Normally when I think of Cape Verde, I tend to think of Césaria Évora, the morna singer, the fact that it is one of eight nations with Portuguese as its official language, a certain disc by Horace Silver, a place where planes refuel flying from South Africa to North America and the soul group, Tavares.
While I was aware of the emigrant past of this island nation off the west coast of Africa, this article in Sunday's New York Times brings it back poignantly:
If Cape Verde is the Galapagos of migration, Jorgen Carling, a Norwegian geographer, is its Darwin. A rising star on the academic circuit, Dr. Carling, 32, visited Cape Verde 10 years ago, taught himself Kriole, the local language, and has been returning ever since.
“Cape Verde is a showcase of the contradictions and frictions of global migration,” he said. “It is in a quite dramatic transition — from being so dependent on migration to trying to cope with a world in which borders are closing.”
The tensions he cites abound. Migration reduces poverty. But it increases inequality between migrants and others back home. Migration can express family devotion. It can also strain family bonds.
And while migration may be at record levels, so is the frustration of people who want to migrate but cannot. That is because as migration grows, the desire to experience its economic rewards grows even faster.
“Migration is probably more important to more people than it has ever been,” said Dr. Carling of the International Peace Research Institute, a nonprofit group in Oslo. “But what characterizes the world today is also the feeling of involuntary immobility.”
I recommend that you read the entire article along with the online multimedia features that it came with here, and here . Full disclosure: my biological father (who died when I was five) was an immigrant as is my wife. I tend to believe that anyone willing to work, learn the language and contribute should be welcome. I'm not one of those who supports the notion that this has an adverse impact our culture. Our nation is wildly diverse without the immigrants. Imagine the differences between those who have been living for several generations in the South, the Midwest, New England and the West Coast and you get the idea.
I am troubled by this, however:
More broadly, however, development experts are split on the effects of migration. Remittances feed and shelter the poor, and migrants sometimes return with new business contacts and ideas. But migration can also drain countries of talent and promote dependency, among individuals and governments. No country has climbed out of poverty through migration alone. Despite the economic progress here, the unemployment rate hovers above 20 percent and the fastest-growing industry, tourism, is dominated by low-wage jobs.
While Dr. Carling admires Cape Verde’s ability to invent itself as a nation beyond borders, he also sees problems with the constant emphasis on departures. It can weaken relationships, he said, leave marriages short-lived and promote indifference among students and workers. “The possibility of relying on remittances — and the prospect of going abroad one day — can alienate you from the environment here,” he said.
One aspect of Andrés Manuel López Óbrador's failed campaign for president of Mexico was his recognition of the failure of his nation in not making their country more hospitable to its poorest citizens. While remittances are vital and important, as the article notes, they are not a solution.
I'm very ambivalent about guest worker programs. Germany brought in numerous Turks as guest workers from 1961 to 1973, but largely treated them as a fungible asset rather than human beings. Precious little was done to integrate them and it wasn't until 1999 that those born in Germany automatically received German citizenship. How absurd was this? In the 2002 World Cup, three players from Turkey's starting eleven were born in Germany, but ineligible to become German citizens, whereas Miroslav Klose and his parents were born in Poland, but his paternal grandfather was of German ancestry and Oliver Neuville, born in Switzerland to a German-Swiss father and Italian-Swiss mother and speaks Italian much better than German, had no problem gaining German citizenship.
I worry less about the impact immigration has on the US and far more about the effect it is having on those left behind,
Obviously the mix of cultures is one of the great strengths of the US - and no region is immune in the current mix. Ironically, even the horror of slavery - and at a great cost over the long run - enriched us culturally. I have some problems with high levels of illegal immigration, but one of the biggest questions raised is the one you touch on. When a country finds a very large proportion of its most highly motivated populace simply taking off with not much liklihood of ever returning, except perhaps to retire decades hence, an awful lot of possibility must be lost. Of course, the economic squeeze and oligarchic politics don't offer much hope for a better future at home, so both the the push and pull intensify. In many ways it's a tragedy. Regarding our own Southern border in particular, I've often thought that a "Marshall Plan" that bypassed the Mexican government in favor of direct assistance to provinces via non-profits, cooperatives and small-entrpreneurial associations might offer some prospect of relieving tensions on both sides of the border and making immigration more a matter of individual choice than economic necessity. But no such deal is likely.
Posted by: Reg | June 24, 2007 at 10:06 PM