Paul Tiyambe Zeleza http://www.codesria.org/Archives/ga10/papers_ga10_12/Brain_Zeleza_.

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CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN MIGRATIONS IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT: TOWARDS BUILDING

THE BLACK ATLANTIC

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Professor of History and African Studies
Director, enter for African Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, Illinois 61820, USA.

th
Essay specially written for the 10 CODESRIA General Assembly, Kampala, Uganda, December 8-12, 2002.

© Draft. Not to be quoted without the explicit permission of the author.

Introduction

Migrations from the South to the North are sometimes seen as representing civilizational counter-penetration,
revolutionary cosmopolitanism, and cultural transnationalism. The culturalist biases of these perspectives tend to ignore a
fundamental feature of international migration, that more often than not people migrate to sell their labor power and that
the patterns of migration, labor procurement, and utilization are conditioned by the dynamics of capitalist development,
expansion, and accumulation. Not only is international migration tied to the changing dynamics of capitalism as a world
system, it constitutes a critical element of the international division of labor. The essay takes the view that the cultural
and economic processes of international migration are intertwined; that African migrations are as much a part of the
complex mosaic of transnational cultural flows as they are of labor and other economic flows. It begins with a general
outline of the dynamics and directions of contemporary global migrations before surveying the patterns and trends of
African migrations to the North, the theoretical explanations that have been advanced to account for it, and closes with
suggestions of turning this developmental deficit into a potential asset, especially for African intellectual production.

Dynamics and Directions of Global Mobility

The late twentieth century has been characterized as the age of globalization marked by the rapid movements of capital,
commodities, and cultures, of images, ideas, and institutions. To what extent can it also be seen as "the age of
migration," to quote the title of Castles and Miller's book? Going by the hysterical pronouncements of politicians and the
media, especially in the North, and the inflated rhetoric by the academic seers of globalization one would think the world
is undergoing massive and unprecedented waves of international migration. The reality is far more complex than is
apparent from much of the popular discourses and celebrations or condemnations of globalization and transnationalism.
The available evidence points to two broad conclusions. First, while the number of international migrants has grown
significantly in absolute numbers since the 1960s, the percentage of people who have left and remained outside their
countries of origin has remained remarkably steady and small. Second, there have been significant changes in the
character and direction of international migration.

The flow of people at the global level has lagged behind the flows of capital and commodities. Accurate data for global
population movements currently do not exist. The available estimates indicate that the number of foreign-born persons,
including migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers, in 243 countries or territories constituting the world in 1985 increased
from 75 million in 1965 to 120 million in 1990, implying an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent, which was only slightly
above the global population growth rate of 1.8 percent. There was hardly any change in the proportion of migrants in the
world population; their percentage remained at 2.3 percent between 1965 and 1990. As might be expected, there were
considerable variations within each major world region. Also, less remarkable than often thought, has been the
percentage of women among international immigrants; it rose from 46.6 percent to 47.7 percent between 1965 and
1990.

While the quantitative magnitude of international migration is not as extensive as it is often assumed, the changes in the
composition and direction of international migration have been quite profound. We can isolate two critical developments.

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First, there has been growing diversification of sending and receiving countries. Second, skilled migration has assumed
greater importance both in terms of the actual flows and in the formulation of migration policies at national, regional, and
international levels. The number of countries accounting for 90 percent of international migrants grew from 44 to 55
between 1965 and 1990. In terms of regional destinations, the share of the developing countries declined from 59.6
percent in 1965 to 54.7 percent in 1990, while that of the developed countries rose from 40.4 percent to 45.3 percent. It
is evident that despite the increase in the migrant populations of the North, the majority of international migrants still
circulated among the countries of the South.

How does Africa compare to the other regions? Between 1965 and 1990, Africa's migrant population grew at a faster
rate than any other region in the world, so that the continent increased its share of international migrants from 10.6
percent to 13.1 percent, although Asia remained the region with the largest number and percentage of global migrants,
followed by Europe, and North America. By 1995, African countries were only second to European countries in the
numbers of economically active migrants they hosted, excluding refugees and asylum-seekers. There were between 36
and 42 million such people globally, and when their dependants are added, there were a total of 80 to 97 million
migrants. Clearly, a lot of Africans who migrate go to other African countries.

Over the last forty years, South-North migration flows have fluctuated and not maintained a consistent pattern. The
Southern countries have gradually come to dominate immigration into the Northern countries. This has led to the
racialization of immigrants in the North, which, in turn, has shattered the assimilationist promises of previous intra-
Northern migration flows. Immigrants become an alibi for national failings; their presence serves both as threads that tie
together and threats that tear asunder the cherished but increasingly troubled marriage between nation and state. There
are considerable temporal, national, and regional variations. The available data reveals that the rise in South-North
migration has been more pronounced in the traditional countries of immigration, such as the United States, Canada, and
Australia, than in Europe. Thus, while the proportion of immigrants from the South between 1960-1964 and 1990-1994
increased from 41.1 percent of all immigrants to 79 percent in the United States, 12.3 percent to 78.4 percent in
Canada, and 7.1 percent to 81.4 percent in Australia, the equivalent ratios for 1990-94 were 46.2 percent in Belgium,
15.5 percent in Germany, and 45.3 percent in Sweden. It is quite evident that in Europe, intra-regional and East-West
migration was as important, and sometimes larger than, South-North migration.

Migration to the North in the 1990s is characterized by several new trends amidst the persistence of old ones. There has
been a reduction in legal immigration flows in the majority of OECD countries since 1993, although migration still plays a
significant role in annual population growth as domestic fertility rates continue to fall and aging of the native population
accelerates. Also, there has been a decrease in the number of asylum claims, but an increase in the relative importance
of temporary and highly skilled workers in the total flows, while immigration for family reunion continues to predominate.
As a part of this, the relative share of family members accompanying foreign workers has risen, accounting for
approximately half of family-related immigration in Canada. Not only has the foreign labor force grown in almost all the
OECD countries, it has spread to more sectors, including the services and self-employment, although foreigners continue
to be more vulnerable to unemployment than nationals, particularly in Europe. In such countries as Australia, Canada,
and Switzerland foreigners constituted between 14 and 18 percent of total employment in 1996; in the United States,
Germany, Belgium, France, and Sweden their share was between 5 and 10 percent; and it was less than 5 percent in
Norway, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

The decline in legal immigration and asylum flows can partly be explained by the adoption of restrictive immigration
policies among many of the OECD countries. In addition, there is more regional policy harmonization through the
European Union in the case of Western Europe and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area) in the case of North
America. These associations, in turn, have sometimes signed agreements with some of the major sending countries in
the South to regulate immigration and facilitate the voluntary return of immigrants. But the long-term efficacy of restrictive
state policies in controlling the volume and composition of international migration remains unclear.

