The other kind of immigration

The flow of people from poor countries to other poor countries is little-noticed but vital.

IN MOST ways, it is a typical immigrant success story. Ouesseni Kaboréq was once a butcher in Burkina Faso, a poor, landlocked west African country. Encouraged by an uncle who was flourishing abroad, he left his country in search of better-paying work. He has done so well that he now employs 41 people. All but two are immigrants like him. The natives cannot bear to get their hands dirty, he says.

But Mr Kaboréq did not migrate to Paris or New Jersey. Instead he crossed just one land border, into neighbouring Ivory Coast. He works in the large meat market in Port Bouët, on the outskirts of Abidjan, near a store that demonstrates its classiness with a picture of Barack Obama on the awning. Mr Kaboréq is not the kind of immigrant whom economists obsess over, nor the kind who irks voters and brings populists to power in the West. But his kind is already extremely common, and is set to become more so.

International migration can be divided into four types. The most important is the familiar one, from developing countries to developed ones. About 120m people alive today have made such a move, calculates the McKinsey Global Institute, an arm of the consultancy—from Mexican grape-pickers in California to Senegalese street vendors in France. But the second-largest flow is between developing countries (see chart). Between 2000 and 2015 Asia, including the Middle East, added more immigrants than Europe or North America.

Some are war refugees, like the Syrians who live in Jordan and the Somalis in Ethiopia and Kenya. But many developing-world migrants are like Mr Kaboréq: people who leave a poor country for a somewhat less poor neighbouring one in search of higher wages. The World Bank estimates that 1.5m migrants from Burkina Faso alone live in Ivory Coast. Relative to Ivory Coast’s population of 23m, Burkinabé immigrants are more numerous than Indians in Britain, Turks in Germany or Mexicans in America.

Ivory Coast is still very poor—about as poor as Bangladesh. It is, however, better off than Burkina Faso. Batien Mamadou, a farm labourer who works 120km north-west of Abidjan, says wages are at least twice as high. And Ivory Coast is a much better place to start a business. The contrast between the two countries is like the difference between a grand African home and the White House, says Bernard Bonane, who fled Burkina Faso following a coup in 1987 and now runs a security firm. 

Mr Bonane, who lives in a stylish house in a street crawling with guards, says that few of his neighbours are immigrants. That, he thinks, is because most new arrivals send money home rather than splashing out on property. The World Bank estimates that $343m in remittances flowed from Ivory Coast to Burkina Faso in 2015. The exact amount is unknowable, not least because the two countries share a currency, meaning money can easily be moved across the border in ways that officials do not notice. But the importance of these short-range remittances is plain. Ivory Coast is thought to account for fully 87% of all remittances to Burkina Faso.

Rather little of the cash that flows out of the world’s richest countries ends up in the poorest ones. Gulf states such as Dubai and Saudi Arabia take in millions of remittance workers from lower-middle-income countries such as India, but hardly any from really poor ones such as Chad and Malawi. The world’s poorest people cannot afford to travel to the West or the Gulf.

They can, however, hop on buses bound for nearby countries. “The poorer the people, the shorter the distance they want to travel,” says Dilip Ratha of the World Bank. Such migrants might not be able to send much money home, but what they do send is badly needed. Whereas fairly poor countries like Nigeria can send many people to the West, households in very poor countries like Mali depend on workers who have migrated within west Africa (see chart in this article).

Neighbouring countries often share a language and sometimes a currency. Tribes often span borders, too: national boundaries in Africa were drawn to suit colonial powers, not to accord with cultural and ethnic divisions. All that smooths the migrant’s path. And although south-south migrants tend to have informal jobs, as farm labourers, builders, market traders and so forth, this is no special hardship. In rich countries, where most workers have above-board jobs, informal work is precarious and exploitative. In poor and middle-income ones it is the norm.

Widespread though migration is in west Africa, it cannot match the mighty human rivers of Asia. In November India’s home-affairs minister, Kiren Rijiju, declared that about 20m people from Bangladesh were living illegally in India. Sanjeev Tripathi, the former head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, thinks that an overstatement. His estimate, based on census data, is that more than 15m Bangladeshis are living in India. If either is right, the Bangladesh-to-India migration corridor is the largest in the world.

