Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees marks an historic departure from its increasingly restrictive stance towards asylum seekers in recent years. With the exception of Angela Merkel’s bold but isolated welcome of displaced Syrians (which generated a considerable backlash), efforts to elicit empathy for people escaping conflict zones have been met with indifference —and at times outright hostility — since the so-called migration “crisis” in 2015. Escalating border patrols and illegal “pushbacks” intercepting would-be asylum claimants have defined an ever-hardening border regime that led numerous commentators to pronounce the “end of asylum” prior to Russia’s invasion.
Against this backdrop, solidarity with refugees in countries as diverse as Hungary and Denmark has been something of a revelation. After years of internal wrangling and inaction over how to share the “burden” of asylum applications, policy has been dramatically overhauled by the decisive implementation of the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive (TPD), granting millions of Ukrainian refugees right of residency with access to work and education outside their homeland. A comparable shift in Britain has led liberal commentators to proclaim, “The spasm of xenophobia that was spread by the Brexiteers has lifted”.
How to explain this so-called U-turn? For charity workers and activists accustomed to combatting negative perceptions of asylum seekers in Europe, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has ushered in a strangely disorienting scenario. On the one hand, the protection and dignity of displaced persons that they have long called for has arrived with bells on. After years of complaint about being “overwhelmed” by trickles of new arrivals, millions have been absorbed virtually overnight without a peep. On the other, the “solidarity” that underpins this dramatic turnaround would appear to exclude non-Europeans.
The very same border guards consigning asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and Eritrea to detention or possible death by “push-back” into freezing cold forests are distributing soups and blankets to Ukrainians offered safe passage. Long after animals were evacuated from Ukrainian zoos, Asians and Africans are reported to be languishing in the EU’s Zhuravychi facility, close enough to the warzone to hear artillery and explosions. Such facts, together with scenes of non-white students being obstructed from reaching safety, raise the question of whether what we are witnessing is in fact a turning point at all, and not merely the latest chapter of an older story of European racism.
Migration researchers and policymakers have interpreted these differences technically, citing other factors: geographic proximity, legislative frameworks that give Ukrainians greater legal access to enter the EU, cultural, historical, ethnic and religious affinities that bind them to neighbouring Christian societies. Echoing the liberal centre of European politics, these voices insist the “opening of refugee corridors to Ukraine’s neighbours has little to do with race”.
Asians and Africans are reported to be languishing in the EU’s Zhuravychi facility, close enough to the warzone to hear artillery and explosions.
That the “legislative frameworks” privileging Ukrainians over migrants from the Global South might themselves be part of a racialized migration system is rarely considered by exponents of this technocratic analysis. Nor do they take into account the role of racial ideology in forging the so-called “ethnic, cultural and religious affinities” that bind white Europeans against groups deemed alien, summed up by Polish member of parliament Dominik Tarczynski before the current conflict: “We’ve taken over two million Ukrainians in Poland. We will not receive even one Muslim . . . This is why our government was elected; this is why Poland is so safe”. As for “geography”: how does proximity explain the greater willingness of Britain and Italy to receive Ukrainians rather than the Africans and Asians they seek to repel? Or, for that matter, the enthusiasm of the United States?
Statements professing solidarity with Ukrainians for their “blonde hair” and “blue eyes” did the rounds on social media during the early weeks of the conflict. Race is also at play, however, in subtler enunciations of difference — above all, the presumed contrast between the “economic” motivations of “illegal” entrants with the “political” drivers of Ukrainian flight. The propensity of Westerners to identify Ukrainian affluence as a basis of empathy underlines the class-based dimensions of race. The feeling that “they are just like us” because they travel with suitcases, own cars and live in cities like “our own” is intimately related to the perception of Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans as covetous imposters who could never have been middle-class, and therefore had nothing to lose from the wars that plague their wretched countries of origin.