Indicative of the confusion and challenges is the fact that contradictory efforts were being made at the same time to
integrate immigrants. On the one hand, regularization programs were being promoted as immigrant rights were being
eroded, on the other. Between 1995 and 1998 regularization drives of undocumented foreigners were launched in Italy,
Portugal, Spain, France, and Greece, and limited amnesty measures were adopted for select groups of immigrants and
asylum seekers in Germany and the United States in 1996 and 1997, respectively. But the rates of naturalizations
remained low, except for the United States and in Germany for ethnic Germans. Assistance programs for new
immigrants were curtailed and immigrant civic and political rights reduced or threatened even in the United States. And
the dreams of building multicultural societies were increasingly imperiled by the rising specter of racism, violence, and
discrimination against foreigners, especially those from the South.

Amidst all this, the formation of new ethnic communities and ethnic minorities continued, reshaping the political and

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cultural landscapes of both the receiving and sending countries. In fact, as Tomas Hammar has observed, a new
category of aliens was emerging, "neither aliens nor full citizens, but something in between which we might call
‘denizens.’ Still foreign citizens, they now possess considerable rights also in the countries where they are domiciled,"
including voting rights in local elections as is the case in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. The rise of the "denizens"
raised fundamental questions about the interface between nation-state and citizenship, and fostered demands for plural
identifications based on multiple residences rather than symbolic allegiance to a monolithic national identity. In recognition
of this emerging reality, some countries began to accept dual citizenship, a process that enabled migrants to participate
in the politics of both their countries of origin and countries of settlement. This is a route African countries might want to
consider as a way of limiting the losses of skilled migration to the North.

African Migration to Western Europe and North America African Migration to Western Europe and North America

It was in this complex maelstrom of rapidly changing international migration that African immigrants, including the
intellectual elites among them, found themselves. African migration to Europe has generally tended to follow the historical
and linguistic trails of colonialism, so that Britain and France are the preferred destinations of migrants from the former
British and French colonies, respectively. Nevertheless, African migration has become more diffuse and spread to the
northern countries, principally Germany and the Netherlands, as well as the southern ones, including Italy, Spain, and
Portugal, which had until the 1970s themselves been countries of emigration.

France boasts the longest history of immigration in modern Europe, dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century.
After the Second World War, France pursued expansive immigration policies to sustain economic reconstruction and
growth and boost its population. Moreover, there was widespread confidence in the country’s capacity to absorb and
integrate the newcomers. The consensus for an open immigration regime crumbled as both the postwar boom and the
self-assured Gaulist era came to an end at the beginning of the 1970s. It was during this very period that African
immigration began to expand, which ensured that migrants would be at the center of painful debates about French
identity and citizenship, especially since, like in the other industrialized countries, it reflected important shifts in the
composition of previous flows dominated by fellow Europeans and Christians.

French immigration policy became increasingly restrictive as the traditional external control of borders and internal
regulation of labor markets were reinforced by a new strategy of attacking and limiting the rights of established
immigrants. Nevertheless, African immigration continued to rise both absolutely and relatively, dominated by the three
North African countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Altogether, African immigrants increased their share of the total
immigrant population from 24.7 percent in 1975 to 33.0 percent in 1990. In the 1990s over half of the immigrants into
France from non-European Economic Area countries came from Africa, roughly a quarter from Asia and the balance
from the Americas (14 percent) and non-EEA Europe (11 percent). Similarly, in 1996 half of the 109,800 foreigners who
acquired French nationality, half involved African nationals and around a quarter Europeans.

Despite its massive exports of migrants, Britain’s immigrant population has historically been lower than that of France.
Foreigners made up 3.2 percent of the total population between 1986 and 1990 and 3.4 per cent between 1994 and
1996. As in France, the composition of immigration began to change noticeably from the 1960s as more immigrants
started to flow in from the ex-colonies, especially the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent. This also triggered bitter
debate about immigration, leading to stringent restrictions that culminated in a clamp down by Thatcher’s government in
the early 1980s. The racialization of the immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, R. Miles (1991) has argued,
evoked and reinforced the racialization of earlier European immigrants, especially the Irish and Jews, as well as the
othering of the domestic working class, processes which were critical in the construction and reproduction of British
national identity.

Notwithstanding the restrictions, migrants from the so-called New Commonwealth increased. Specifically immigration
from western and eastern Africa increased from 79,000 in 1984 to 127,000 in 1995, of whom 69,000 were women. In
the 1990s migrants from Africa and the Indian subcontinent accounted for the largest group undertaking naturalization.
Between 1993 and 1996, 32,400 Africans were granted citizenship in the United Kingdom, out of a total of 173,400
citizenship grants. As for the labor force, in 1996 African immigrants comprised 10 percent of the total foreign labor
force, estimated at a little over 2 million, as compared to 23 percent for those from Asia and 40 percent for migrants
from the European Union.

Besides France and Britain, the other former colonial powers that have attracted immigrants from their former colonies
are Belgium and Portugal. Belgium has been a popular destination for migrants from the Democratic Republic of the
Congo. Between 1991 and 1996 Belgium attracted 12,700 Congolese immigrants, which was, however, a tiny fraction -
2.7 percent - of the total number of immigrants. For its part, Portugal pulled immigrants from its former colonies of Cape
Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. By 1996 there were 72,900 immigrants from these countries, 54.3

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percent of who were from Cape Verde, out of a total immigrant population of 172,900. Thus, the share of African
immigrants was 42.2 percent; up from 39.5 percent in 1988 when there were a total of 94,700 immigrants.

In the 1970s and 1980s noticeable numbers of immigrants from several African countries began flocking to other
European countries with which they had no colonial ties. Among the most popular were Germany and the Netherlands.
The leading African source of immigrants to these two countries was Morocco, whose inflows into Germany totaled
43,700 between 1988 and 1996, and into the Netherlands 72,200 between 1986 and 1996. In 1995 there were an
estimated 138,700 Moroccans in the Netherlands, the largest group among the country’s foreign-born population. By
1996 Moroccans had become the leading immigrant group in two other countries, Italy and Spain, with 119,500 and
77,200 immigrants, representing 10.9 and 14.3 percent of the total foreign-born population, respectively. Another African
country to feature among the leading fifteen sources of immigrants into the Netherlands was Somalia, whose numbers
rose from 3,600 in 1990 to 17,200 in 1995, the fastest growing immigrant population during this period. Somalia also
featured among the leading sources of immigrants for Denmark – from 600 in 1992 to 9,700 in 1996. Somalia became
the fourth largest source of immigrants for Finland, although the numbers were small, 4,600 in 1996, out of a total of
73,800 immigrants. For its part, Sweden became an important destination for Ethiopians whose numbers reached
13,200 in 1993.

