Emigration from Africa will change the world | As other countries age, they will need African youth

Excellent article about a critically important but underdiscussed issue. Emphasis mine:

> After John Uwagboe moved to Scotland in 2008 he did not see another black man for several weeks. When at last he did, on the other side of a street in Edinburgh, he crossed over to meet him. Soon the strangers were hugging like long-lost friends. They went for lunch. “The guy wasn’t even another Nigerian,” recalls Mr Uwagboe. “He was from Ghana!”

> In 2001 there were just 5,000 Africans in Scotland, or 0.1% of the overwhelmingly pasty-faced population. By the time of the most recent census, in 2022, that population had increased more than 11-fold, and will very probably have grown faster since. Mr Uwagboe, who came to study, then worked his way up the ranks of a bank and later became a restaurateur, says there are more than 3,000 members of a WhatsApp group for Nigerians in Edinburgh. There are ten branches of his Pentecostal church. “One thing for sure is that Africans will keep coming,” he says.

> That may seem improbable when Donald Trump is booting out migrants, European politicians are embracing nativism and media coverage of migration from Africa focuses on the illegal sort, in leaking dinghies. But the vast majority of Africans leave the continent in prosaic, legal ways. This form of migration has continued to increase despite the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment. It will in all likelihood continue to grow in the coming decades, expanding African diasporas around the world. The trend will have profound effects in recipient countries and in Africa itself.

> The growth stems from the extraordinary demographic divergence between Africa, the world’s youngest continent with the fastest-growing population, and everywhere else. Labour is becoming more abundant in Africa and scarcer in many other places. As a result, argue Kathryn Foster and Matthew Hall, demographers at Cornell University, “The future of migration will be African in origin.”

> Earlier this year McKinsey, a consultancy, published a report on the “new demographic reality”. It notes that a “first wave” of countries including America, China, Japan, South Korea and all of Europe will see their working-age population (15- to 64-year-olds) shrink by about 340m by 2050. **Longer lives and, especially, falling fertility rates, mean the “support ratio” of working-age people to those over 65 in these places has dropped from 7:1 in 1997 to 4:1 today. By 2050 it will be just 2:1.**

> A shift is also under way in emerging economies. **By 2060, according to UN forecasts, the support ratio will fall from 6.2:1 to 2.3:1 in Brazil and from 7.5:1 to 2.4:1 in Vietnam**, notes Michael Clemens of George Mason University. “Nothing like this shockingly rapid disappearance of workers has happened in world history,” he says.

> The exception is sub-Saharan Africa. Though fertility rates are falling there as well, they are doing so more slowly, from a higher starting-point. The region is decades behind in its “demographic transition”. Its working-age population will rise by around 700m by 2050, roughly doubling. By 2030 roughly half of new workers entering the global labour force will be from sub-Saharan Africa (see chart 1).

> They will struggle to find work at home. Sub-Saharan Africa sees around 15m people enter the labour market every year but just 3m formal jobs created. A survey last year by Afrobarometer, a pollster, found that 47% of Africans in 24 countries had considered migrating and 27% had given it “a lot of thought”—increases of nine and ten percentage points respectively since the previous round of surveys in 2016-18. “Better work opportunities” was by far the most cited reason.

!ping IMMIGRATION&AFRICA&SOCIAL-POLICY