It is of course true that many of those who seek asylum in Northwestern Europe are fleeing marginalization and encampment in “safe countries”, in addition to the dangers that uprooted them from their countries of origin. The entanglement of “economic”, “political”, and indeed other motivations in each individual’s decision to move is beyond doubt. But the EU’s own recognition rates underline just how many non-Europeans who apply for asylum are in fact “authentic” refugees: last year 81 per cent of Eritrean asylum applicants were accorded protection; 79 per cent of Yemenis, and in October-November, over 90 per cent of Afghans. Britain’s processes of adjudication confirm a majority (around two-thirds) of all those who apply for asylum in the UK are entitled. All of which suggests the lack of empathy with these groups is about more than objectively observable difference.
Viral footage of African students prevented from boarding trains at gunpoint makes a similar point. Even as they fled a warzone alongside millions of other “genuine” (white) political exiles, a tiny trickle of highly educated, middle-class non-white people were pulled aside by Europe’s asylum system for less-than-equal treatment. To explain such blatantly racialized filtration away via legalistic reasoning or talk of geography is disingenuous. It also requires a short memory. Broaden the picture to encompass what we’ve learned about “traveling while Black” in other recent emergencies, and the curtailment of these students’ movement reflects a pattern.
To explain such blatantly racialized filtration away via legalistic reasoning or talk of geography is disingenuous.
As recently as November 2021, blanket flight bans were imposed on African countries following the discovery of the Omicron coronavirus variant by South African scientists. Racist photographic imagery and grotesque cartoons depicting the virus as Black figures in boats appeared in the European press. Nigeria and South Africa, two of the most affluent and politically influential nations in the African continent were powerless to protect the right of their middle-classes to cross international borders. “Had the first Covid-19 virus . . . originated in Africa,” remarked Dr Ayoade Olatunbosun-Alakija, an African Union vaccine expert, “it is clear the world would have locked us away and thrown away the key.”
Her words reflect an unspoken truth about Africa’s lowly position in the hierarchy that underpins international mobility. Yet, discriminatory policies and practices in Europe are just one pillar of this system. Another rests on mobility from and within the African continent itself, which is increasingly the site of exported European migration controls, a phenomenon known as “externalization”. Just how deeply the two are entwined was illustrated by the recent unveiling of Britain’s Rwanda deal, which envisages the deportation of “irregular migrants” without processing their asylum applications.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s framing of the plan to the British press began with a lengthy preamble on Britain’s proud history of refugee protection, including its recent acceptance of Ukrainians. He then presented the UK’s intention to export unwanted arrivals to Africa as a means of preserving its capacity for compassionate action. In spelling out the relationship between embracing some and removing others, he couldn’t have been clearer: Britain’s generous acceptance of Ukrainian and other “genuine” refugees is dependent on the successful removal of false pretenders via externalization.
This effective bifurcation of asylum seekers into (white) Europeans and non-whites from Asia and Africa is not a peculiarly British phenomenon. Denmark, which just passed an expedited law to ease Ukrainians’ access to labour markets and schools, is in the process of forging a similar arrangement of its own with Rwanda. The first European country to officially restrict migrants and refugees classified as “non-western” last year, it will not apply its “jewellery law” — passed in 2016 to allow confiscation of valuables from refugees claiming asylum — to Ukrainians. Syrians, in response to whose arrival the law was invented, witnessed their own rights of asylum revoked just months ago. Damascus was declared a safe country amidst Denmark’s drive to rid its territory of unwanted “ghettos”, but legal challenges have complicated the government’s attempts to force them to return. As for the EU, which has done so much to support the acceptance and integration of Ukrainians in recent months, it was reported on April 6th that the Commission is now proposing to levy punitive trade tariffs on countries that do not accept the return of citizens who have illegally entered Europe. A move that would tie trade to migration policy sounds less of a U-turn than a continuation of the hardening regime pursued by “fortress Europe” since the 1990s.
Denmark, which just passed an expedited law to ease Ukrainians’ access to labour markets and schools, is in the process of forging a similar arrangement of its own with Rwanda.
