Lampedusa Italian Coast. The Bridge MAG image

As details come to light of the sub-Sahara African origins of the 250 passengers reported to have drowned when a boat bound for Turkey recently sank, is likely to further cement the world’s false ‘ethnic’-oriented perceptions with regards to the modern phenomena of ‘illegal immigration’.

Recently, African immigrants have been filling world headlines after 400 refugees arrived in Lampedusa on the Italian coast over the past weekend; but, as always, such news stories are communicated through a westernised, immigration-sceptic lens.

According to the International Organization for Migration:

“Between 1960 and 1975, 27,000 Africans left their continent to find refuge in the world’s most industrialised countries. Between 1975 and 1984, the number shifted dramatically from 27,000 to 40,000; and from 1990 to 2012, every year, 20,000 Africans have left their continent for the West.”

The International Organization for Migration is an intergovernmental organization; it was initially established in 1951, as the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), to help resettle people displaced by the Second World War.

The IOM is dedicated to promoting humane and orderly migration for the benefit of all.

It is often overlooked that the majority of those African immigrants, refugees from wars and political instabilities in their home countries, have strongly contributed throughout the decades to those Western economies to which they have migrated. This, and the fact that their skills and strong work ethic are still prized by Western countries today – whether legal and qualified, or neither –rarely makes the headlines.

English red-top – and frequently right-wing – tabloids have gone to great lengths over recent years to manufacture negative headlines about African immigrants, often with scant substantiation for such claims.

On 25^th September 2012, in his article entitled ‘BORDER guards in Spain have caught an illegal immigrant trying to sneak into the country – smuggled inside a car seat’, journalist Ian Garland wrote: “The 20-year-old man from Guinea had pulled the foam padding out of the passenger seat of a Renault people-carrier and hidden inside the shell.”

Passenger airplane  A320. The Bridge MAG image

British Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May was recently quoted in right-wing tabloid The Sun as saying:

“Immigration in the UK is too high. Sun readers have known this for many years. This country cannot cope with the influx we saw in the last decade.”

According to economists, there are currently more than 15 million illegal immigrants in the United States, and a ‘black market’ economy in cheap labour is currently flourishing. Also called a ‘parallel economy’, the ‘shadow’ market includes not only illegal activities but also unreported income from the production of legal goods and services, either from monetary or barter transactions.

In the ‘International Monetary Fund Issue’…

“Estimating the size of the shadow economy is difficult. Thus, economists and government statisticians have made a variety of calculations to gauge how large the shadow economy is….

Economists also believe it is wrong to argue that African immigrants push native-born workers out of jobs, because, what those immigrants often find in the so-called ‘land of the free’ frequently falls short of their expectations.  They often do the dirty work that most European workers shun, such as cleaning, kitchen pottering, shelf-stacking in shops, caring for vulnerable people (children, the elderly, blind, disabled etc.), mining, street sweeping, public toilet cleaning, and security work….

Brain draining from Africa to Western countries x264 from Rachel Tcheungna on Vimeo.