ImmigrationKilling us softly

Coverstory

Slowly, and without many noticing, a new threat to Africa is taking shape through the mass immigration schemes for highly trained and skilled Africans such as America’s Green Card Diversity Lottery and Britain’s Highly Skilled Migrant Programme. This month, we take an indepth look at how such schemes are killing Africa softly.

Africa is currently haemorrhaging its best brains at an alarming rate. The “brain drain”, a phrase many Africans have become familiar with and which started as a trickle, has now become a flood that threatens to cause the intellectual desertification of the continent. If a key factor for anticipating the future development and productivity of any modern society is the number of intellectuals, thinkers, visionaries, professionals and skilled workers it produces, then Africa had better beware. The problem is not that the continent cannot produce highly-trained and skilled human resources, the problem is that today they are being taken away faster than Africa can replenish them. Various estimates suggest that between 20% and 50% of the top African brains and skilled personnel now reside outside the continent, and most maintain minimal professional contact with the motherland. Numerically speaking, this translates into tens of thousands of experienced, highly trained and skilled doctors, nurses, pharmacists, engineers, writers, scientists, business people, university lecturers, accountants, administrators, computer experts, artists, lawyers, town planners, etc. They, their children and their children’s children are lost to the continent as they are almost certain to stay in their new adopted countries in the West. The loss to Africa of the economic, social and other spin-offs from this lost tribe of Africans is simply incalculable.

This year’s World Migration Report, citing various European and American official sources, states that a new generation of “sub-Saharan African Diaspora has been mainly concentrated in the US (881,300), France (274,538), Britain (249,720) and, to a lesser degree in Germany (156,564) and Italy (137,780). Many thousands more are dispersed in lesser concentrations throughout Canada, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, Spain, and as far away as Australia, Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia.”

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