Clearly, African immigration to Europe was marked by increasing diversification both in the number of countries sending
and receiving the immigrants. Particularly remarkable was the emergence of the southern European countries, such as
Italy, Portugal and Spain, themselves emigration countries, as immigration countries. Enclosed in a new European
transnational space, new identities of ethnicity and citizenship began to emerge that entailed creating both symbolic and
material borders to keep away or distinguish the immigrants. The Europeanization of these countries and the rebordering
of the Mediterranean that it implied required the separation and stigmatization of immigrants from the South as disruptive
and threatening, a discourse that promoted their racialization, marginalization, pathologization, and even criminalization,
which in turn bred popular antagonism, institutional discrimination, and sometimes racist violence.

Equally rapid has been the growth of African migration to North America, especially the United States. Prior to the
twentieth century, African migrations to the Americas were dominated by slavery. After the staggered abolitions of the
European and American slave trades and the end of African forced migration, only small numbers of Africans left the
continent to settle in North America as compared to other immigrant groups. From 1820 to 1993 – excluding slaves -- the
United States only took in 418,000 African immigrants, while 345,425 Asians came in 1993 alone. American census data
covering the period 1850 to 1990 shows that the number of African born migrants in the US population rose from 2,538
in 1900, climbing to 18,326 in 1930, 35,355 in 1960, and 363,819 in 1990. Thus more than three-quarters of the African
migrants in 1990 have entered the country since 1970.

As rapid as this may seem, Africans accounted for a small proportion of immigrants to the United States. By 1990
African immigrants constituted only 1.9 per cent of the total US foreign-born population, up from 0.4 per cent in 1960.
The share of the African immigrants increased to 6 per cent in 1996. In the meantime, there was also a precipitous fall in
the proportion of European and Canadian immigrants, and a sharp rise for Asian and Latin American immigrants, which
provoked an anti-immigrant backlash. Notwithstanding the regional shifts in the sources of immigrants, the large-scale
increase of the United States’ foreign-born population from 1970 mirrored trends a century earlier. By 1970 immigrants
accounted for 4.7 per cent of the US population, the lowest level since 1850, rising to 6.2 per cent in 1980, and to an
estimated 9.7 per cent in 1997. Numerically this represented an increase in the size of the immigrant population from 9.6
million in 1970 to 14.1 million in 1981, 19.8 million in 1990, and 22 million in 1994. The last time the numbers of
foreign-born people in the United States had topped 14 million was in 1930.

The relatively low rates and levels of voluntary immigration from Africa to the US until the 1960s can be attributed both to
restrictive US policies against non-European immigration and the reluctance and inability of colonized African populations
to migrate in any significant numbers outside the continent. It is instructive to note that the largest numbers of African
immigrants to the US in 1960 came from Egypt and South Africa, which supplied 8,316 and 5,394, respectively, of the
35,355 African immigrants. Both countries had relatively advanced economies, had been sovereign for many years, and
their migrants were, in the case of South Africa, largely white, or in the case of Egypt considered as white under US
immigration law. From the 1970s significant changes began taking place in the regional and national distribution of
African immigrants to the U.S.

Between 1980 and 1990 West Africa overtook North Africa, although Egypt remained in first place, followed by Nigeria,
and Ethiopia, which surpassed South Africa, then Ghana, Morocco, and Kenya. The magnitude of the migration flows
from Africa to the United States appears to be positively correlated, as Bernard Logan has argued, to population size,
economic system and conditions, language policy, the development of higher education, and colonial legacy, so that the
largest numbers of African migrants have tended to come from countries with "a large population; a pro-western,

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capitalist outlook; speakers of English, rather than any other European language; unstable economic conditions; a long
history of well-established higher education; and a colonial legacy that had not been too culturally dominant."

It is difficult to predict future flows of African immigrants to the United States. In so far as family migration constitutes the
main component of permanent immigration into the country, accounting for 65 percent in 1996, more Africans are likely
to enter as family members as their relations resident in the US adopt American citizenship. The number of Africans
acquiring United States citizenship has grown steadily, rising from 7,122 in 1988 to 21,842 in 1996, which represented
2.9 and 2.1 percent, respectively, of the total acquisitions. Altogether, 108,441 Africans became naturalized Americans
during this period. Also, Africans are likely to benefit from the program, introduced in 1995, to increase the diversity of
countries sending migrants to the United States, under which 55,000 permanent permits are granted annually to nationals
of countries, which do not send many immigrants.

Canada has also become an increasingly attractive destination for African immigrants. Africa’s immigrant population in
Canada increased from 101,700 in 1981 to 166,200 in 1991 that is at an annual rate of 6.3 percent. As a percentage of
the total immigrant population, the African share rose from 2.6 percent in 1981 to 3.8 percent in 1991, while the share of
the immigrant population in the total population remained steady at 16.1 percent both in 1981 and 1991. Women
constituted a little over half the total immigrant population. The share of African women among African immigrants was
slightly less than half. Specifically, they comprised 47.7 percent of African immigrants in 1981 and 46.6 percent in 1991.

The growth of African immigration to Canada becomes clearer when we examine figures for annual inflows of permanent
settlers. The inflows of permanent settlers from Africa increased from 7,400 in 1985 to 36,100 in 1996, that is, from 8.8
percent to 16 percent of total inflows. All combined 294,100 Africans were admitted into Canada as permanent residents
between 1985 and 1996. The number of Africans taking Canadian citizenship has grown accordingly, as more Africans
pass the three year lag between receiving landed immigrant status, the term used for permanent residence status, and
the ability to apply for citizenship. While immigration under family sponsorship is important, Canada more than the United
States has put growing emphasis on the migration of skilled workers and business people. In 1997, for example, only 28
percent of immigrants were in the family class, 49 percent were in the skilled worker class, 9 percent in the business
class, and 11 percent were refugees.

Causes, Courses, and Consequences of African Migration

African migration to the North is part of a much older story of African global migrations, going back in modern times to
the tragic days of the European slave trade when millions of shackled African men and women were shipped to the
Americas, at once a painful moment and a poignant metaphor that established the subsequent tapestry of African-
European-American relations. A cruel reminder that for the victims and combatants of western barbarity, globalization -
the dispersal of individuals, ideas, ideologies, and institutions - did not start yesterday with the Internet. Contemporary
patterns of African overseas migration are woven in intricate and complex ways in the older processes, each successive
wave creating new layers of memories and meanings, new braided histories of Africa and its diaspora.

The literature on the causes, courses, and consequences of international immigration is rich and controversial. Much of it
is still trapped in the old "push-pull" model, while the newer perspectives of transnationalism tend to emphasize the
novelty of contemporary patterns and processes of international migration. Several theories have emerged to fill the
explanatory void left by the often blunt "push-pull" paradigm, each employing radically different concepts, assumptions,
and frames of reference, that seek to explain the factors that first, initiate, and second, perpetuate international
migration, and third, that attempt to assess the effects of international migration on both the sending and receiving
countries. Some emphasize economic factors and motivations; others offer political or sociological perspectives and
propositions.

