“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates / Plato, Apology, c. 400 BC
31-07-2026, 10:46 Society / Analytics

Migration from Africa to Europe

by Delma Danitza Bacarreza
International Relations Specialist with a strong interest in social and civicjournalism, focusing on the political, economic, and social transformations shaping Europe


As I already wrote before, Europe is facing a bigger crisis regarding immigration from Africa.

Most people coming to Europe are looking for a better life to create a business and then help the family, but the problem is that the system is different than they imagine. In Europe, finding good work requires many years and also, if you're a foreign person, it will take more. Also, you have to learn the language and learn a profession. Also, you have to pass many controls to have the documents, and maybe you can be put on a trip to a concentration camp in Albania. In places like Italy, the government is allowing migrants to arrive to put them to work on farms and places where they are paid around 4 or 5 euros per hour, working more than 10 hours every day.

There is a big hypocrisy in governments, because on one side they know that they need new people to do the work that the Europeans don’t want to do and on the other side they let many of these people without help, deporting them, including families or putting them in the centers where they are going to stay more than 18 months waiting for the papers to be in Europe in the conditions that we never know.

Also regarding the news, there is a copy that politics repeat like "we are doing our best to solve the problem", but the problem is bigger than we see. First, the crisis in most of the countries in Africa was created by some European company that came to exploit raw materials, creating economic instability.

But why are the governments allowing this big flow of migrants to come to Europe?

Europe needs migrants as a workforce, and due to birth rates - a topic I previously wrote an article about - which explains how the number of new births is steadily declining, whereas births within foreign or mixed-heritage families are increasing each year, thereby ensuring a degree of future economic stability.
Only in Spain, along the Ceuta border in the last days cross around 2000–3000 migrants. In Italy, they count around 300 hundred people a week or more.

The problem for this government is to chose, they have started to legalize around 500,000 thousand undocumented migrants, but there are less than half of the migrants in those countries. Letting people in infinite limbo, leaving them few choices for living in an environment that fails to integrate them, thereby fostering delinquency. No choices, no documents, no papers, no work, no money, no food.

The problem is growing. There is not a genuine criterion for deciding who can and cannot stay in Europe—not to mention the business that has sprung up in Africa to enable people to cross the ocean. Because, beyond what we see and what we are told, there are many other dynamics at play, evolving day by day and directly affecting people's lives.