Could we be heading for a world in which Syrians, along with other Arab, Asian and African asylum seekers alike will be deported from Europe to the African continent to accommodate “genuine” refugees? If so, what does this mean, and how did we get here?
The EU-Africa ‘Partnership’
More than racism, geography, or indeed any of the other factors listed above, the revival of European asylum policy to address the plight of Ukrainians has been framed geopolitically. Putin’s misadventure, according to security experts and aficionados, presents a more flagrant, clear-cut breach of legal and political norms than other messier conflicts around the world. As a threat to the territorial integrity of a nation-state, the invasion undermines a sacred principle of the Westphalian international order: national sovereignty. Ukraine’s women and children, according to this view, embody the stakes of a universal struggle waged by their gallant menfolk.
Revealingly, Sir Tony Blair, whose punditry is otherwise ubiquitous these days, is nowhere to be seen making this point. The gist of those who do is that Ukraine and its human casualties matter for global order in a way other conflicts and theirs do not. Whatever one makes of the threat posed by Putin, this kind of rationale misses the whole point of refugee protection: to ensure fair treatment for those whose claims to asylum might be prejudiced by such distortive considerations, which, within a just legal order, cannot determine who receives protection, and who does not.
Sensing the need for a less Hobbesian, value-based argument to justify the elevation of Ukraine above other conflicts, Europe’s liberal centre has expanded on what this particular national liberation struggle means for people: “This is not only an attack on Ukraine”, tweeted Ursula von der Leyen on March 10th: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “a defining moment for the European Union”, because “it is an attack on people’s freedom to choose their own destiny. The very principle our Union is based on.”
Just how committed Europe is to ideals of sovereignty and democratic freedom beyond the Global North is evident in the “externalization” of its borders. An approach to migration policy that relies upon the willingness and capacity of sending and transit states to prevent irregular migratory outflows to Europe whilst accepting the “return” of deportees and “voluntarily” repatriated migrants, externalization has been the preferred strategy of the EU and individual European countries seeking to rid their shores of undocumented arrivals from Africa for close to a decade. Advanced under the umbrella of “cooperation”, it was ramped up in 2015 via the EU’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), launched to tackle the “root causes of irregular migration” holistically through development, job creation, and by creating legal pathways of mobility.
The single largest tranche of funding — around a quarter of the EUTF’s five billion Euros — has been spent on “migration management”, the meaning of which was analysed by a study that compared the rhetoric of cooperation agreements with policy implementation. It found that between 2005 and 2016, European discourse on “managing” the movement of people obscured a reality of restriction: when it came to action, the EU’s focus was on halting all migration from Africa to Europe — so much so that the number of first time visas for employment of African citizens was reduced by approximately 80 per cent between 2010 and 2016. Six years on, this remains the pattern. In a recent webinar, Professor Mehari Taddele Maru, a leading analyst of EU-Africa cooperation on migration, described the anticipation of African policymakers for regular migratory alternatives that seem never to materialize: waiting for the EU’s legal pathways is “like waiting for Godot”.
Externalization has been heavily criticized by civil society actors in both Africa and Europe, who view it as a form of domination through which a powerful economic block advances its agenda over “partners” on unequal footing, for the most part bilaterally. The inequality at its heart is reflected in disregard for the sovereignty of African nation-states. A fortnight before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson suggested sending EU border forces to Senegal, a country whose constitution upholds the right of its citizens to migrate and settle abroad. The proposal, which would see Frontex — the EU’s border and coastguard agency — operating on non-European territory for the first time, was promptly greenlighted by Dakar for technical discussions. Bilateral “cooperation” led by individual member states has raised similar protest given the power imbalance that underlies agreements with countries such as Niger, one of the poorest nations in the world, which was persuaded to host an Italian military mission to support increasingly militarized attempts to combat irregular migration in 2018.
Just how committed Europe is to ideals of sovereignty and democratic freedom beyond the Global North is evident in the “externalization” of its borders.
