Trends in African Migration to Europe: Drivers Beyond Economic Motivations

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractThe current migration and refugee crisis in Europe requires an understanding of the di↵erent migration drivers beyond the well-known economic determinants. In this paper, we view migration from a broader human security perspective and analyze the determinants of regular and irregular migration flows from Africa to Europe for the period 1990-2014. Our results show that, in addition to economic determinants, a combination of push and pull factors influence the migration decisions of individuals. In particular, rising political persecution, ethnic cleansing, human rights violations, political instability and civil conflicts in African source countries are all significantly associated with increased migration flows into European destination countries. Therefore, our results underscore the need for the EU and European countries to collaborate with the source countries, not only in terms of supporting economic development in the source countries, but also in promoting human security: human rights, democracy, peace and social stability.

Asylum Migration, Borders, and Terrorism in a Structural Gravity Model

“…Two recent papers suggest that political factors have become more relevant over time. Giménez-Gómez et al (2019) find that wars, civil conflicts, violations of human rights, and oppressive regimes explain economic migration and forced displacement (asylum seekers) from 51 African sources countries into 21 European destination countries between 1990 and 2014. Kang (2020) finds that political instability of the source country is the main factor explaining the determinants of the number of applications for asylum in seven EU countries from 145 origin countries in the 2008-2014 period.…”

African Asylum Seekers in Europe: The Interplay between Foreign Aid and Governance in Origin Countries

“…After controlling for destination-country fixed effects, his results show that greater political stability in the origin country significantly reduces emigration rates. Focusing on Africa, Giménez-Gómez et al (2019) explore the determinants of migration and asylum-seekers migrating to Europe over the period 1990 to 2014. The methodology is similar to that used by Hatton (2016), with the main difference being that the dependent variables are not divided by the population of the country of origin, as Kang (2021) does.…”

“…The existing literature on the determinants of asylum migration has mainly focused on evaluating the role of political instability and conflict in the origin countries as push factors (Hatton 2016;Giménez-Gómez 2019, Kang 2021. A few studies have devoted special attention to development aid (Dreher et al 2019;Murat 2020), but none have explored the interplay between governance and development aid and its relationship with migration in search of asylum.…”