The security of Africans beyond borders: Migration, remittances and London's transnational entrepreneurs

International Affairs

Volumn 83, Issue 6, 2007, Pages 1171-1191

  Styan, David ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 35548981782     PISSN: 00205850     EISSN: 14682346     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2346.2007.00680.x     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. The four men convicted of the abortive 21 July 2005 bombs in London were all born in the Horn of Africa. However, all arrived in the UK as children; their path to violent Islamism was via delinquency and British youth prisons. Their alleged leader received his inspiration and training via UK-Pakistani networks. On the failures of Islamism in Africa, see Alex de Waal, ed., Islamism and its enemies in the Horn of Africa (London: Hurst, 2004).
2. On crime, see J.-F. Bayart et al., eds, The criminalization of the state in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1999). On migration within Africa, see Dilip Ratha and William Shaw, 'South-South migration and remittances', World Bank working paper 102, April 2007. This puts intra-African migration at 69%, while the Bank's Migration and remittances factbook puts the figure at 63% of an estimated 16 million African migrants. This World Bank study suggests that by far the largest number of Africa's economic migrants move within the continent, 60-70% of Africa's migrants moving to work in neighbouring states.
3. A more comprehensive survey evidently also requires a deeper historical perspective, not simply on the impact of slavery in forging diasporic identities, but also on the degree to which the anti-colonial and pan-African movements were in part a product of migration and diasporic education and cohesion. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, 'Rewriting the African diaspora: beyond the Black Atlantic', African Affairs 104: 414, Jan. 2005, pp. 35-68, relates the 'new' African diasporas of late twentieth-century migrations with earlier epochs.
4. UN General Assembly, 'International migration and development; report of the Secretary General' (A/60/871), May 2006, p. 5.
5. Steven Vertovec, 'Circular migration: the way forward in global policy?', working paper 4 (Oxford: International Migration Institute, 2007).
6. Richard Banégas, Roland Marchal, Julien Meimon, 'La fin du pacte colonial?', Politique Africaine, no. 105, March 2007, p. 24. Sarkozy's new Immigration minister, Brice Hortefeux, has explicitly revived the idea of payments to returnee migrants.
7. Nicolas Sarkozy, speech to Euro-Mediterranean Conference on Migration and Development, Rabat, 10 July 2006, http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/actu/bulletiu. gb.asp?liste=20060719.gb.html, accessed 18 July 2007.
8. Global Commission for International Migration, 'Migration in an interconnected world: new directions for action', 2005.http://www.gcim.org/en/, accessed 18 July 2007.
9. See http://www.gfmd-fmmd.org/, accessed 18 July 2007.
10. The London-based film-maker Sorius Samura provided voice and testimony to these migrants in his 2001 TV film Exodus. Abderrahmaue Sissako, the Paris-based Mauritaniau film-maker, refers to the trans-Sahelian migration as 'collective suicide' in his 2006 film Bamako.
11. BBC News Online, 'Canaries migrant death toll soars', 28 Dec 2006.
12. Peter Popham, 'Europe's shame', Independent, 28 May 2007.
13. On the plight of migrants from the Horn of Africa in Libya, see Human Rights Watch, 'Stemming the flow: abuses against migrants, asylum seekers and refugees', Sept. 2006, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/ libya0906/ libya0906webwcover.pdf, accessed 18 July 2007. The Italian-based 'Fortress Europe' group maintains a comprehensive list of deaths and detentions of migrants at www.fortresseurope.blogspot.com, accessed 19 July 2007. They report that Libya arrested 2, 137 Eritreans in May 2007 alone.
14. Libération, 11 July 2006.
15. Agence France-Presse, 25 July 2007.
16. Economic Commission for Africa, International migration and development: implications for Africa (Addis Ababa, Sept. 2006).
17. During the conference, Libyan Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdel-Rahman Shalgam claimed that the country hosted two million illegal migrants: Reuters, 'EU, Africa seek ways to cut illegal migration', 22 Nov. 2006.
18. Voice of America, 22 Nov. 2006, voanews.com, accessed 18 July 2007.
19. Louis Michel, 'Promouvoir une migration accompagnée', 23 Nov 2006, http://europa.eu, accessed 19 July 2007.
20. 'Spain pioneers policy on African migrants', Financial Times, 22 June 2007.
21. Frédéric Docquier and Abdeslam Marfouk, 'International migration by educational attainment', in Caglar Ozden and Maurice Schiff, eds, International migration, remittances and the brain drain (Washington DC: World Bank/Palgrave, 2006).
22. Vertovec, 'Circular migration', p. 7;
23. Philip L. Martin, Susan Martin, Patrick Weil, Managing migration: the promise of cooperation (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006) p. 28.
24. www.diasporaafricanforum.org, accessed 6 Aug. 2007.
25. See the Migration and Remittances programme of the World Bank, notably the Migration and remittances factbook (Washington DC, June 2007);
26. also Dilip Ratha's 'Leveraging remittances for development', policy brief (Washington DC: Migration Policy Institute, June 2007), which suggests that remittances now amount to twice the value of official aid received by developing countries.
27. The IMF cautiously estimates Africa's informal remittances as 45-65% greater than suggested by official data: see S. Gupta, C. Patillo, S. Wagh, 'Impact of remittances on poverty and financial development in sub-Saharan Africa', working paper WP/07/38 (Washington DC: IMF, Feb. 2007).
28. Barbara Jettinger, Senegal country study: report on informal remittance systems in Africa (Oxford: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Jan. 2005), concisely examines how these systems work.
29. Kevin Savage and Paul Harvey, eds, Remittances during crises: implications for humanitarian response (London: Overseas Development Institute, May 2007), http://www.odi.org.uk/HPG/remittances.html, accessed 19 July 2007.