The economic theories can be grouped into four. The first two, despite their differences in terms of units of analysis and
assumptions about the motivations and contexts of migration decision-making, are essentially micro-level decision
models, while the other two offer structural and global perspectives. In the neoclassical economic model, international
migration is seen, at a macro level, as the result of wage differentials and employment conditions between countries
which, at a micro level, propels individuals as rational actors making cost-benefit calculations to migrate in pursuit of
income maximization. In contrast, the "new economics of migration" attributes migration decisions to households, not
simply isolated individuals, seeking both to maximize income absolutely and relative to other households and to minimize
risks associated with a variety of economic failures in addition to those in the labor market.

As is common in much neo-classical economics, these theories tend to reify migration, ignoring the historical, institutional,
and structural contexts in which it occurs. Some research suggests, in fact, that absolute poverty is a barrier to
migration, except for the "survival migration" induced by war or natural catastrophes, and that rising incomes in

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developing countries actually stimulate migration if it entails rising agricultural productivity which releases more labor from
agriculture than can find employment in the nascent industries. Emigration persists for as long as economic development
continues, which eventually leads to fertility decline and rising demand for labor, until a point of transition is reached from
emigration to immigration. Often neglected in the neo-classical economics literature is the role of the state in regulating
migration flows through its control over borders.

The dual market theory and world systems theory focus largely on broad structural forces operating in the world
economy as keys to understanding migration flows, their size, direction and persistence. They emphasize the dynamic
nature and interdependence and reciprocity of migration between sending and receiving countries. Proponents of the
dual labor market theory argue that international migration is caused not by push factors in the sending countries but by
pull factors in the receiving countries, by the structural requirements of the modern industrial economies for low wage
and low status jobs in labor markets that are segmented and where the traditional sources of entry-level workers -
women and teenagers - have progressively shrunk. In contrast, the world system theorists see international immigration,
not as the result of recent processes of market segmentation in particular industrial economies, let alone wage rate or
employment differentials between countries, but as the natural outcome of capitalist economic expansion that began in
the sixteenth century. The penetration of capitalist market relations in peripheral, noncapitalist societies, the argument
goes, creates disruptions and dislocations that produce mobile and migratory populations. Besides internal capitalist
transformations and thickening external ties of trade, financial transactions, transportation and communications,
globalization also generates ideological and cultural linkages, constantly reinforced by mass communication and
advertising campaigns, which foster popular and seductive consumerist images of the North that stoke the circuits of
international migration.

These theories need not be mutually exclusive. A process as complex as international migration cannot but be the result
of equally complex forces operating at various levels in space and time. Individuals and households make migration
decisions in the context of structural and historical forces that they often do not control, that are defined by uneven
development between countries and societies and unequal flows of capital, commodities, communication, and cultures,
that create connections and networks which blur neat distinctions between sending and receiving countries. Much of the
literature on African international migration tends to emphasize the operation of both economic and political factors.
There is overwhelming evidence that political pressures produce large flows of refugees and other migrants, including
otherwise patriotic professionals who are driven abroad to save their lives and serve the struggles against tyranny. It
follows that unless and until the political conditions improve there can be no hope for stemming the emigration of
workers, professionals, and intellectuals. According to research survey of African immigrant professionals in the United
States by Kofi Apraku (1991), 52% of respondents ranked political dictatorship and lack of freedom in their home
countries as being either very important or somewhat important in their decision to emigrate, compared to 66% who
cited the economic situation in their country as the motivating factor behind their migration.

There can be little doubt that international migration flows are determined by conditions in both the sending and receiving
countries, including the state of the economy, political stability and freedoms, and immigration law, all of which are
affected by broader forces in the global political economy. The acceleration of African migration to the United States
from the 1980s can be accounted for by the deteriorating economic and political conditions, which were exacerbated,
some would say caused, by the imposition of draconian structural adjustment policies by the international financial
institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that entailed economic retrenchment and
reinforced state authoritarianism. Also, American immigration law and policies became less restrictive for African
immigrants. For example, as noted earlier from 1995 out of an annual immigration lottery of 55,000 offered by the US
government, some 21,000 were reserved for Africans.

Whatever might initiate immigration, the factors and forces that perpetuate it can be quite different. Several theories
have been developed to account for the rise of new conditions that emerge in the course of international migration that
sustain it and function as independent causes for further migration. The first is network theory, according to which the
networks that arise in the course of migration and which link migrants, former migrants, and nonimmigrant in sending and
receiving countries through kinship, friendship, and community ties constitute an expanding pool of social and cultural
capital that lower the costs and risks and raise the benefits of movement, and therefore increase the likelihood of
international migration. As conduits of resources in the form of information and assistance including remittances, social
networks mediate between individual actors and larger structural forces. Studying them permits understanding migration
as a contingent social product and process conditioned by historically generated social, political, and economic
structures of both sending and receiving countries.

The second is institutional theory, which argues that as migration expands profit-seeking and humanitarian institutions,
organizations, and entrepreneurs develop to service both legal and illegal migrants, especially as restrictive immigration
policies are adopted by the receiving countries, that serve to institutionalize and promote international migration

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irrespective of the causes that originally started it. In short, the "migration industry," as Castles (1999) calls it, facilitates
international legal migration flows, as well as illegal trafficking, which "form part of the burgeoning global criminal
economy, which is an integral part of globalization." The third theory, cumulative causation, maintains that migration
brings about changed social, economic, and cultural contexts, which affect subsequent migrations. In other words, each
migration decision is influenced by previous migrations, which alter the regional distribution of income, land, and human
capital, the organization of productive activities, and the culture and social meanings of migration and work. In the
sending countries migration can become an esteemed rite of passage, while in the receiving countries occupations
dominated by immigrants can become culturally labeled "immigrant jobs," and therefore shunned by native workers,
thereby reinforcing the structural demand for immigrants.

Once again, there is little that is intrinsically incompatible among the three theories. Each explains an important dynamic
and dimension of the migration process. It stands to reason that migration involves both social networks and enabling
institutions and is a cumulative process. The interplay between these factors obviously varies in specific contexts.
Increasingly, international migration has come to be seen as an integral part of globalization, or the phenomenon known
as "transnationalism," a social process in which migrants establish social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and
political borders. Viewing international migration from the transnational perspective has serious implications on how
immigrants should be viewed by both sending and receiving countries and how migration is analyzed. First, it means that
migrants who settle permanently are not necessarily betraying their nation or are culturally alienated, for they develop
and maintain familiar, economic, political, cultural, social, religious, and recreational contacts with their home countries.
Second, they cannot be viewed in the host countries simply as visitors who have no rights and no right to demand rights
and who should go "home" if they don't like things as they are. Third, the absolute distinction between settlement and
return migration becomes questionable. The settler migrants need not be seen as worse than the return migrants, for as
long as the former maintain links with their areas of origin they can be as important as the latter for development in terms
of making economic, political, and cultural contributions.

