[rad-green] Seeds of Europe’s ‘migrant crisis’ are in Europe itself

*https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/10/opinion/seeds-of-europes-migrant-crisis-are-in-europe-itself/
<https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/10/opinion/seeds-of-europes-migrant-crisis-are-in-europe-itself/>*

*Asia Times          October 24, 2019*



*Seeds of Europe’s ‘migrant crisis’ are in Europe itselfBy VIJAY PRASHAD*

[image: image.png]


If you ask African migrants in Europe who came across the Mediterranean Sea
in a boat if they would make the journey again, most of them would say
“yes.” Many of them had been in vans and trucks that took them across the
dangerous Sahara Desert, and many of them had been on board vessels that
struggled to get across the choppy waters. They might have seen their
fellow migrants die of thirst or of drowning, but none of that halts their
conviction that they’d cross the sands and the seas again.

Harsh treatment by European border guards and an overwhelming experience of
racism inside European society do not bring regret or suggest that they
would not do it again.

“It was all to earn money,” said
<https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/news-centre/news/2019/despite-dangers--majority-of-irregular-migrants-from-africa-to-e.html>
Drissa,
from Mali. “Thinking of my mom and my dad. My big sister. My little sister.
To help them. That was my pressure. That’s why Europe.”
Myths about African migrants

A UN Development Program (UNDP) report
<https://www.undp.org/content/dam/rba/docs/Reports/UNDP-Scaling-Fences-EN-2019.pdf>
released
on October 17 shows that 97% of the nearly 2,000 African migrants in Europe
interviewed would take the same risks again to come to Europe knowing what
they know now about the dangers of the journey or what life in Europe is
like. What is powerful about this UN report is that it dispels many of the
myths about African migration.

There is a terrible view that Africans are somehow “invading” Europe, or
even worse, “swarming” into Europe. Anti-immigration rhetoric speaks of
building fences and creating a Fortress Europe. It is as if there is a war,
and Europeans must arm themselves against invaders.

A year ago, the UN’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide, Adama
Dieng, warned
<https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/2018-10-16.Keynote%20to%20EU%20High-Level%20Meeting%20Vienna.cleared.pdf>
that
European politicians were fanning the flames with hateful rhetoric that “is
legitimizing hatred, racism and violence. While extremists spread
inflammatory language in mainstream political discourse under the guise of
‘populism,’ hate crimes and hate speech continue to rise. Hate crimes
constitute one of the clearest early-warning signs for atrocity crimes.”

At the UN in Geneva this May, Dieng, a Senegalese lawyer, said
<https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/05/1037651>: “Big massacres start always
with small actions and language.”

The UN report shows that the hatefulness around the African migrants is
misplaced. The reasons for major flows of migration to Europe actually come
from within Europe itself. Those leaving war zones – Syria and Afghanistan
in Asia, but also Eritrea and Libya in Africa – come in expected numbers
<https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/EDN-20190620-1> as
they flee bombs that are often produced inside Europe. These numbers are
much higher than for those Africans who come to Europe for work.

In fact, more than 80%
<https://www.undp.org/content/dam/rba/docs/Reports/UNDP-Scaling-Fences-EN-2019.pdf>
of
African migrants stay on the African continent. The proportion of African
emigration out of the continent compared with Africa’s population “is one
of the lowest in the world,” says the United Nations. Most of the migrants
who go to Europe, according to European data
<https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/EDN-20190620-1>,
come by regular channels – with a visit to an embassy, an application for a
visa, the granting of the visa, and then a flight into the country;
irregular arrivals, many by boat, are far fewer than those via a valid
visa. It is racism that fails to acknowledge this reality.
Remittances

If you dig into the numbers
<https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/news-centre/news/2019/despite-dangers--majority-of-irregular-migrants-from-africa-to-e.html>
in
the UNDP report, you find that 58% of the African migrants in Europe were
either employed at home or in school when they decided to leave; most of
the migrants had jobs and earned competitive wages. What drove them was the
insecurity in their countries, and the fact that they felt they could earn
more elsewhere. More than half of the migrants had been supported
financially by their families to make the journey, and 78% sent back money
to their families.

