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Exploiting
Africa's migrants
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
June 9, 2006
LONDON - One hundred black men
crammed together in a small boat crossing a patch of the
wild Atlantic. The Spanish know how many arrive, but have
no idea how many are lost at sea. No one mentions, either
African or Spaniard, that this island is where Thor
Heyerdahl of Kon Tiki fame made his home until he died
two years ago. The panicky feeling now dominating the
airwaves and newsprint leaves no time for either irony or
imagination.
In the local press here it's a
front-page story every day. The president of the local
Tenerife government has written to all the media asking
them "to tone down" their coverage as it is undermining
the tourist industry, the driving force in the local
economy.
Yet, as Prime Minister José
Luis Rodríguez Zapatero told parliament last week,
the number of illegal immigrants arriving in Spain has
been less over the last twelve months than it was in the
last year of the government of José María
Aznar. Aznar's effort to clamp down and persuade Morocco,
Algeria and Tunisia to tighten up controls on the
overland routes has simply pushed the would-be migrants
out to sea.
Just over thirty years ago I penned
my first article for the International Herald Tribune- on
immigration. I had spent two weeks in Senegal, Mali and
Mauritania interviewing young men who were planning to
cross the desert, find a trafficker on the Mediterranean
coast who would then secrete them in a truck and drive
them up to Paris. Paris hired these illegals by the
hundred to clean the streets. I also visited where they
lived- in abandoned factories on the outskirts of Paris,
50 men to a dormitory. In remote villages on the Senegal
river I had come across the most amazing sight- suddenly
out of the desert shrub land would rise a village,
gleaming white with fresh paint, a newly built mosque,
its minaret quavering in the heat, and along the pathways
elegant women walking along, dressed in fine damask,
parasols held aloft to hold off the dangerous sun. Young
men? There were none. The women told me they were working
in Paris and sending home a postal order every month.
Rural development? There was little sign. The remittances
had gone into paint, clothes, the mosque and a school.
The fields and goats, never particularly productive, were
even less so.
Thirty plus years later, a new
generation continues the traffic. But if the land ways
are blocked, they take the bus down to the coast and risk
their lives with a boatman who probably has never before
ventured further than 5 kilometres out to sea.
Meanwhile in Tenerife something
else is going on. Not that long ago there was no tourist
industry to speak of. The island, and its Canary
neighbours, were poverty stricken, so barely noticed by
Madrid they made an ideal place for a disaffected General
Franco to plan his coup d'etat. From the turn of the
nineteenth century onwards young men had got on rickety
steam and sailing ships and crossed the Atlantic to Cuba
and Venezuela. Today there are daily direct flights to
and from Havana and Caracas, reuniting families but often
bringing back those who never found prosperity on the
other side of the Atlantic and now realize that they will
have a better life in their homeland or their father's
homeland. Tenerife is more swamped with returning Latin
migrants than it is with Africans. Spain has no trouble
employing either group. The economy purrs ahead and
employers beseech the government not to return the boat
people to whence they came.
But rank and file Spaniards don't
like this massive African influx. They see Africa as a
bottomless pit. Racism is endemic.
So what can Spain do? The European
Union has been called in to help patrol the Atlantic. A
planeload of migrants or two are being returned to
Senegal. But the government has no intention of standing
up to the highly subsidised Spanish farmers who are
clamouring for cheap labour. No one sees the irony of the
migrants ending up helping to keep the price of Spanish
oranges and tangerines competitive with Morocco's or
Spanish early flowers and vegetables competitive with
Senegal's.
Immigration has long been an
exploitative business, and give the migrant the
alternative of working at home he will quickly return
there to a less cruel and more emotionally secure
environment, as the Cubans and Venezuelans show. Europe
should reduce its trade barriers and help make work for
the Africans at home.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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