The case for the multiplicity of immigrants' involvements, concerns, actions, and decisions that span borders is quite
compelling. Less so is the argument that this is new, that contemporary transnational migration differs significantly from
previous migration experience, as Glick Schiller, et al. (1992) and many others contend. Besides the development of
rapid communications and transportation systems that facilitate contacts and connections between migrants, or
transmigrants, and their home societies, it is not clear what is really new about today's migration experiences and
processes in the North, except perhaps that they increasingly affect and are dominated by peoples from the South.
Quantitatively, the current volumes of migration are not historically unprecedented. Nor is it useful to claim that
transnationalism implies the demise of such bounded imaginary and material spatio-temporal constructions of ethnic
groups and nations, let alone states.

This raises a series of questions about the consequences of migration for the migrants themselves as well as for their
countries of origin and their countries of immigration. How do African migrants fare and adapt in the North? What is the
impact of their migration on their home and host countries? Much of the literature has focused on the economic
dimensions of these questions. This essay does not discuss the economic effects of African immigrants on the receiving
countries. As might be expected, given the diverse social and national origins and profiles of African migrants to the
North and of the countries they migrate to, it is not easy to generalize on how well or poorly they fair and adapt. The
theoretical literature compounds the difficulties given the variety of models that seek to explain the performance of
migrants. One is human capital theory, according to which education and training are important determinants of income
and occupation. Some studies inspired by this theory make claims of immigrant superiority, that immigrants, even if they
are not always composed of "the best and the brightest" of migration folklore, tend to be self-selective and highly
motivated, qualities that are invaluable for adaptation and success. Others emphasize that immigrants arrive in the host
country with many handicaps, including sometimes lack of language skills, knowledge of the job market, local customs,
values, and the social structure, which impedes their assimilation or adaptation. Human capital theory tends to assume
that economic discrimination is irrational and exogenous.

Other theories take labor market discrimination as a given and seek to explain it. One explanatory model sees it in terms
of job segregation or closure by dominant groups who limit the eligibility of new members to high-rewarding occupations.
The split labor market thesis postulates that the market is divided along racial, gender and other hierarchized lines along
which rewards are unequally distributed. Immigrants are positioned accordingly. The succession model predicts that a
group that arrives last occupies the bottom position in economic rankings as previous groups progressively move up the
occupational hierarchy. A version of this model, the queue theory, suggests that employer preferences often determine
rankings on the labor queue, which may result in some groups being selected for jobs, which may be high paying. The
rankings are often determined by ethnic and racial characteristics. Many studies show that there is a cost to being a
racial or ethnic minority in the Northern countries. From these perspectives, African migrants can be expected to suffer

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triple subordination: as immigrants, as people who arrived recently, and as people many of whom are black.

Not surprisingly, there is little agreement on the fate of African migrants in the North. Different samples, methods, and
measures have yielded conflicting and confusing results. Tales abound of African immigrants suffering the indignities of
racism, loneliness, and otherness, and the iniquities of unemployment and underemployment. But there are also
numerous stories of African immigrants flourishing and prospering in their adopted countries. Many succeed in enjoying
the comforts of their new citizenship. Disagreement has mostly centered on the educational and income differentials
between African immigrants and other immigrants and the host populations. In the United States, for example, one
school argues that the African immigrants compare extremely well with those of the host American population and other
immigrant populations. But there are studies which give a different picture that despite their relatively high levels of
education (nearly half had a college education higher than European, Asian, and Latin American migrants and native-born
Americans only 17% of whom had a college education) the mean earnings of African immigrants were less than those of
other immigrants such as those from the Caribbean and other racial minorities such as African Americans. This would
seem to suggest that in addition to a racial tax, African immigrants pay a cultural tax, the devaluation of their human
capital in a society where things African are routinely negatively stereotyped and despised. One more reason why the
African immigrants cannot escape Africa and have to be concerned about its development: its shadows of
underdevelopment cast a pall over how they are perceived and perform in the North. Clearly, the odyssey of African
immigrants in the North seems to be filled with triumph and tragedy, fulfillment and frustration, impressive successes and
ignominious failures.

No less difficult to determine is the relative economic impact of immigration on the sending and receiving countries. One
school of thought argues that migration contributes to underdevelopment in that it drains sending areas of their human
labor and capital that took enormous resources to nurture and produce. UNCTAD, for example, has estimated that one
highly trained African migrant between 25 and 35 - the age group into which most of the Africans going abroad fall -
represents a cash value of $184, 000 at 1979 prices. Not only are remittances insufficient to compensate for such
losses, they increase dependency, contribute to political instability, engender economic distortions, and hinder
development because they are unpredictable and undependable and encourage the consumption of goods with high
import content. Those who contend that migration promotes development argue that remittances improve income
distribution and quality of life by loosening production and investment constraints faced by households in the sending
countries. "The reality," J. Edward Taylor (1998), correctly points out, "lies somewhere between these two extremes." It
all depends on the context, countries, and communities involved.

The exact magnitude of international migrant remittances is unknown since a large portion is not channeled through
formal banking systems or made up of cash-transfers. Nevertheless, available estimates indicate that there has been
rapid growth in the volume of global remittances in recent decades, from less than $2 billion in 1970 to $70 billion in
1995, surpassing official development assistance. The top five countries in combined remittances during this period were
France, Mexico, Portugal, Egypt, and the Philippines. By 1994 Egypt actually ranked first in the world with just over $5
billion, followed by India with nearly $5 billion, and Mexico with $3.7 billion. Another African country with significant
remittances was Morocco with $2.1 billion. Not many economy-wide studies have been conducted on the effects of
migrant remittances on African countries, except for Egypt and a few others. Much of Egypt's remittances came from
the oil-rich Gulf countries. On the one hand, migration has been credited with being a major source of foreign exchange
for the Egyptian economy, improving wages and living standards, while on the other it has been blamed for shortages of
skilled workers, inflationary pressures, a high demand for imports, external dependency, conspicuous consumption, and
a diminishing work ethic.

Studies done elsewhere present the same contradictory conclusions -- remittances can have both negative and positive
impacts. They may reduce or reverse the lost-labor-and-capital effects of migration if their size exceed the value of
production lost as a result of emigration, and if they enable economic agents in the sending areas to overcome capital
and other constraints on production activities. Remittance-use studies have shortcomings that limit their ability to
determine conclusively the positive or negative developmental impact of remittances. To begin with, most remittance use
surveys tend to assume a naive model of how remittances influence the expenditures of receiving households because
they do not provide information on remittances' contribution to total household income and how expenditures change as a
result. Second, they ignore the impact on the wider community whose production may be influenced by the remittances
even if the receiving households use them primarily for consumption, as most remittance-use studies seem to indicate.
Furthermore, it is often not appreciated that the locales across which the impact of remittances can be determined vary
in terms of the migrants' own remittance behavior, resource endowments, and market and economic policy contexts, so
that the remittances can contribute to development in some sending areas, but not in others. Finally, often left undefined
is the whole question of what constitutes "development" and the benchmarks that should be used in assessing the
developmental impact of migrant remittances.