Aside from the symbolic connotations of European police making arrests on African soil, opposition to externalization stems from the lack of transparency and accountability that often accompanies this type of collaboration, which critics view as undemocratic. Predicated upon opaque, high-level deliberations between foreign powers and political elites that are seldom subject to meaningful public debate or participation by civil society, externalization is associated with the adoption of donor-oriented policies in exchange for funds spent without oversight. It is revealing that European overtures are least successful in contexts such as Gambia, where the government’s accountability to the electorate has prevented its acceptance of returnees from Europe, and Tunisia, where civil society raised concerns about EU attempts to create disembarkation zones.
In so far as externalization has succeeded in stemming the flow of emigration from Africa, it has done so by bolstering the coercive capacities and border controls of countries such as Libya, with grave consequences for human rights. From 2017, Italy and the EU’s empowerment of the quasi-military Libyan Coastguard through provision of funding and equipment contributed to the development of a sadistic, state-sponsored machinery of emigration control linked to industrial-scale trafficking by militias. Thousands of migrants and asylum seekers, some of whose interception was enabled by European aerial surveillance, were systematically extorted in a network of black prisons where excessive force, violent abuse, murder and rape are known to have occurred. The UN is currently investigating reports of mass graves filled with the bodies of migrants in the desert city of Beni Walid.
A less extreme version of this story unfolded in Sudan, where EU finance for President Omar al-Bashir’s border police was linked with human rights abuses committed by the army’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a reincarnation of the Janjaweed paramilitary group, accused of war crimes during the Darfur conflict. In Niger, a clampdown on smuggling since 2015 led to the adoption of longer, riskier, more expensive routes through Chad and Sudan, increasing the scope for police forces to extract bribes for facilitation. Migrants now pay more, and experience greater danger to reach the same destinations. In each case, the effect of EU support for state-led crusades against smuggling has been to render migrants more vulnerable.
Proponents of externalization (who rarely refer to it as such), like to claim it is part of a collaborative project that improves migration governance in African states by strengthening their capacity for border-management. National-state sovereignty is in fact reinforced, they argue, by enabling African policymakers and officials to administer mobility with support from migration agencies such as the IOM and UNHCR, and by building border posts and installing new architectures of computerization to digitize the identities of citizens and migrants alike. Through technology transfer and training, Europe is professionalizing the management of mobile populations in Africa, all in the spirit of “cooperation”.
Others are more sceptical about the value of surveilling, assigning and binding African populations to national-state territories through what is, after all, an EU-driven project to concretize borders drawn up by Europeans in the previous century. In West Africa, externalization is imbricated within a gambit of multilateral counter-terrorism measures. Financial, military, and technological support have poured into securitizing hubs along Niger’s borders. With Frontex at the forefront of collating biometric information about African bodies in these laboratories of digital governance, it seems reasonable to assume data could be used to return and confine Africans on the move to their countries of origin.
Externalization is associated with the adoption of donor-oriented policies in exchange for funds spent without oversight.
More than just keeping Africans in Africa, however, externalization threatens to undermine intra-African mobility, which accounts for by far the largest proportion of international African migration. Consider: Nigeriens, Malians, Burkinabès, Ivorians, and others formerly employed in the trans-Sahelian transit economic hubs shut down by the EU’s anti-smuggling drive, are members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), whose Common Approach on Migration legitimates freedom of movement for citizens across the region. Collateral damage in the war against ‘trafficking’, these traders and transporters might wonder: what right does a union of states thousands of miles away have to shut down a busy crossroads of intra-African migration integral to their livelihoods? Similarly, nomadic and pastoral populations whose lives have depended on seasonal, cross-border migration for centuries, and transnational populations such as Somalis in northern Kenya being turned into “machine-readable” refugees might feel similarly ambivalent at Europe’s support for “better migration governance”. Intervention of this kind, whatever its intentions, has a tendency to add bureaucratic layers to “migration management”, formalizing previously porous or unregulated spaces, creating de facto restrictions and inhibiting traditional patterns of trade and transhumance.
