North Africa: Leave and Transit
My summary and notes of a paper by Martin Baldwin-Edwards about North Africa as a region of emigration and transit migration.
Martin Baldwin-Edwards is a political economist known for his work on the socioeconomics of migration in the Mediterranean. He is former director of the Mediterranean Migration Observatory. (Side note: Baldwin-Edwards has been collecting antique maps about the middle east here.)
In 2007, Baldwin-Edwards published a paper in the Review of African Political Economy journal, titled ‘Between a rock & a hard place’: North Africa as a region of emigration, immigration & transit migration (DOI: 10.1080/03056240600843089).
I just finished reading the paper and this post is my summary and notes.
Europe had always approached the migration crisis as a security crisis. Baldwin-Edwards calls this a “prevailing Eurocentric perspective” as it concentrates on the negative impact of migration on Europe and disregard the positive impact of migration on Africa.
People emigrate and there are always reasons. Baldwin-Edwards notes that emigration is “somehow connected to with income disparities between countries of emigration and immigration, but very low income countries tend to have very low emigration”, as they are too poor to leave.
There is little doubt that the main reason for leaving North Africa is purely economic. I am a North African myself and I am sure of that. Speaking of economics and political economy, North African economies are fragile. Libya and Algeria depend on oil and liquid gas exports respectively, Morocco and Tunisia depend on tourism revenues and foreign currencies remittances, and Egypt depend on a mixture of tourism revenues, FX remittances, and foreign direct investment (FDI).
Politically, North Africa is diverse. There is a stable monarchy in the west (Morocco), a gas-rich Algeria with a very young population and high fertility rates, an ambitious and much more progressive Tunisia crippled by economic hardships and high unemployment rates, an oil-rich Libya with a very low population density per km², a strong Egypt on the Military front with economic hardships and a very high public debt. There is also Mauritania which is part of the Maghreb Union, but is very unique socially and politically with few things in common with Libya, namely the primitive yet still strong bond of tribalism and tribal politics. Also, let’s remember that recently, Algeria’s request to join BRICS was rejected, while Egypt was welcomed (along with UAE, Ethiopia, and others).
All of this makes North Africa diverse, and while that diversity is not the subject of this issue of the newsletter, it helps to understand that not every North African has the same Why, the same motivation (and destination) when they are leaving their country.
Egypt for instance is both a destination country (for Palestinian, Sudanese and other refugees) and an emigration country, although with a different profile. Egypt exports low-skilled migrants to Saudi-Arabia, and a mix of semi-skilled and low-skilled labor force to Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE. There is also a significant Egyptian diaspora in America and the UK.
Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans have always had France as a major destination but this has been changing in recent years, probably due less job opportunities and rising cost of living in France. Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Greece don’t have stronger economies, hence we find less concentration of North African immigrants, except as a transition country/temporary migration base (i.e., en route to Northern Europe) or we find migrants closer to home in Southern Europe (i.e., Moroccans in Spain, Tunisians in Italy, Egyptians in Greece, and Algerians in France, Libyan who stole public money and ran to neighboring Malta, etc…).
Remittances
Here are the recent numbers from the World Bank regarding remittances received as % of GDP for North Africa:
Morocco: 8.5% of GDP (2022)
Tunisia: 6.1% of GDP (2022)
Egypt: 5.9% of GDP (2022)
Mauritania: 1.1% of GDP (2022)
Algeria: 0.9% of GDP (2022)
Libya: No data available but should be close to nothing compared to its neighbors
Obviously and as Baldwin-Edwards stresses in his paper, remittances represent the new alternative to FDI to this region. Morocco being the biggest beneficiary of remittance money thanks to its emigration-encouraging policies dating back to the 1960s and 70s, might now be ready to exit the “migration band” as Henrik Olesen suggested back in 2002. The “migration band” is the group of nations ranging from upper-lower to lower-middle in income. These are the world’s largest exporters of labor—think the Philippines, Mexico, and North Africa. Olesen argued that above this range, emigration starts to diminish. In simple terms, when the income levels in the country people are leaving from (emigration country) become closer to the income levels in the country they are moving to (immigration country), fewer people tend to leave. This reduced income gap reduces the incentive for people to migrate for better economic opportunities, thus leading to diminished emigration rates.
North Africa as a transit country en route to Europe
“North African countries have attracted significant numbers of African and also some Asian migrants: most fail to cross the Mediterranean and reach the European continent and remain in very poor conditions in North Africa.”— Martin Baldwin-Edwards
In the last few years, we began to hear the word “transit” to describe North African as a temporary destination for those aiming for Europe after the 2011 uprising in Tunisia. This is nothing new but the numbers are more significant now than when Baldwin-Edwards published his paper in the mid 2000s. Back then in Tunisia we never had any concerns for our national security due to Sub Saharan migrants, but our society and our government (i.e. we) now see them as intruders threatening our territorial integrity and coming to take over our country—the one we are leaving anyways for Europe.