NEW YORK, 22 OTTOBRE – Irregular migrants who made the fraught journey from Africa to Europe would do so again despite knowing the dangers of the trip. Some 93 per cent of almost 2,000 irregular migrants surveyed experienced danger on their journey, but only two per cent said that greater awareness of the risks would have caused them to stay home.
This and other findings emerge from a landmark report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Scaling Fences: Voices of Irregular African Migrants to Europe, produced to close gaps in the global evidence base and paint a clearer picture of why irregular migrants move from Africa to Europe.
The report, which interviewed 1,970 migrants from 39 African countries in 13 European nations, all of whom self-declared that they arrived in Europe through irregular means and not for asylum or protection-related reasons, challenges commonly held assumptions around irregular migration from Africa to Europe.
It finds that getting a job was not the only motivation to move, that not all irregular migrants were ‘poor’ in Africa, nor had lower education levels. 58 per cent were either employed or in school at the time of their departure, with the majority of those working earning competitive wages. Still, some 50 percent of those working said they were not earning enough. In fact, for two-thirds of those interviewed, earning or the prospect of earning in their home countries did not hold them back from travelling.
“Scaling Fences highlights that migration is a reverberation of development progress across Africa, albeit progress that is uneven and not fast enough to meet people’s aspirations. Barriers to opportunity, or ‘choice-lessness’, emerge from this study as critical factors informing the calculation of these young people,” said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator.
“By shining a light on why people move through irregular channels and what they experience when they do, Scaling Fences contributes to a critical debate on the role of human mobility in fostering progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and the best approaches to governing it,” he said.
The report finds that for many of those who move through irregular channels to Europe from Africa, the voyage is time-bound. The findings show that more of those who did not want to stay in Europe had a legal right to work, compared to those who did want to stay – by a wide margin of 18 percentage points.
The apparent shame of not achieving their ‘mission’ of sending funds back to families and communities emerged as a major factor in keeping respondents from returning, with 53 per cent of respondents receiving at least some kind of financial support from their families and friends in order to pay for their journey.
Once in Europe, of those earning, the vast majority – 78 per cent – were sending money back. Respondents earning in Europe were, on average, sending a third of their monthly incomes back – but this represents 85 percent of their total monthly incomes in their home countries.
The report also found that the experience of being in Europe differs between men and women: the gender wage gap between men and women in Africa resoundingly reverses in Europe, with women earning 11 percent more, contrasting with previously earning 26 percent less in Africa. A higher proportion of women were also sending money back, even among those not earning.
But gender differences were also apparent in experiences of crime, with a slightly higher proportion of women falling victim to a crime in the six months prior to being interviewed than men, and significantly more experiencing sexual assault.
‘Scaling Fences’ is the second in a series of UNDP reports documenting the journeys of young Africans, with the first exploring what drives some into the arms of violent extremism. (@OnuItalia)
