Global Development: Views from the Center
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August 22, 2007
Can European aid halt African emigration? Forget it.
Posted by Michael Clemens at 03:45 PM
The BBC reports that European donors have unveiled a US$6 billion aid package for West Africa to "help halt the emigration of young people from the region," by creating "a Francophone West African bloc so prosperous no one will want to leave."
The idea that US$6 billion over three years will somehow make West Africa prosperous in short order is almost beneath comment. West Africa has received more than US$225 billion in aid (today's dollars) since 1960, and it is clearly not so prosperous that no one wants to leave. Serious analysts debate aid effectiveness, and I believe aid can modestly raise living standards in limited settings, but even the most sanguine researchers do not live in cloud-cuckooland, a universe in which West Africa can be "fixed" in a few years with a bag of euros.
Even if the aid could somehow cause a quick and easy jump in West African living standards, however, there is little evidence that higher incomes cause substantially lower emigration rates in the poorest countries. Indeed, when very poor countries become somewhat richer there is some evidence (pdf) from the World Bank that emigration can rise, as it becomes easier for potential emigrants to fund the costs of education, transportation, smuggling, and so on, that facilitate labor movement. Even those who dispute the evidence that emigration rates rise with incomes in the poorest countries, such as Boston University's Robert E. B. Lucas, do not find that emigration falls much with rising income.
All of this remains controversial among researchers, and economists Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson do find (pdf) that high growth in African countries of origin can slightly attenuate migration—controlling for the vast wage gaps between Africa and Europe, which have a dramatically larger positive effect on emigration. But that's the point: West Africa is very poor, and no matter what realistic degree of economic growth it experiences in the short or medium term, it will remain dramatically poorer than Europe for generations. That gap will continue to cause Africans to migrate for a very long time to come.
If you lived in a place where you had just $15 to buy your family what it needed for a whole week, would you leave? Would it change your mind if someone told you that a couple years from now you might have $16 a week instead?
Sadly, there is no quick-fix way to keep Africans from attempting the deadly journey to the Canary Islands and Lampedusa in unseaworthy craft, as there is no quick-fix way to keep Mexicans and Central Americans from attempting the risky crossing of America's southwest desert. But among the highly imperfect solutions, Harvard's Lant Pritchett has the best: give many of them a humane and dignified path to a substantial degree of economic opportunity through expanded guest worker arrangements.
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Comments
Hi Michael,
I don't disagree with you substantively, but I have to point out that simply introducing the concept of growth-oriented assistance as a response to unwanted immigration is light-years ahead of the dialogue in the USA. Here, the primary response has been to militarize our borders, punish domestic employers for using available, and attempt to cut off immigrants (including legal immigrants) from basic social services.
As long as there is a substantial wage differential, laborers will flow (or try to) from lower-wage to higher-wage regions, like water in osmosis. This reality requires sophisticated policy and a recognition that the pressure will never relent.
I agree that the EU initiative won't achieve the stated goal - but neither will the effort to build a fence to keep Mexicans out of the USA. Which one do you think is more neighborly and humane?
Posted by: gawain kripke at August 28, 2007 12:02 PM
Thanks very much for your thoughtful comment, Gawain. I agree completely that if the only two policy options were 1) aid to reduce migration and 2) coercion of border-crossers and employers, and one of these bad options had to be chosen, the former would be preferable, for just the reasons you point out.
Due to the collapse of comprehensive immigration reform, US policy remains focused on coercion of individuals at the border. EU policy has added this new element of aid to 'halt' migration, but it has substantially stepped up interdiction as well. Since the research literature suggests that the aid per se will have a negligible effect on the number of people risking their lives to get to Europe, the effect of the aid-plus-interdiction policy on the number of sea deaths is unlikely to differ from the effect of an interdiction-only policy.
So is this really much better than focusing on interdiction? It does 'feel' more humane, but if the name number of corpses wash ashore in Southern Morocco with or without the aid package, is it really more humane? The truly humane policy is to give as many low-income people as possible an orderly, legal, temporary way to participate in European and American labor markets if they want to and employers want them to. Neither the US nor the EU is doing anywhere near enough on this front.
Posted by: Michael Clemens at August 30, 2007 01:44 PM
THE UGANDAN EXPERIENCE.
What Europe is trying to do is reciprocal to the 1940's Marshal Plan that sought to develop Europe then have Europeans running to the United States after the inter war periods. Did this work for the Europeans or not, and why can't it work for the West Africans? If there has been investigations, thorough research, and establishments made to enable this plan to work, then this is the way to go. Many Ugandans who got opportunity to work in Iraq have come back and set up business which they are now overseeing. Will they go back to Iraq again? I think not at all. The idea of guest worker arrangement has been thwarted without a second thought but as I argued earlier this would help the would be emigrants with an orderly, well paying opportunities and also generate much funds for the host countries in terms of Visa funds and transportation costs. The Mexican example that is being given here Gawain is a classic way that has been mishandled through a fencing program. Even then those who cross the border to work in the U.S Industries, just a few metres on the other side of the boarder, are poorly paid, so that they do not think about migration as the option.
Paul Mayende,
M.A International Relations,
Makerere University Kampala.
Posted by: Paul Mayende at September 12, 2007 02:22 AM