Title:	Migration between Africa and Europe
Authors:	Cris Beauchemin
Keywords:	Europe
Issue Date:	2018
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	Of all demographic outcomes, irregular migration is among the most difficult to study. Even when they are fully documented, migrants are difficult to survey simply because they are by definition mobile. Unauthorized migrants are especially difficult to study given their clandestine presence in places of destination and the inherent risks they face when revealing information about their existence to strangers. Under these circumstances, standard survey methods do not work, and more subtle and imaginative approaches must be used. During the 1980s, my colleague Jorge Durand and I developed the ethnosurvey as a new tool for studying undocumented migration. Rather than seeking to undertake a representative survey of migrants at places of destination, we sought to locate and interview migrants within specific communities of origin. Even when applying random sampling to locate respondent households, we found that within hometowns the implicit threat of revealing to strangers sensitive information about clandestine behaviors abroad was greatly reduced. Returned migrants were willing and often eager to talk about their foreign experiences and the role that international migration played in their own lives and the lives of family members. After establishing a relationship of trust with their interlocutors, respondents were quite willing to share information about family members still living or working abroad, thus enabling researchers to follow social networks to places of destination where they could interview additional migrants from the community. Jorge Durand and I originally developed the ethnosurvey approach to study documented and undocumented migration between Mexico and the United States, beginning with representative surveys undertaken in 4 communities in 1982 and then moving on to construct a much larger, cumulative database by surveying 4–6 communities new each year from 1987 to the present, an effort that came to be known as the Mexican Migration Project (MMP). Having proved the utility of the approach in Mexico, in 1998, we went on to create the Latin American Migration Project to carry out ethnosurveys in other nations of the hemisphere. Over the years, variants of this multisite, multi-method approach to data collection have been applied in a variety of other nations to study migratory streams emanating from Eastern Europe, China, South Asia, and other regions. The Migration between Africa and Europe (MAFE) project represents perhaps the most elaborate and well developed of these efforts, with wide-ranging surveys fielded in different countries to reveal in rich detail the complex operation of three different migration systems: one connecting communities in Senegal to destinations in France, Italy, and Spain; another linking communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to destinations in Belgium and the United Kingdom; and a third binding locations in Ghana to points of destination in Great Britain and the Netherlands. The chapters in this volume document in great detail the evolution of each of these migration systems from their origins in the 1970s to the present. In doing so, they identify key determinants of migrants’ decisions to depart and return at different points in time, shine new light on how migrants integrate within both sending and receiving societies, and document the subtle interplay between migration and the social organization of households and families. The MAFE project definitively proves that it is indeed possible to conduct rigorous, scientifically valid, and empirically reliable research on the illusive phenomenon of unauthorized migration. One can only hope that scholars take note of the great value of MAFE’s methods and findings and that policy makers draw upon them to base their decisions on facts rather than fantasies.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55585
ISBN:	978-3-319-69569-3
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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