[BRIEF NOTE] Two Articles on Migration

[rfmcdonald]

From the New York Times, Kevin J. O'Brien's article "Poor Economy Is Driving East Germans From Home" goes into detail about the increasing depopulation of the former East Germany:

As the former East Germany enters its 14th year of double-digit unemployment, jobless residents are emigrating west and leaving behind an eerie still-life landscape of shrinking cities, depression-level unemployment and 1.3 million empty apartments, according to the Verband Deutscher Makler in Berlin, the German real estate agents' association. In Berlin alone, 100,000 apartments are vacant, most of them in the former East Berlin; further south in Leipzig, 42,000 are empty.

"People are leaving in droves, and most of the ones leaving are young,'' said Christine Hannemann, a sociology professor at Humboldt University in Berlin who specializes in the region's development. "Much of East Germany is turning into a series of ghost towns and enclaves for senior citizens.''

Since the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, eastern Germany has shrunk by 3.1 million residents, reducing the population from 16.7 million to 13.6 million, according to the German Federal Statistical Office. Most leave to find work. In April, unemployment in the former East Germany was 18.8 percent, versus 8.5 percent in the west.

eternityfan has noted on Living in Europe that East German living standards remain perennially below those of the former West Germany. As the European Union consolidates its expansion into more affordable regions of central Europe than the former GDR, East Germany's fate might indeed be that of becoming Germany's mezzogiorno. The key difference, I suppose, is that East Germany's weight within the German federal state would be much less, and less so every year, than the mezzogiorno within the Italian quasi-unitary state.

Ivan Briscoe's article "Dreaming of Spain: migration and Morocco" at Open Democracy goes into detail about the immense migratory push north across the Mediterranean:

“People flow” northwards across the Strait is driven by a vast disparity in wealth – average income in Spain, at around $15,000, is thirteen times that of Morocco – and currently seems unstoppable. One effect has been to complete Spain’s transition from place of exodus to migratory magnet. The country’s foreign population, now 2.6 million (in a total of 40 million), has quintupled since 1996; it includes around 600,000 Moroccans. Many of the latter are illegal immigrants surviving in the black economy amidst a society wary of their presence and religion even before “11-M”.

Of course, Moroccans--and other Africans--experience an irresistible pull that won't be answered or halted by stronger barriers against migration:

Spain’s pull remains indestructible. Paul, a Nigerian friend of David, has a degree in economics, but lacks the contacts to get any sort of job. His savings at home totalled only $15, but richer friends invited him on the long trek north due to his language skills. “Our country is not a place to dwell in,” he says. “You cannot feed or clothe yourself in Nigeria. We are going to Europe to uplift our families.” When asked about the risks involved in the crossing, David turns his face haughtily away and wags his finger. “I had a little boy with a 17-year-old woman and I will not go home empty-handed.”

[...]

“Everybody knows the risks,” explains Khalil Jemmah, head of a group defending clandestine immigrants (Afvic). “But they say that to die once is better than dying ten times in the face of your parents’ pity.” The boat owners, he says, employ recruiters who haunt the region’s bars, extol Europe’s wonders, and present themselves as “Robin Hoods, social saviours – with a 20% commission on all sales.”

The recruiters invoke all the main tropes of migrant myth, created over decades by a 2-million-strong Moroccan diaspora: the steady job, the presents for the family, the summer holidays spent showing off the car and the girlfriend, the absence of worry. “They invented a dream for themselves, with luminous and radiant memories. This embellished image had to protect them from an unhappy fate” wrote Tahar Ben Jelloun of the early emigrants to Europe in his novel, L’ecrivain public (1983). For women, the choice to flee is simpler. “In this region, a woman is either a prostitute or a slave,” states Jemmah.

Speaking from personal experience, people only leave their homes when they want to, when they don't perceive that any alternative to leaving exists. If south-to-north migration is to decrease, then it will have to do so through decreasing the attractiveness to move on the parts of both sides of the frontier, in order to be basically just.