Even in its worst years, the Mediterranean boat-people flow is only a small part of the migration picture: tens of thousands of entrants in a continent of half a billion people that receives three million immigrants a year. Most Africans living in Europe are fully legal, visa-carrying immigrants who arrive at airports. Even the majority of illegal African immigrants in Europe aren’t boat people: They’re legal visitors who’ve overstayed their visas.
What has compounded the matter during the past 24 months has been the conflict in Syria. While only a fraction of people fleeing that country have attempted to go to Europe – the vast majority are encamped in Turkey, Jordan or Lebanon – that fraction has multiplied the numbers of boat people dramatically in 2014 and 2015. It now accounts for perhaps half of Mediterranean boat migrants (though the boat that was the subject of last weekend’s tragedy carried passengers almost entirely from sub-Saharan Africa).
Refugees tend to be temporary (the much larger exodus of asylum seekers that confronted Western Europe during the Balkan wars of the 1990s – a population shift that seemed even more intractable – mostly returned to their countries after the conflicts ended), and are dealt with through different policies than are migrants. In Europe, those policies are deeply dysfunctional, with little agreement among the 28 EU countries about how to handle refugee claimants or how to deport illegitimate ones – which has contributed to the death toll.
“There should be no reason for Syrian refugees to be getting on these boats, except that there has been no proper pathway for safe refugee acceptance opened up,” Dr. de Haas says. If Western countries would take their United Nations refugee responsibilities more seriously, Syrians wouldn’t be dying at sea.
The most insidious notion is the one that holds that the Africans on the boats are starving villagers escaping famine and death. In fact, every boat person I’ve met has been ambitious, urban, educated, and, if not middle-class (though a surprising number are, as are an even larger number of Syrian refugees), then far from subsistence peasantry. They are very poor by European standards, but often comfortable by African and Middle Eastern ones. And no wonder: The boats cost upward of $2,000 to board (and you need more money to make a start in Europe). That’s a year’s income in many African countries.
Why would somebody risk their life, and their comfort, for a journey that at best would promise a marginal life in the underground economies of Europe?
Linguère Mously Mbaye, a scholar at the Bonn-based Institute for the Study of Labour, conducted a study of hundreds of people in Dakar, Senegal, who were planning to make the crossing to Europe.
The migrants tended not to be very poor. And they tended to be well-connected in Europe: They knew large numbers of people from their home country already living in Europe and working in similar occupations. In other words, they were tied into “migration networks” that communicated information about employment, small-business, housing and migration opportunities. Migrants tend to choose their European destinations not according to culture, language or history, but according to the number of people from their network who are living there – and also according to the economic success of their destination country.
The Syrian refugees are less tactical – and not as well linked into existing economies – than the Africans, but they, too, tend to come because they have connections to people or organizations in Europe. Concludes Dr. Mbaye, “Illegal migration starts first in thoughts, based upon the belief that success is only possible abroad.”
Both major studies found that the Africans who get onto the boats are not running from something awful, but running toward a specific, chosen opportunity, in employment or small business.
That’s a big reason that the boat-people flows have gone up and down so dramatically: Dr. de Haas’s studies found that the main driver of cross-Mediterranean migration is not any economic or political factor in Africa but “sustained demand [in Europe] for cheap labour in agriculture, services, and other informal sectors.” Even those who are fleeing – the Syrians, some Eritreans – are choosing where they flee based on a sense of opportunity.