It is also one of the most fraught. Immigration from Bangladesh not only raises anxieties about national security; it also suggests to those who worry about such things that a predominantly Hindu society is being diluted. In the 1980s students in Assam, a state that touches Bangladesh, led a revolt against mass migration and forced the national government to introduce tougher laws. Nationalist politicians still make hay out of the issue. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has accused Bangladeshis of “destroying” Assam and has insinuated that rhinos are being killed to make space for immigrants.

In fact Bangladeshis are spread across India. One of them is Salma, a young woman living in Navi Mumbai, a suburb of India’s commercial capital. She was brought to India as a child by her parents, who later returned to their farm in Bangladesh. She is married to an Indian man and has children, who go to school in India. She even has Indian identity papers, which say, falsely, that she was born in Kolkata. Sometimes she is turned down for jobs when she tells people her name. But many Mumbai employers are too hungry for workers to care. Salma was recently hired to work in one house on the condition that she stay out of the kitchen.

Sometimes Indian police officers round up Bangladeshi immigrants and push them over the border. “But they often come back,” says a cop in Mumbai. “They have to earn a living.” Even in Assam, where feelings run high, just 2,442 illegal immigrants were deported between 1985 and 2012, according to a report by the state government. Asked for their papers, suspected illegal immigrants say they will fetch them, then disappear. Or they produce false documents. “If you pay money, you’ll get any papers you want,” says Mr Tripathi.

The World Bank estimates that more money is remitted to Bangladesh from India—$4.5bn in 2015—than from any other country. As in west Africa, this is an economic lifeline. Remittance workers tend to respond quickly to economic shocks in their home countries: the flow of money to Nepal jumped after the Gorkha earthquake in April 2015, for example. And studies of other countries show that remittances are commonly invested, especially in children’s education.

Following footsteps

It is likely that developing-world migration will become even more important. In the 1970s the world looked fairly simple, point out Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh, both academics at the University of California, San Diego, in a new working paper. The global south was poor and had lots of children; the global north was rich and had few. People tend to move not just from poorer countries to richer ones but also from countries with high birth rates to those with low ones. The imbalance between North America and Latin America fuelled the northward migration that so distresses some American voters.

By mid-century China, India and almost all of Latin America, including Mexico, will be members of the low-fertility club. Only sub-Saharan Africa will still be having a baby boom. If UN projections are right, in 2040 more than a third of all children under the age of 14 will be living in Africa. Mr Hanson and Mr McIntosh predict huge pressure for migration from Africa to Europe, making the Mediterranean into a new (somewhat wider) Rio Grande.

Yet that pressure will not necessarily find an outlet, says Michael Clemens of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank. European voters are not keen even on current levels of immigration and will be still less enthused by a doubling or even a tripling of their immigrant populations. So there will be an enormous number of potential African migrants and not enough places for them in the West. They are highly likely to head for other African countries, for the Middle East and perhaps even for Asia. Countries such as China and South Korea have resisted mass immigration, but they badly need more young people. In short, says Mr Clemens, south-south migration is likely to grow a lot.

Many poor countries are unprepared for an influx, and unwilling too. Purges of migrants are already common. Pakistan is trying to evict hundreds of thousands of Afghan migrants; Gabon is kicking out immigrants from central Africa; Thailand has expelled Cambodians. But many slip the net. Many Burkinabé migrants were pushed out of Ivory Coast during the civil war that erupted in 2002, only to return. Burkina Faso is too poor, too politically unstable and, for people who have lived in Ivory Coast for years, too foreign.

“They will never go back,” says Moumouni Pograwa, who runs a mining and construction company in Abidjan and is an unofficial spokesman for Burkinabé. Recently Mr Pograwa offered to help immigrants whose homes had been demolished in a slum clearance. Would any of them perhaps like a bus ticket to go back to Burkina Faso? Of perhaps 4,500 people who had been evicted, just two took him up on the offer.