.
“Migration as
such is abstract. Migration follows economic development. Migration follows
globalization, both within and between the region and other parts of the world”
(EU Commission, DG Home staff, Brussels)..
In the past decades Europe encountered
socio-economic changes that lastingly affected societal and economic
structures. European societies experienced a decline and an aging of their
population. This diluted the capacities of welfare state structures and
compromised the labor supply to European economies. Mismatches of sectoral
demand and supply led to the paradoxical situation of rising unemployment rates
with a concurrent increase of labor needs. Southern European states were
additionally confronted with the consequences of the EU integration processes,
since their labor forces moved to the now easily accessible and more attractive
North European markets. In order to sustain the economic equilibrium, Europe
had to ‘import’ labor forces.
Beside others, these needs were
covered by a highly mobile West African labor force. As a result of the economic and political
crisis, which the West African region experienced from the mid 1970s onwards, a
share of this mobile labor force had oriented towards the thriving Maghrebi
labor markets. By the end of the 1990s they increasingly extended towards the
needy European labor markets.
However, European popular fears on
access to welfare privileges and moral considerations of civil society on a possible
West African ‘brain drain’ continuously discouraged European governments to
setup a political framework that would channel the supply of labor migrants to
the respective sources of labor demand. While the wider popular called for the
control of what was widely perceived as refugee movements, civil society called
for an extension of European asylum systems.
Decision
makers confined themselves to the rather curious ‘no policy tools’. This
resulted in growing European informal economies and labor markets, which
attracted and absorbed illegal West African migrants. Against this background,
it is concluded that illegal migration is not the actual challenge. Rather, the
challenge is the generation of policy initiatives that respond to the eligible
but at times opposing needs of societal groups in the face of the underlying
socio-economic changes in Europe. Illegal migration is found to be a
consequence of such unmet challenges and hence has to be addressed via these. >>> read Part III. of I./II./III./IV./V./VI. <<<