Herein lies the troubling essence of externalization, a project that protects the integrity of migration and asylum systems in Europe by undermining prosperity, mobility and human rights in Africa. Bilateral cooperation led by the EU contains a special layer of hypocrisy given the block’s espousal of regional integration and human mobility between neighbouring states in Europe: in its own backyard, it celebrates cultural exchange through schemes such as ERASMUS and Schengen’s integrated trans-national labour market. In Africa, it dissuades young people from emigration through “information campaigns” and promotes nationally self-contained development projects that implore them to stay put, stigmatizing mobility and shrinking their horizons of travel in the name of tackling (irregular) migration’s “root causes”.
Britain’s Rwanda Deal
If the EU’s approach to externalization involves maintaining the appearance of value-based cooperation and includes broader consultation, for example with the African Union, no such parameters constrain individual Western countries engaged in secretive, bilateral talks to secure the reception of deportees. Pioneered by Israel, which quietly used Rwanda and Uganda to rid its territory of African “infiltrators” for several years from 2013, this type of externalization makes little pretence at submitting itself to public scrutiny. Neither African country publicly acknowledged their receipt of unknown numbers of Eritreans and Sudanese. The scheme came to light in 2018 when Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government attempted to ramp up repatriations through increasingly coercive measures, embarrassing both Rwanda and Uganda, which to this day, deny colluding in the removal and transfer of African asylum seekers from Israel under degrading and illegal conditions.
Given the covert nature of this type of sordid transactional migration diplomacy, the detail of what gets proposed for barter is mysterious, though leaks suggest offerings go well beyond the usual development aid. Israel reportedly extended assistance in Defence to Uganda and Rwanda. Earlier this year, Denmark was credibly reported to have tried to give Rwanda 250,000 COVID-19 vaccines to host asylum processing centres. Despite being rejected, this last “donation” underscores the depths to which this type of exchange can sink: exploiting an African country’s inferior access to life-saving medical technology during a pandemic as a basis of negotiation.
Bilateral cooperation led by the EU contains a special layer of hypocrisy given the block’s espousal of regional integration and human mobility between neighbouring states in Europe.
Against this background, Britain’s agreement with Rwanda feels more like a place we’ve been headed to than a diplomatic breakthrough. That’s not to deny elements of genuine innovation in Home Office Priti Patel’s proposition, which goes further than Australian-style “offshore processing” and Israel’s undocumented deportations. Crucially, the scheme does not envisage the re-entry of successful asylum applicants. The radical aspect, then, is Britain’s not-so-tacit admission that it doesn’t actually matter whether individuals are “genuine” refugees. (The possibility they might be is acknowledged by the plan’s offer of safe haven in Rwanda.) Instead, their fates hinge on whether they arrived by legal invitation. Here too, the plans break new ground, in that the government has been unusually candid about the typical profile of those they wish to see removed without UK asylum processing. “Only adult males would be sent to Rwanda,” Welsh Secretary Simon Hart briefed the press. A subsequent statement by the Home Office has cast some doubt over whether such a rule would in fact apply, but there’s little doubt whom the new order would target. Like talk of “economic motivations”, gender too now functions as a language of difference that signifies non-European identity without referring to it explicitly.
Despite the astronomical cost, bureaucratic and legal complexity of the scheme, which is unlikely to be implemented any time soon, its significance as a barometer of right-wing European attitudes to migration and asylum from Asia and Africa could not be clearer: A government that airlifted dogs from Kabul during the chaos of Western withdrawal last year, is this year rolling out a legal framework for Britons to (literally) open their homes to Ukrainian women and children. Simultaneously, it is planning large-scale expulsion of predominantly male, non-European asylum seekers to Africa.
Like talk of “economic motivations”, gender too now functions as a language of difference that signifies non-European identity without referring to it explicitly.
