures are pretty stable. Migrants represent 3.5% of today’s world population. This means that 96.5% of the population live in the country in which they were born in.

Therefore, the answer to this question depends solely on whether we count absolute numbers, percentages, and how we count migrants specifically.

The simple answer is: In 2020, we counted 281 million migrants (3.5% of the world population), and 48.1% of them were women.

For a long time, until the mid 90s, it was especially men who emigrated because it was mainly due to labour needs (due to needs arising from post-war reconstruction, etc.). From the 1990s onwards, the immigrant population become more feminised, initially as a result of family reunification.

The proportion of women migrants has hardly changed over the last decades. However, more women migrate independenlty nowadays to work, study, or as the head of a household.

In our minds, we tend to associate migration with men. This is largely due to the portrayal by the media: Very often, the migratory routes that receive the most media coverage are the routes predominantly taken by men. 

In European countries, for example, the central Mediterranean route is highly represented in the media, where in recent years most migrants.

This invisibilisation of women in regards to migration is also used, by those opposed to welcoming immigrants, to play on fears and limit empathy. Thus, trying to increase fear of this fantasised image of a horde of men launching an assault on Europe…

When you classify types of migration as North to North (that is rich country to rich country), South to North, North to South and South to South, you can see that the highest proportion of migration flows is the one from South to South. South to North only represents 35% of the migration flows even though this type flow is the one that is most mediatised and debated.

Regarding asylum, we can see that most refugees flee to a neighbouring country and only one European country (Germany) is in the first 5 countries welcoming most refugees. It is quite logical that most migrants will arrive, especially in the case of asylum, to a neighbouring country where they will have historical and cultural links.

In European debates usually, the focus is on African migration flows to Europe. It is important to have in mind that 80% of African migrations occur inside the African continent. All in all Africans don’t emigrate much. They represent 16% of the world population but only 14% of World migrants (40 million people). The proportion of African emigrants regarding the population of their continent has been generally constant for the past 30 years (around 3%) . If we take a closer look on Africans in Europe, they only represent 2% of the European population . In the same way, it is also important to remember that many migration flows are occurring from one European country to another and these flows represent 35,2% of migration flows in Europe.

Poverty is not the principal cause of migration.

• Studies, training can represent the wish to pursue studies, to leave for a professional or qualifying training.
• Economic and social net can represent the wish for better socioeconomic perspectives (decent employment, increase of standards of living), care and support for the needs of the family who stayed in the country.
• Family life can be marriage or family reunification.
• Politic / insecurity / dictatorship can be the fact to flee a situation of political insecurity, wars or conflicts (non-respect of rights, physical threats, persecutions against LGBTQI+), to be an asylum seeker / refugees.
• Environment: to move away from a disaster or hazards linked to the geographical nature of the territory or the climate change.
• Cultural / emancipation / identity: cultural emancipation, identity construction, curiosity, wish of otherness, to meet new people and to make new discoveries.

Migration is also expensive. It is actually mostly cosmopolitan elites who have the privilege to migrate: students, ‘intellectuals’, high-skilled workers. If they are less visible, it is mostly because they are mostly called ‘expatriate’ and not ‘migrants’. In the case of forced migration, it is neither the poorest who migrate. Migrating is expensive. In the case of wars, natural disasters or economical crises, it is mostly middle classes who have the means to migrate and to ask asylum in another country. The poorest don’t have this possibility who can’t allow themselves to use migration as an adaptation strategy. People also have the image of poor migrants because it is also the border restrictions that put migrants in a situation of vulnerability and therefore of poverty. Many refugees who had pretty good socio-economic conditions in their countries end up in the streets or with very low material conditions once they are in their asylum countries or in their trajectories.

Careful with the words used to talk about migration. First of all, pay attention to the vocabulary used to talk about migration, and in particular the lexical field around ‘plumbing’: ‘blockage’, ‘flow’, ‘to overflow’… This lexical process dehumanises and gives a false impression of a zombie attack. It also helps to justify the false concept of the ‘great replacement’. Above all, we forget that most migration is legal and corresponds to fundamental principles (such as the right to live as a family) or international treaties (such as the right to asylum, the free movement of Europeans or the rights of the child).