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But even those who hold positive views of the developmental effects of remittances concede, to quote one such author,
"the volume of remittances between 1965 and 1985 is a fraction of the debt burden of developing countries...
Remittances have not declined precipitously nor led to other dire results to be expected from the pessimistic framework
used by some to analyze and evaluate their functions. Nor have they generally been the transition to sustained economic
growth that resulted in narrowing the North-South economic gaps" (Keeley, 1989: 524). Such realities have kept alive the
debate about "the appropriateness and feasibility, both in terms of economics and legality, of the so-called Bhagwati
proposal which calls for income transfers via taxation from the emigrant professionals to those left behind" (Miyagiwa,
1991: 744).

Impatient governments of sending countries and guilt-ridden international development agencies have sought to stem the
tide of emigration in three main ways, through regulatory or restrictive policies, delinking policies, and incentive policies.
The first involves the imposition of stringent passport regulations and foreign exchange allocations, requiring students to
sign bonding agreements, and devising taxation and compensation schemes. Until the early 1970s, for example,
Egyptians working abroad were obliged to transfer to Egypt up to 25% of their foreign incomes. There is little evidence
that such policies act as much of a deterrent to determined emigrants. Under the so-called "de-linking" policies, a nation
seeks to domesticate and divorce its educational systems from international standards that facilitate the migration of
professionals. The incentive policies attempt to induce skilled people to stay at home or to return from abroad either
permanently or periodically. These include the assistance programs financed by the International Organization for
Migration and the UNDP's Transfer of Knowledge Through Expatriate Nationals. By the end of 1994 IOM's program had
assisted 1,2000 African migrants to return to six target countries: Ghana, Kenya, Somalia (until 1991), Uganda, Zambia,
and Zimbabwe.

Bridging the Black Atlantic

It is easy to see African intellectual migration to the North as an unmitigated economic, political, and cultural disaster for
Africa. Remittances from them and other migrants, while important for the families and communities of the migrants and
sometimes for some countries in their national balance of payments, do not seem to compensate for the net losses of
their productivity and potential contributions to national development. It has also been argued that the intellectual
migrations deprive civil society of the organizational political skills of middle class professionals. That explains, according
to the critics, why while African governments publicly decry the migration of their intellectuals, they do little to create
conditions that would stem it.

All this may be true, but it forecloses the possibility that the migrants can also be turned into assets for Africa. In so far
as many of the migrants may not return, despite the proverbial wishes of migrants to return home "someday," African
countries and the migrants themselves need to devise creative strategies that exploit and enhance the potential benefits
of African skilled emigration. Demands on the Northern countries to compensate African countries and others in the
South for the emigration of their skilled personnel and lost human capital, which have been made, are not likely to go far.
It might be more fruitful to concentrate on how African migrants in the North can constitute themselves into an effective
political and economic lobby for Africa, by actively campaigning for African causes, cultivating old and new alliances and
constituencies for Africa, and forming new linkages with their counterparts on the continent.

Africa and its diaspora have not always effectively mobilized to serve and advance each other's interests as has been
the case, for example, between the Jewish diaspora and Israel, or increasingly the Chinese diaspora and China. Israel's
clout in Washington has less to do with the economic importance of Israel to the United States than with the political
clout of the Jewish lobby, which others such as Randall Robinson's TransAfrica have sought to replicate for Africa and
the Caribbean, although not always reciprocated from the African side (Robinson, 1998). Similarly, China's rapid
economic development in recent decades has been fueled to some extent by investment from the overseas Chinese. The
new African diaspora and their offspring in the United States who Mazrui calls the American Africans, can help invigorate
the re-awakened interest in Africa among the historic African American diaspora and serve as a Trans-Atlantic bridge, as
cultural mediators between Africa and Africa America, whose communication and knowledge of each other have largely
been through the distorted lenses and prejudices of imperialist and racist media.

Immigrant African intellectuals, as cultural producers, have an important and specific role to play in brokering relations
between Africa and the North, in blackening the Atlantic. They must resist the seductions of the Northern academies to
become native ventriloquists, complicit authentic others who validate narratives that seek to marginalize Africa. Nor
should they let themselves be manipulated as a fifth column in the North's eternal racial wars by disavowing the
protracted struggles of historic African diaspora communities for the full citizenship of racial equality, economic
empowerment, and political power. Solidarity requires respect for each other's struggles and recognition of our splendid
diversities anchored on a strategic racial essentialism, in so far as it is the historical racialization of our humanity that has
produced and continues to reproduce our collective exploitation and denigration whether in Africa or the North.

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Migrant African intellectuals should not be seen solely in the magisterial role of Edward Said's cosmopolitan
revolutionaries or the ministerial role of Ali Mazrui's teachers subverting the North through counter-penetration. They are
both students and teachers of African and Northern societies, cultural workers and producers who should, in solidarity
with historic African diaspora communities, construct knowledges of their multiple worlds that demystify the roots of
Africa's and diaspora Africa's oppression and exploitation; knowledges that seek to empower their communities; that
expose and confront the tyrannies of Northern imperial power and Africa's dictators; that promote respectful
conversation between Africa and the North.

Scholarly production and conversation are conducted through publications, conferences, classrooms, and increasingly
through the Internet. What ought to be the role of migrant African intellectuals in African and Africanist scholarly
production and discourse? Let me make a few proposals that suggest the possibilities of turning migrant African
intellectuals from liabilities into assets for African intellectual development based on the recognition that while many may
not be able or want to return permanently to their native countries they, like most migrants, often suffer from
abandonment guilt which they seek to alleviate by continued participation in developments at home. In days gone by,
global migration often entailed permanent relocation or long separation and infrequent encounters with one's native home
through mail and the occasional visit. The contemporary revolution in telecommunications and travel has compressed the
spatial and temporal distances between home and abroad, thus offering migrants unprecedented opportunities to be
transnational, to be people of two worlds, perpetually translocated, physically and culturally, between several countries
or several continents. Thus, globalization is not simply facilitating the rapid flows of capital and commodities, but also
revitalizing old cultural and community networks, thus strengthening transnational ethnic, racial, and national identities.