If any of this sounds like a U-turn, the direction of travel is toward the original Eurocentric scope of the Refugee Convention, which, at its inception in 1951, was designed to protect Europeans uprooted by the Second World War. Like the still largely colonial world of that era, today’s European system of migration and asylum governance offers sanctuary to Europeans whilst saying little about Europe’s responsibility to displaced populations elsewhere. With climate catastrophe looming, we can see where such a framework might lead. Perhaps, in years to come, the period between 1990 and 2022 will be retrospectively viewed as an historically exceptional interval during which Europe received significant numbers of asylum seekers from Asia and Africa. Its increasing reluctance to do so over these three decades, manifested in the rise of openly racist, xenophobic political parties and externalization policies, would appear to be culminating in the present bifurcation, catalysed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
What does this mean for Africa? Achille Mbembe has described European migration policy as wanting to turn Africa into a “Bantustan”. Yet the Rwanda plan envisages a curious and unprecedented multiracial role for Africa as a point of disembarkation, not just for Sudanese, Eritreans, Maghrebi and other cohorts of the continent’s own returnees, but Asians from just about anywhere else. Some of these exiles may have transited Africa en route to Europe; others are being offered one-way tickets to a country they’ve never visited, and whose credentials to safely host and integrate refugees have been questioned by leading asylum and human rights experts.
Denmark was credibly reported to have tried to give Rwanda 250,000 COVID-19 vaccines to host asylum processing centres.
The Tories are spinning this, as one might expect, in terms that flatter Rwanda as a safe and stable country with a powerful economy — evidence that Africa is held in high esteem. Their scorn for the unwanted human surplus they’re shipping from their shores suggests they feel otherwise. Notwithstanding Rwanda’s status as a dynamic economy (though not as strong as is being suggested), the plan brings to mind Lawrence Summers’ infamous 1991 World Bank memo about the “impeccable” economic logic behind “dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country”. Like European diplomats pushing externalization over the last decade or so, Summers too had Africa in his sights — not because he viewed it on equal terms, but because he saw it as the ideal cite of expulsion to absorb that which is unwanted or discarded by the rich world.
Needless to say, European policymakers preaching democracy and anti-imperialism against the tyranny of Putin would firmly dispute any such suggestion. Whatever their commitment to these values in Europe, the global direction of migration policy more broadly suggests the sovereignty and freedom they have in mind when calling for protection of Ukrainian refugees is rather different from that which is envisaged for non-Europeans they wish to keep in/send to Africa, where the post-colony is being fashioned, , into a receptor and container of bodies and aspirations.
None of this is to lessen the case against Russian territorial imperialism and its associated crimes, which are rightly being condemned in the strongest possible terms. Nor is it to question Ukrainians’ right to protection. They deserve all the political and material support they have received and more. Indeed, given the complex position of East Europeans within the Northwest European racial imaginary, and its well-known fickle tolerance for strangers in general, it would be misplaced to assume their position is secure, or to exaggerate their privilege within an international migration system that treats all displaced persons inadequately. Incidentally, the “welcome” of the hollowed-out British state, which is sourcing out a significant proportion of the burden of hosting Ukrainians onto society, actually risks placing individuals in situations of vulnerability within private homes. Without questioning the generosity of the vast majority of those extending support within communities, the motives behind the enthusiasm of a small minority of those who wish to shelter East European women could well be less than innocent, a possibility not lost on refugee charities that have expressed well-grounded concerns about the dangers of trafficking.
Progressive voices within Europe and the West have called for the generosity shown to Ukrainians to be extended to other groups. Optimistically, perhaps, they imagine the outpouring of support for refugees in Ukraine as the potential starting point for a genuine U-turn in asylum policy — one that would acknowledge the humanity, needs and entitlements of all displaced persons, irrespective of origin or geopolitical salience. If such a scenario seems unlikely in Poland and Hungary, it may well be that in other countries, the hostility of prominent actors and voices towards non-European asylum seekers is not quite as widely shared by all parts of society as policymakers seem to believe. An Ipsos survey conducted before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine found a majority of Brits backed giving refuge to those fleeing war, suggesting the bifurcation scenario being advanced by political elites, in which racism and externalization reconfigure asylum and migration in ways that threaten to introduce an apartheid in global mobility, is neither necessary nor inevitable.
