Irregular migrants who made the fraught journey from Africa to Europe would do so again despite knowing the dangers of the trip,United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report said on Monday.
Some 93 per cent of almost 2,000 irregular migrants surveyed experienced danger on their journey, but only two per cent said that greater awareness of the risks would have caused them to stay home.
This and other findings emerged on Monday from a landmark report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Scaling Fences: Voices of Irregular African Migrants to Europe, produced to close gaps in the global evidence base and paint a clearer picture of why irregular migrants move from Africa to Europe.
The report, which interviewed 1,970 migrants from 39 African countries in 13 European nations, all of whom self-declared that they arrived in Europe through irregular means and not for asylum or protection-related reasons, challenges commonly held assumptions around irregular migration from Africa to Europe.
It finds that getting a job was not the only motivation to move, that not all irregular migrants were ‘poor’ in Africa, nor had lower education levels. 58 per cent were either employed or in school at the time of their departure, with the majority of those working earning competitive wages. Still, some50 percent of those working said they were not earning enough. In fact, for two-thirds of those interviewed, earning or the prospect of earning in their home countries did not hold them back from travelling.
The respondents also spent at least three years more in education than their peers.
“Scaling Fences highlights that migration is a reverberation of development progress across Africa, albeit progress that is uneven and not fast enough to meet people’s aspirations. Barriers to opportunity, or ‘choice-lessness’, emerge from this study as critical factors informing the calculation of these young people,” said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator.
“By shining a light on why people move through irregular channels and what they experience when they do,Scaling Fences contributes to a critical debate on the role of human mobility in fostering progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and the best approaches to governing it,” he said.
The report finds that for many of those who move through irregular channels to Europe from Africa, the voyage is time-bound. The findings show that more of those who did not want to stay in Europe had a legal right to work, compared to those who did want to stay – by a wide margin of 18 percentage points.
MG/abj/APA