World Bank statistics
<https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2019/04/08/record-high-remittances-sent-globally-in-2018>
show
that remittances to African countries are growing. In line with the global
trend, sub-Saharan Africa received more foreign exchange from remittances
than from foreign direct investment (FDI).

In 2018, according
<https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2019/04/08/record-high-remittances-sent-globally-in-2018>
to
the World Bank, remittances to sub-Saharan Africa totaled US$46 billion,
almost 10% more than in 2017. The countries that received high remittances
were Comoros, The Gambia, Lesotho, Cape Verde, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Senegal,
Togo, Ghana and Nigeria.

The total FDI flow into sub-Saharan Africa last year, according
<https://unctad.org/en/pages/newsdetails.aspx?OriginalVersionID=2109> to
the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), was $32 billion, up by
13% from 2017, but significantly less than the remittance inflows.

Migrants who send money home are more important than the corporations and
banks that bring investment dollars into these countries. It’s too bad the
bankers are treated better than the migrants.
African debt crisis 2.0

Africa is on the threshold of a major debt crisis.

The last African debt crisis was in the 1980s, as part of the broader Third
World debt crisis. In the decolonization period, Africa – looted of its
wealth by colonialism – had to borrow money for development; these funds
were large, but worse was the manipulation of dollar-denominated debt by
the London Interbank Borrowing Rate (LIBOR) and by the US Treasury’s
interest rates.

Skyrocketing debt in the 1980s produced a long period of austerity and
suffering. That debt simply could not be paid as long as multinational
corporations in effect stole Africa’s resources and refused to pay taxes on
that drain of wealth. This was the reason initiatives such as the Heavily
Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) and Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative
(MDRI) were created by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
in 1996 and 2005 respectively. By 2017, these initiatives had provided $99
billion <https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/debt/brief/hipc> to reduce
Africa’s debts from a debt-to-GNI (gross national income) ratio of 119% to
45%
<https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2019/04/10/is-a-debt-crisis-looming-in-africa/>
.

No change in the structure was made – no assault on transfer mis-pricing
<https://www.salon.com/2019/07/10/how-multinationals-pad-their-budgets-with-the-wealth-of-developing-countries_partner/>
and
base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), mechanisms used by Western-based
multinationals to continue their plunder of the African continent. When the
2014 commodity price shock came, many African countries slipped gradually
toward a new debt crisis. The new debts are not all government debt, but
include very high proportions of private-sector debt, which tripled
<https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2019/04/10/is-a-debt-crisis-looming-in-africa/>
from
$35 billion in 2006 to $110 billion in 2017 according to World Bank figures
<https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.DOD.DPNG.CD?view=chart>. Debt
repayments have risen dramatically, which means that investments in health
and education have declined, as has access to capital for small-scale
private businesses.

Currently, according to World Bank numbers
<https://www.policycenter.ma/sites/default/files/PCNS-GEG-AfricasRisingDebt-Discussion-Paper.pdf>,
half of the 54 states in Africa struggle with high rates of debt to gross
domestic product, with many of these over the 60% threshold that signals a
crisis. The rate of increase of this debt has set off alarms across the
continent.

What does this mean?

It means that if there is any financial crisis in the West, it will draw
away financing from Africa, plunge the region into another major debt
crisis, and set millions of people in search of better earning
opportunities. Families and countries in Africa have come to rely upon
remittances. They are part of the structural fabric of finances.

Racism against the migrant is an enormous problem, and it must be tackled
in itself.

But deeper than that is another problem that has grown as a result of the
lack of an effective post-colonial policy – the structural problem of the
ongoing theft of resources from Africa, and of the lack of financing for
the continent to develop its own potential. Allowing multinational
corporations to steal African resources, and allowing foreign banks to lend
to Africa at virtually usurious conditions, simply creates a cycle of
crisis that results in migration and remittances as the Band-Aids.

Europe does not have a refugee or migration crisis. The real crisis is in
Africa, where the thief – often a European company – continues to undermine
the continent’s ability to breathe.

*This article was produced by* Globetrotter
<https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/>, *a project of the
Independent Media Institute, which provided it to Asia Times.*

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