The pricewinning Journalist Olivier Jobard accompanies in his video Kingsleys Crossing (english – 23 minutes) a you man from Cameron on his way to Europe. The video is a production of MediaStorm.

By Charlotte Wiedemann

Is migration good, just because the European Union is fighting it so hard? This is a political and a moral question. More often than not, it will be answered in moral terms; in particular by those, whose response to fortress Europe is a different understanding of the globe, a conception of universal freedom of travel and of open borders. Indeed, the benefits of migration seem obvious. Foreign workers send home large amounts of money; they combat poverty by their own effort. But the implications for those migrants’ home-countries are rarely addressed. How are they affected? What are the consequences for their domestic politics, when millions of their citizens are, as it were, posted abroad as cash machines?

Hein de Haas (2008)

Dominant discourses obscure that African migration to Europe and Libya is fuelled by a structural demand for cheap migrant labour in informal sectors. This explains why restrictive immigration policies have invariably failed to stop migration and have had various perverse effects. Also African development is unlikely to curb migration as it will enable and inspire more people to migrate. Despite lip service being paid to “combating illegal migration” for political and diplomatic reasons, neither European nor African states have much genuine interest in stopping migration.

Hein de Haas

Although there has been an incontestable increase in regular and irregular West African migration to Europe over the past decade, available empirical evidence dispels most of these assumptions.

By Oliver Bakewell

Migration has always been a strategy used by people to try to improve their quality of life, and a development industry that fails to recognise this will severely limit its impact on poverty eduction.