Legal Immigration

Carrot and stick: How Mali plans to limit emigration

Politics

10.11.2008

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New migration pact is intended to control EU immigration policy
The "Celtic Tiger" has lost its roar – EU labour migrants in Ireland
Carrot and stick: How Mali plans to limit emigration
New migration pact intended to control EU immigration policy

On November 6 the EU Development Commissioner, Louis Michel, opened a "Centre for Migration" in the Malian capital Bamako. It offers Malians information about how to legally emigrate to Europe. The EU-financed Centre will also offer language courses and carry out research on migration. It is hoped that it will help in the management of migration and reduce the amount of illegal emigration to Europe. But how successful is this model likely to be?

Claude has been living in the forest outside the Moroccan town of Oujda for years. Although he originally comes from the Congo, he could not wait to leave the place. He travelled via the Central African Republic to Cameroon, then via Nigeria and Benin to Niger, and then to Algeria. In total, he has been travelling for six months. "When I have some more money, I will move on," he says. Europe is the next stop. He has tried it several times already.

Sub-Saharan migrants become stranded in North Africa

An increasing number of illegal migrants like Claude are making their way from sub-Saharan Africa to the north of the continent. And like him, many of them become stranded in North Africa, because Europe is ensuring that its borders are increasingly well-guarded. Morocco, Algeria and Libya are all important transit countries, as is the sub-Saharan state of Mali, where the new Centre for Migration has been set up. Refugees travel from Mali to Senegal or Guinea-Bissau, from where they try to reach the Canary Islands. It is a risky undertaking, and the Centre’s 30 staff members warn visitors against it. Instead, they want to explain how you can travel to Europe legally. "Illegal migration is flourishing here," says Badra Alou Macalou, the Malian Minister for African Integration, “and that's partly because potential migrants are not given enough opportunities to emigrate legally."

Job Centre or tokenism?

The Centre is not intended to be a job centre for work in Europe. According to Karl Kopp, a Europe specialist at the German refugee lobby group Pro Asyl, that is one of the concept’s biggest failures. "They won't change anything in the suffering of the people who want to leave or who have to flee," he says.

"We are concerned that the Centre will turn into just a token solution and that it will merely paper over the real situation."

EU without a concept on legal migration

When he talks about the real situation, Kopp is referring to the fact that the EU has not found a way of dealing with the phenomenon of migration. There may well be a common policy on protecting the EU's outer borders or in other words, on dealing with illegal migrants. But so far, every member state puts together its own policy on legal migration. The current EU president, Nicolas Sarkozy, would like to change that. He wants to see migration better managed in the future, so that highly qualified workers can be recruited to Europe.

Centre for Migration to benefit the EU?

That fits with the way the Centre for Migration sees itself. But EU Commission spokesman Amadeu Altafaj-Tardio rejects accusations that the Centre is there for the benefit of the EU and insists it is intended to help Mali develop its own policy on migration. "This is by no means a European institution on African soil," he says. "The Centre answers to the government of Mali, and it's merely supported by staff and material from the European Commission."

But the EU is pumping ten millions euros into the Centre over the next four years, which means it is inevitable the EU will expect to have some influence on what goes on there.

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