Closing borders is at best an illusion, at worst an electioneering lie designed to make people believe that all social and economic ills come from foreigners and that, therefore, preventing all foreigners from entering the country will magically solve the economic crisis and mass unemployment. Moreover, there are examples to show that closure does not prevent arrivals, and that openness does not, on the contrary, lead to mass arrivals. Despite the construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border, Mexican migrants cross the wall anyway, at their peril, and end up settling with their families in the United States.

By contrast, when the EU was extended to the countries of Eastern Europe (thus opening up the border between Eastern and Western Europe), we expected a huge migration of Eastern Europeans to the West. In the end, this migration was very modest and much lower than expected.

Similarly, it can be argued that closing borders encourages people to stay in the country they have managed to reach, whereas opening them up would encourage greater fluidity thanks to the back-and-forth flows with the countries of origin. People come to work, to have a romantic relationship, to discover the world, to study, or to flee their country… but when the situation in their country improves, they are likely to return to their country of origin.

Assumption: migration is a factor in the economic, social and cultural weakening of host countries.

This logic is based on the motivations attributed to migrants: they would leave their country to benefit from generous social benefit systems (unemployment, retirement, health insurance, etc.), they would take jobs that don’t necessarily require qualifications, and therefore put downward pressure on wages. As a result, it would be the poorest people (the misery of the world) who would migrate. But to migrate, you need resources, economic, social and cultural capital… All this suggests that our solidarity systems could disappear under the weight of immigration, and justifies closing borders in favour of selective immigration.

Many economists have studied this issue. While in the short term, immigration has little impact on the economy, it does have positive effects in the medium and long term: lower unemployment, higher wages, etc. In addition, by creating new housing needs and by consuming, immigrants will increase demand and therefore the labour offer. The economy is not a fixed-size cake to be shared out, where what some take is at the expense of others (Jean Tirole, Nobel Prize in Economics 2014). On the contrary, the arrival of new immigrants contributes precisely to increasing the size of the cake. Migrants expand the size of the economy, bringing in more consumers, producers, contributors, taxpayers… It is true that they are generally less well paid than others, but they are concentrated in the working ages, so the balance is positive or neutral (they have not cost the national education system, for example, because they went to school elsewhere).

While like all nationals they are entitled to public assistance and services (provided they are legally resident in most cases), it should be remembered that they contribute to the State budget by paying taxes and social security contributions in the same way as nationals. Moreover, as surprising and unfair as it may seem, undocumented migrants also pay most of these contributions, even though they are forced to live and work illegally, and are denied access to many rights, especially social ones.

A first figure to have in mind is the one of the money transfers realised by migrants. They are continuously progressing. According to the World Bank, in 1970, they represented 6 billion dollars and today they represent 860 billion dollars.

These funds are decisive in the improvement of life conditions of migrant families and more generally for the local development. They represent:

• Resources for households
• Offsetting imbalances in the balance of trade (import/export ratio)
• Development of projects in regions of origin
• Participation in the local economy
• Privileged method of cooperation with countries of origin, particularly for less qualified people

These fund transfers are essential as they are complementary to the official development assistance (ODA), which uses the development aid as a tool of foreign policy (e.g. used to sign lucrative contracts for companies in industrialised countries). 85% of development aid is given directly to governments, 14% to organisations in donor countries and only 0.8% to organisations, associations and local authorities, which are the real players in development.

Another thing to take into account is the professional and personal experience that has been acquired at the international level when there is a return migration. This makes migrants powerful stakeholders of the economic development of their region of origin.

Migrants also have a strong propensity to create their own businesses thanks to the savings they accumulated abroad.

In the long-term, emigration can have positive spin-offs as second generations also have a role to play. ‘Today, some young people of immigrant origin (2nd generation) are contributing to the development of their parents’ country of origin. Some of these young people would probably never have gone to school if their parents hadn’t migrated’ – Mamadou Ba, CADERKAF deputy secretary for external relations, international cooperation, immigration and co-dvpt.