African Migrations: Patterns and Perspectives

1. Overcoming the Economistic Fallacy: Social Determinants of Voluntary Migration from the Sahel to the Congo Basin

1 OVERCOMING THE ECONOMISTIC FALLACY SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF VOLUNTARY MIGRATION FROM THE SAHEL TO THE CONGO BASIN BRUCE WHITEHOUSE THE “WORLD’S WORST CITY” Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, is of modest size by world standards, with a population currently estimated at somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million. It is also in many respects typical of cities throughout Africa and the global South, characterized by rapid population growth, high unemployment, and shrinking public resources. While this erstwhile somnolent colonial outpost was once (briefly) renowned as the capital of Free France during the Second World War, during the 1990s Brazzaville became remarkable mainly as the scene of recurring violence by ethnopolitical factions vying for control of the Congolese state and its substantial oil revenues. These conflicts claimed tens of thousands of lives and forced hundreds of thousands to flee the city. Meanwhile, real income, education, and health indicators dropped sharply (Yengo 2006). The decade of unrest and economic stagnation tarnished Brazzaville’s reputation to the point that in 2003 it was actually named the “world’s worst city” in a global survey conducted by an international human resources firm.1 Herein lies a paradox that has propelled my research since I first visited Brazzaville in 2003. This city, wracked by war, economic decline, and joblessness, is also home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants. The vast majority of them come from across the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). But Brazzaville’s immigrant population also includes an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people from the West African Sahel, especially Mali, Guinea, and Senegal. Although Congo has been home in recent years to a few thousand refugees from Rwanda and the Bruce Whitehouse 20 DRC, its West African residents are not forced migrants: they are entrepreneurs , petty traders, and unskilled laborers who have come to Congo to seek their fortunes at great personal expense and often considerable risk. Over decades and generations, they have come to constitute a reasonably successful immigrant community in Brazzaville, an important element of the city’s commercial sector and an enduring part of its social landscape. What is it that draws these people to Brazzaville? What rewards do they expect to reap, and what opportunities do they encounter after traveling over 2,000 miles (frequently overland) from their West African countries of origin? As an anthropologist seeking to answer these questions, I have found that prevailing theories of the determinants of migration are not always adequate to the task. These theories, which rely overwhelmingly on analysis of economic factors, tend to obscure the social embeddedness of individual migrants, thereby preventing a more complete understanding of human spatial mobility and its underlying motivations. In this chapter, I demonstrate how established explanations of migration’s causes may be enhanced by considering the social forces that mediate economic decision-making processes. MIGRANT MOTIVATIONS: AN OVERVIEW There is broad agreement among scholars across academic disciplines that the primary causes of voluntary migration are economic in nature. A number of theoretical models offer competing but also potentially complementary explanations at both the micro- and macro-levels (Massey et al. 1994; Brettell and Hollifield 2008). Neoclassical economic analysis emphasizes the role of differing wages and unemployment rates in influencing an individual’s decision to move from one place to another, with “high wage countries” drawing migrants away from “low wage countries.” The value of migration can be understood as the expected standard of living abroad, minus the expected standard of living at home, minus the costs of migrating (Carling 2002). The “new economics of migration” focuses on risk management and economic diversification at the household level , casting migration as the product of conscious strategies by household heads to protect themselves and their kin from the vagaries of climate and market conditions. Segmented labor market theory considers the demand from employers in developed countries for cheap, low-skilled workers from abroad; this demand creates bifurcated labor markets in host countries , with a high-skill, high-wage upper stratum dominated by natives and a low-skill, low-wage stratum dominated by immigrants. At the highest level of abstraction, world systems theory stresses economic globalization —the integration of societies into a single capitalist world system—as the driving force behind international migration, drawing people from 21 Overcoming the Economistic Fallacy poor countries of the economic “periphery” to the wealthy countries of the “core” (and particularly to...