It is in this context that the possible contributions of migrant African intellectuals need to be examined. There is need to
develop innovative and cost-effective exchange programs that facilitate the periodic flow of migrant African intellectuals
from the North to Africa. To date exchange programs have largely focused on Northern scholars coming to Africa, and
occasionally African scholars visiting Northern institutions. Too often, the linkages have been one-sided, used by
Africanists in the North to underwrite their academic careers, leaving little intellectual benefits for African scholarship. We
need to devise programs that specifically target migrant African intellectuals, who constitute, I believe, an important, but
under-utilized, link in the transfer of technology and intellectual capital from the North to the continent. They have a
responsibility to be Africa's intellectual eyes and ears. As we all know Africa is routinely defamed and denigrated in the
popular media and in scholarly publications in the North. Migrant African intellectuals ought to continuously challenge such
misrepresentations, particularly among Africanists and other scholars, and to raise the intellectual costs of maligning and
misrepresenting Africa.

Let us explore more concretely how new linkages and forms of collaboration can be established between migrant African
intellectuals and intellectual communities on the continent around each of the three critical areas of scholarly pursuit:
teaching, research, and public service. Migrant intellectuals can contribute to teaching and training in Africa in five ways.
First, through joint appointments in African and Northern universities. Periodic teaching visits by the migrant intellectuals
would foster continuous interaction with students and colleagues on the continent. This could be a far more effective
method of "transferring technology" from the North to Africa than can be expected from expatriate workers, transnational
corporations, and foreign aid. Second, the Internet offers unprecedented opportunities for collaborative distance teaching
between African scholars in the North and their counterparts on the continent. The establishment of virtual universities
offers a unique opportunity to utilize African intellectuals in the North and link them to African educational institutions.
Third, migrant African intellectuals need to take advantage of study abroad programs sponsored by their institutions and
various consortia by not only encouraging the development of more such programs in Africa, but by ensuring that they
are designed in such a way that they actively participate in them and that they involve African students and are not
restricted to, or are glorified tourist junkets for, students from the North. Fourth, migrant African intellectuals ought to
participate in existing, or in establishing new, national and regional specialized institutes. Such institutes offer unique
opportunities for concentrated and short-term teaching and training. Each of the major independent social science
research centers -- CODESRIA, SARIPS, and OSSREA -- as well as some universities, have set up specialized training
institutes, whose structure allows for participation by scholars based in different countries, including those from the North
as trainers and resource persons. Finally, it is possible for migrant African intellectuals to contribute to curriculum
development in African institutions through informal and formal communications with their colleagues on the continent.
Informally through personal contacts, and formally through linkages between their institutions in the North and African
institutions. There are already many such inter-university linkages, but migrant African intellectuals have not always been
as actively involved as they could be.

Each of these linkages in the teaching domain can foster more fruitful research linkages between African intellectuals
within and outside the continent and contribute to the advancement of research and development in Africa. Specifically, in
the realm of research there are four ways in which migrant African intellectuals can play a productive role. First, joint
research projects ought to be pursued more vigorously. All too often, researchers from the North, equipped with fistfuls

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of dollars and theoretical conceit, descend upon Africa to test their latest pet theories and use their African colleagues
as research assistants to collect data. Northern-based African scholars could help in changing the dynamics of such a
research culture and promote more equitable relations by openly criticizing exploitative practices and sensitizing
universities and foundations that fund African research to promote research that is truly collaborative, from the
conception of research problems, to collection and interpretation of data, to writing and publication of research results.

The appointment of increasing numbers of Africans as program officers and directors in some of the large foundations
offers African intellectuals on the continent and in the diaspora an opportunity to promote new North-South research
linkages and practices. Similarly, the appointment of Africans in senior administrative positions in African studies
programs provides a basis for building new Africanist research cultures and practices. The establishment of mutually
beneficial institutional linkages and support between African researchers across the Atlantic constitutes the second area
in which migrant African intellectuals could advance research in and on Africa.

The third area centers on publication. Co-authorship and co-publishing between African scholars and publishers based on
the continent and their counterparts in the North should be encouraged. It offers the former wider markets for their ideas
and products, and helps the latter to focus their research on fundamental questions confronting Africa thus saving them
from the sterile seductions of post-something theorizing beloved among many Northern scholars. As I have stated man
times, African scholars based in the North should try as much as possible to publish in Africa-based journals and
monograph series as a way of building African intellectual capacities and communities and of promoting intellectual
conversation across the Atlantic in so far as it will be in their interest to see to it that such publications are marketed and
read in the North. The reciprocal responsibility on the part of continentally based scholars and publishers is that they
must export well-produced texts of impeccable scholarship. They are unlikely to attract their compatriots based in the
North seeking to ascend the slippery poles of tenure and promotion if their publications are shoddy and reinforce the
perceived inferiority and marginality of African scholarship. In short, co-authorship and co-publication offer possibilities to
promote and mainstream African scholarship.

Besides the migration of people, a few African scholarly journals have also migrated to the North. The principal example
is Transition, founded in Uganda in the 1960s, now relocated to Harvard University in the United States. Such journals
have a special responsibility to act as a medium of serious, two-way intellectual conversation between Africa and the
North. They must avoid the dangers of developing historical amnesia and falling easy prey to the seductions of the
post-something sophistries parading in many a Northern academy, which many African intellectuals on the continent find
at best amusing, and at worst dangerous. They must address the fundamental processes, issues, and questions that
have shaped, connected, and differentiated Africa and the North. Through them we must remember and reconfigure the
Middle Passage and the numerous ties that bind Africa and the North.

In addition to collaborative research, migrant African intellectuals could contribute to the development of respectful
intellectual conversations across the Atlantic through the establishment of extensive general and specialized review
periodicals, edited and published jointly in the North and Africa, in which African and Africanist publications would be
routinely reviewed. The review periodicals could also assist in advertising African books in the North and vice-versa, and
in breaking the cycle of self-referential solitude that currently characterizes Africanist scholarship. Such scholarly media
would help promote more accountability and respectful communication between African and Africanist and other Northern
scholarly communities. Today Northern scholars writing on African countries do not need to worry about what their
African colleagues think or say, especially if the latter are based on the continent, because they are unlikely to review
their work. This promotes intellectual indifference and misconduct, which sometimes includes outright fraud and the
falsification of data.

Migrant African intellectuals have, I believe, a special responsibility and role to mainstream African scholarship in global
scholarship by promoting the consumption of African scholarly texts in the North. This often requires nothing more than
simple commitments in so far as university professors have considerable freedom in designing courses and setting
reading materials. That African intellectuals in the North must inform themselves of scholarly publications by their
colleagues on the continent, which could be used as class texts, cannot be overemphasized. More challenging is to
ensure that African publications are ordered by libraries with dwindling acquisition budgets and that they are included in
index and citation systems that increasingly act as gateways to research products and inquiries as publications and
information explode. Not to be cited by the major indexing services often spells intellectual invisibility and death. Migrant
African intellectuals, working in collaboration with Africana librarians, need to push for the inclusion of African publications
in these indexes, which filter and legitimate scholarly products.