The plan brings to mind Lawrence Summers’ infamous 1991 World Bank memo about the “impeccable” economic logic behind “dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country”.
As for progressive voices within Africa: policymakers, officials, intellectuals, experts and civil society will not be waiting for Europe to reach particular conclusions about international migration and asylum from Africa to Europe. Nor will they wait for Europe to extend the generosity it has shown to Ukrainians to the people of their respective regions, within which most African migration takes place. Even before the West was faced with the burden of absorbing the largest exodus since World War II, its externalization agenda in Africa was criticized for lack of attention to intra-African migration and displacement. Given its new strategic priorities, increased costs of living and the Western media’s uninterrupted focus on the war in Ukraine, it seems less likely than ever such attention will finally materialize. If anything, there are already signs that Europe’s disproportionate fixation with Russia’s invasion is resulting in the direction of funding away from humanitarian crises in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, for instance, where acute hunger linked with climate change is contributing to internal displacement.
In the longer term, the strength of political and diplomatic resistance to the troubling aspects of Europe’s externalization agenda will depend in some measure on the African Union. The latter has been critical of Europe’s evasion of its responsibilities to accept immigration from Africa whilst offering its own genuinely exciting vision (2063) for intra-African migration, which unapologetically advocates free movement as a pathway to peace and prosperity. Together with East and West Africa’s respective regional political communities, IGAD and ECOWAS, the AU could continue to be a vehicle for progressive change. Historically, in its incarnation as the OAU, it has led the world in refugee protection by broadening the original Eurocentric focus of the Refugee Convention in 1969, and again in 2012, when the Kampala Convention on internal migration was signed. Leading analysts of East Africa and the Horn of Africa point out that the region is exemplary in the extent of protections provided by states and institutions to displaced persons. This is not to suggest they don’t have their own problems. Shrinking space for asylum in Kenya and Tanzania, for instance, has led to threats of camp closures and repatriation. South Africa, where immigration and asylum have been politicized in toxic ways with violent consequences, is wracked with xenophobia. It is to point out, rather, that they have little to learn from Europe.
The motives behind the enthusiasm of a small minority of those who wish to shelter East European women could well be less than innocent.
The agency of African society will also be asserted through the policies of individual African states, particularly where democracy and civil society are most vibrant. It is no coincidence that EU overtures have been least successful in contexts where governments are accountable for their migration policies to civil society and electorates — that is, where greater degrees of popular sovereignty and democratic culture are in evidence.
Finally, the role of the African diaspora had a noticeable impact during the Ukraine crisis, not least the actions of social worker Tokunbo Koiki, Barrister Patricia Daley and medical student Korrine Sky studying in Ukraine, who together formed a humanitarian social organization, BL4BL (Black Women for Black Lives), that raised funds to support the evacuation of Black students caught up in the warzone. In drawing attention to the neglect and in many cases, discrimination that led to the abandonment of these individuals, BL4BL made a powerful connection that points to the ways in which the global Black Lives Matter movement could in years to come expand into opposition against policies that have led to the suffering of migrants from and within Africa. The deaths and disappearances of tens of thousands who attempted to cross the Mediterranean or the Niger desert during the peak years of externalization since 2015 have thus far figured surprisingly little in debates about migration policy, except where their tragedy is used to stigmatize irregular migration and vilify “traffickers”, justifying evermore draconian controls without addressing the single biggest “root cause” of irregular migration — the absence of legal pathways to migrate. Despite the transformative impact of BLM in so many other spheres of life within the West, a certain disconnect exists between its advances and the field of migration, where, as noted earlier, experts who stubbornly downplay the importance of racism tend to dominate the conversation.
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This article is published in collaboration with the Heinrich Boll Foundation.
