Migration Takes Centre Stage

By 2050, one in four people in the world will be African, according to population projections. As such, Africa’s burgeoning youth population could be a boon for the world’s economy, helping to offset ageing populations across the rest of the planet, including in Europe. However, EU attitudes towards African migration are often clouded by a neo-Malthusian lens that emphasises scarcity, incapacity, unemployment, and other negative undercurrents. This view is influenced by the historical legacy of colonisation, a legacy that has worked to undermine much of the work done to address migration between the two continents over the past two decades. In this chapter, we look beneath the hood at how the EU deals with African migration, unpack the actual size and flows of African migration, and explore the moral and political underpinnings of the debate. Contrary to the notion that Africa is a continent experiencing mass exodus, data sets show that Africa’s role in the global migrant population is significantly smaller than other regions. Additionally, we see that a proliferation of initiatives to address migration and a tendency to focus on short-term security measures at the expense of paying attention to the root causes mean that migrants’ needs and rights are often side-lined. This fragmentation of approaches also weakens African agency and undermines the unified, continent-wide framework that the AU seeks to establish.