As for public service, migrant African intellectuals can also play several roles. First, there is advocacy. Together with
other migrant Africans, and working with groups interested in Africa, they can contribute to the formation of active

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lobbies for Africa with key public and private constituencies, ranging from governments and the corporate sector, to the
increasingly influential NGO movement and the media. As intellectuals, they have the capacity to provide coherent
analyses and chart the contours of fruitful and mutually beneficial relations between Africa and the North. At the very
least, African governments and institutions ought to use them as interpreters of the North. Their work is also essential to
minimizing media misrepresentation and marginalization of Africa. This is connected to the second public service function
that migrant African intellectuals can perform: being actively engaged in outreach either through existing institutions they
belong to or new institutions that they can form. Outreach aims at promoting informed knowledge and public discourse
on Africa. The constituencies for outreach include the institutions and sectors mentioned above, as well as educational
institutions, movements with potential international scope, such as labor unions and religious organizations, and various
cultural communities, especially those among the historic African diaspora.

Finally, wherever possible migrant Africans need to actively participate in the politics of both their countries of origin and
countries of settlement. Generally migrant Africans tend to be more preoccupied with politics back home than in their
new countries, in which they participate through fund raising activities, formation of exile political parties, and lobbying in
Northern capitals against dictatorships and governments they disprove of. It is important to balance this with engagement
in the electoral politics of the North, which often requires taking up citizenship. As their numbers and political voices rise
in specific locations, and through coalition building with groups and constituencies favorably disposed towards Africa,
migrant Africans could begin to influence the foreign policies of their adopted countries towards Africa. The role of
migrant intellectuals in this endeavor is to map out the trajectories of African political participation in the North and to
interrogate the current constructions of citizenship and to articulate new ones that resonate with their transnationalism
and the positive possibilities of globalization.

Clearly, effecting these changes and developments requires a lot more than personal commitment by individuals.
Institutional anchors are required to navigate the demanding rigors and rituals of academic life and migrancy. The
institutional mechanisms can include both old and new institutions. Better use could be made of existing academic
associations and NGOs, such as the African Studies Association in the United States and CODESRIA; to coordinate and
develop some of the activities outlined above. Official university associations, such as the Association of African
universities also have a role to play. So do international organizations such as UNESCO and UNRISD (United Nations
Research Institute for Social Development). But the way forward might require setting up separate organizations, linked
to all these entities, that specifically focus on promoting the utilization of migrant African intellectuals in the development
of teaching, research, and public service in and on Africa along some of the lines suggested in this essay. Such
organizations could put to much better use some of the funds currently allocated to programs promoting the permanent
return and relocation of migrant Africans or the huge sums spent on technical assistance by often ill informed or
indifferent non-African expatriates. These suggestions are based on the recognition that the challenge for Africa is not
simply one of capacity building, but also of capacity utilization, of finding the most effective ways to fully exploit the
intellectual and technical capacity that has already been built, which for various reasons, is now scattered all over the
world.

Conclusion

The essay has shown that the dynamics and directions of global mobility have shifted, and African participation in
international migration, particularly in Western Europe and North America, has become more pronounced,
notwithstanding the imposition of stringent immigration controls by these countries. It was also noted that the causes,
courses, and consequences of contemporary international migration systems are tied to complex social networks that
have arisen as a result of the long processes of globalization and transnationalization in which Africa, including its
educational institutions and cultures, have been involved and implicated. I believe that the rising migration of Africa's
professional elites and intellectuals may, indeed, be a curse if dismissed and ignored, but it can be turned into a blessing
if embraced and utilized. It is generated by, and inserts Africa into, contemporary processes of transnationalization and
globalization, which follow and reinforce the old trails of Pan-Africanism. The challenge for Africa, then, is how to rebuild
the historic Pan-African project, spawned by the global dispersal and exploitation of African peoples over the centuries,
by creatively using the current migratory flows of African peoples, cultures, capacities, and visions. It is an old issue in a
new age that requires responses and solutions that are both old and new, that entails and transcends the possibilities of
Mazrui's counter-penetration, Said's cosmopolitanism, and Appadurai's cultural-scapes.

ENDNOTES

These are positions associated with, respectively, Ali A. Mazrui, Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa. London:
Heinemann, 1978; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Alfred Knopf; and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large.
Cultural Dimension of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. This essay is based on much longer chapter
in Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Rethinking Africa’s Globalization, Volume 2, The Developmental Challenges, Trenton, NJ: Africa World

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Press (forthcoming).

S. Castles and M. J. Miller. 1998. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. 2nd Edition.
London: Macmillan.

H. Zlotnik, H., "Trends of International Migration Since 1965: What Existing Data Reveal." International Migration, 37 (1) 1999: 23.

See H. Fassman and R. Munz, "European East-West Migration." International Migration Review, 28 (3) 1994: 520-538.

See D. S. Massey, "International Migration at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century: The Role of the State." Population and
Development Review, 25 (2) 1999: 303-322.

T. Hammar, T., "Comparing European and North American International Migration," International Migration Review, 23 (3), 1989:
636.

See James Hollifield, "Ideas, Institutions, and Civil Society: On the Limits of Immigration Control in France." 1999, <http://migration
/ucdavis.edu/mm21/Hollfield-France.html> Accessed on 6/26/99.

OECD, 1998:101-7.

R. Miles, "Migration to Britain: The Significance of a Historical Approach," International Migration, 29 (4) 1991: 527-542.

(OECD, 1998: 175).

Suárez-Navaz, L. 1997. "Political Economy of the Mediterranean Rebordering: New Ethnicities, New Citizenships," Stanford
Electronic Humanities Review, 5 (2). <http:/shr.stanford.edu/shreview/5-2/navaz.html. Accessed on 6/29/99.

See Gibson, C. J. and E. Lennon. 1999. "Historical Census Statistics on Foreign-Born Population of the United States:
1850-1990,"U.S. Census Bureau. <http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/twps0029.html> Accessed on
6/26/99.

..
The Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) reports that African immigration nearly doubled from 26,716 in 1994 to 52,889
in 1996 primarily due to the Diversity Program, which seeks to increase the diversity of the immigrant pool by expanding the intake
from historically under-represented countries and regions, see INS Statistics. 1999. "Characteristics of Legal Immigrants."
<http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/textonly/stats/annual/fy96/979.html> Accessed on 6/26/99.

..
Logan, I. B., "The Reverse Transfer of Technology From Sub-Saharan Africa to the United States," Journal of Modern African
Studies, 25 (4) 1987: 603.

..
OECD, Trends in International Migration. Annual Report. 1997 Edition. Paris: OECD, 1997:257.

..
OECD, 1998:89.

For more detailed discussion and references please see Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Rethinking Africa’s Globalization, Vol.2: The
Developmental Challenges, Chapter 5, forthcoming.

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