30. Cameron Duodu, 'Tapping investments from Ghanaians in the diaspora', Ghanaian Times (Accra), 7 March 2006. Such vast disparities between IMF figures (e.g. in Gupta et al., 'Impact of remittances') and national data on remittances are not uncommon.
31. Address to regional trade and remittances conference, March 2006, www.watradehub.com, accessed 18 July 2007.
32. African Union Executive Council, EX-CL/277 9IX, http://www.queensu.ca/ samp/migrationresources/ Documents/African_Common_Position.pdf, accessed 18 July 2007;
33. Economic Commission for Africa, International migration and development.
34. Ratha, 'Leveraging remittances', p. 1.
35. Department for International Development (DfID), Moving out of poverty: making migration work better fir poor people (London, March 2007), p. 17.
36. Ratha and Shaw, 'South-South migration and remittances'. Most of Africa's economic migrants move within the continent, and these migrants tend to remit informally, often at punitive rates.
37. In 2007 the MTA had 200 members, with a further 500 affiliates. There are 2,700 money transfer agencies in the UK registered with HM Revenue and Customs: http://www.ukmta.org/, accessed 6 Aug. 2007.
38. Bank for International Settlements, General principles for international remittance services (Basle, Jan. 2007), http:// www.bis.org/publ/cpss76.pdf, accessed 18 July 2007.
39. DfID, BME remittance survey (London: DfID/ICM, July 2006), p. 5, http://www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/files/ukremittancessurvey.pdf, accessed 19 July 2007
40. DfID, BME remittance survey, p. 28.
41. Kavita Datta, Cathy McIlwaine, Jane Willis, Yara Evans, Joanna Herbert, Jon May, Challenging remittances as the development mantra: perspectives from low paid migrant workers in London (London: Department of Geography, Queen Mary, Sept. 2006), p. 13.
42. William Vlcek, 'Development v. terrorism: money transfers and EU financial regulations in the UK', British Journal of Politics and International Relations 10 (forthcoming 2008).
43. The high-profile collapse of FirstSolution, an agency used by many UK-based Bangladeshis, in July 2007 has hastened calls for fuller regulation. In 2001 significant numbers of Somalis were hit by the abrupt suspension of Somalia's largest remittance agency's operations by the US authorities over allegations (which proved entirely erroneous) that it was a cover for Al-Qaeda funds: see Ibrahim Warde, The price of fear: the truth behind the financial war on terror (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007).
44. A recent exception, chronicling the reality of Somali remittances from the UK, is Anna Lindley's working paper, 'The early morning phone call: remittances from a refugee diaspora perspective', WP 47 (Oxford: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, 2007), http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications/ Working%20 papers/WP0747-Lindley.pdf, accessed 19 July 2007. See also Datta et al., Challenging remittances, pp. 13-19.
45. Datta et al., Challenging remittances.
46. See http://www.gkpartners.co.uk/RemitAid.asp, accessed 6 Aug. 2007.
47. On both the Francophone influx and the problems of data, see David Styan, 'La nouvelle vague? Recent francophone settlement in London', pp. 17-36, in Khalid Koser, ed., New African diasporas (London: Routledge, 2003).
48. Lindley, 'The early morning phone call', p. 30, well illustrates the vagaries of data on Britain's burgeoning Somali population, including uncertainty over the very recent and substantial influx of Dutch, Swedish and other Somalis with EU citizenship settling in the UK, primarily in London, Leicester and Birmingham.
49. Over 50,000 Africans are reported to migrate to the United States annually: Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie, 'African leadership for a transnational age', in Onyekachi Wambu, ed., Under the tree of talking: leadership for change in Africa (London: Counterpoint/British Council), p. 217.
50. On recent African settlement in the United States, see Kwado Konadu-Agyemang, Baffour K. Takyi, John Arthur, eds, The new African diaspora in North America: trends, community building and adaptation (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006);
51. Koser, New African diasporas; Zeleza, 'Rewriting the African diaspora' ;
52. Ola Uduku and Alfred Zack-Williams, 'African diaspora-African development concerns: introduction', in Ola Uduku and Alfred Zack-Williams, eds, Africa beyond the post-colonial (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
53. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, The contribution of UK-based diasporas to development and poverty reduction (Oxford, April 2004).
54. Southwark Council, 'Survey of BME and African businesses', mimeo (2005).
55. See http://www.afford-uk.org, accessed 6 Aug. 2007. Note also the "Transfer of Knowledge through Expatriates' programme (TOKTEN) of the UN Development Programme.
56. Y. Kuznetsov, ed., Diaspora networks and the international migration of skills: how countries can draw on their talent abroad (Washington DC: World Bank, 2006).
57. DfID, Moving out of poverty, p. 22.
58. http://www.cfdnetwork.co.uk/, accessed 19 July 2007
59. Hein de Haas, Engaging diasporas: how governments and development agencies can support diaspora involvement in the development of origin countries (Oxford: International Migration Institute and Oxfam Novib, June 2006), p. 4, emphasis added.
60. See also AFFORD and Asian Foundation for Philanthropy, Framework for DfID-diaspora engagement (London: DfID, Aug. 2005). Emphasis is in original.
61. Steven Vertovec, 'Diasporas good? Diasporas bad?', WP 41 (Oxford: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, 2006), p. 6.
62. Some estimates suggested that $1.1 million had been raised for the UIC in the UK during 2006, with a further $300,000 from Somalis in Scandinavia: 'Britons held in Somali clash', The Times, 10 Jan. 2007.
63. 'Shock over attack on Congolese', BBC News Online, 13 Oct 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ africa/6044316.stm, accessed 19 July 2007.
64. Vertovec, 'Circular migration'.