Vloggers Show How To Migrate Illegally On A Jet Ski

North African vlogger and YouTuber Zouhir Bounou (who calls himself Zizou) is not your typical illegal migrant. While he has traveled illegally to ten different countries, he has recorded his illicit journeys into vlogs as a form of entertainment. Many people like Zizou are painting a vivid picture of what life is like outside of North Africa through social media, as recently reported in The Economist.

A large portion of vloggers and their viewers are an educated and employed middle-class in their mid-20s. Murad Mzouri, a popular Moroccan vlogger, shares that he helps his audience “break the fear barrier and fulfill their dream of reaching the West” while earning 2,000 dollars a year through advertising. Despite exposing his irregular migrant status on social media, Zizou has also gained considerable financial support to evade legal sanctions. Zizou’s followers once crowdfunded his bail when he landed in jail. Although Zizou tells his viewers not to follow his path, these enticing vlogs are a tremendous pull factor and are encouraging thousands of North Africans to embark on haraga (illegal migration).

While you can sometimes find phone numbers of smugglers in the comment section, these creative vloggers suggested new ways of illegal entries, such as using a Jetski to travel from Morocco to Spain. 

Interestingly, the North Africans have a unique advantage to not get caught by Western officials because their dialects used on social media are harder to translate.

Post by Isabel Wang. Colgate Class of 2021.

Source: “Vloggers Show How To Migrate Illegally On A Jet Ski,” The Economist. July 22, 2020.

             

 

The European refugee crisis and political outcomes

In the upcoming second edition of the textbook, we include more analysis of the European refugee crisis.

Box 12.1

The European refugee crisis began unfolding in 2015 when tens of thousands of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa fled their homelands and headed north. This influx of new refugees provides even more case studies of how new refugee populations affected political outcomes in Europe. Christian Dustmann,Kristine Vasiljeva and Anna Damm (2019) analyze effect of refugees on electoral outcomes in Denmark, where refugees are allocated randomly by the Danish government. Unlike economic migrants, refugees usually do not have a say in which region of a country they will reside, at least initially. (This is not the case in the United States, where resettlement agencies take into consideration the specific characteristics of the refugees, such as networks of former immigrants from similar countries of origin and availability of local programs to meet the needs of the specific refugee group). The random allocation of refugees across different municipalities in Denmark avoids issues with selection bias (the Appendix to Chapter 8 discusses selection bias). The researchers find that refugee allocations have large effects on voting outcomes: Right-wing parties experience a 1.3 to 2.3 percentage point increase in vote shares (which varies across different levels of government) in response to a 1 percentage point increase in refugees. Overall, there is a shift in the distribution of votes from parties on the left to parties on the right in municipalities with more refugees. However, for the largest municipalities, the response is the reverse: More refugees lead to fewer votes for anti-immigrant parties, suggesting a divide among urban and rural areas.

Dustmann, C., Vasiljeva, K., and Piil Damm, A. (2019) “Refugee migration and electoral outcomes.” Review of Economic Studies 86(5), pp. 2035–2091. DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdy047.

Cool graphics on global migration flows from Bloomberg

Bloomberg News has some very nifty graphics on global migration flows, created using UN data: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-how-migration-is-changing-our-world

It's particularly interesting to see how large the flows are within Europe

The refugee crisis in the EU

Refugees surging into the EU have dominated the headlines in recent weeks. The situation has been building over time and recently reached crisis point, with thousands of migrants streaming into Greece and Hungary every day. The current situation is largely rooted in continued unrest and desperate conditions in Syria; earlier this summer, the influx was largely due to instability in Libya that is resulting in large numbers of migrants setting off from there to Greece and Italy. The latest wave is also setting off for the EU from Turkey.

A set of EU rules called the Dublin Regulation requires that asylum seekers--people asking to be declared refugees and granted the right to stay in the EU--apply for asylum in the first EU country they reach. This means huge numbers of applicants in Greece, Hungary and other countries in southern and eastern Europe. Those ports of entry are relatively poor and offer few government-funded benefits to refugees. Many migrants therefore want to go to Germany and other relatively wealthy countries in northern and western Europe. Some countries in northern and western Europe are welcoming the asylum seekers, most notably Germany, while others are trying to discourage them, such as Denmark. Indeed, Germany's non-enforcement of the Dublin Regulation and its relatively generous benefits to refugees may be contributing to the influx. 

Important economic issues related to the crisis include: Are the migrants refugees or economic migrants? How do the policies of the EU or its member states affect the inflow of migrants? How should the EU and its member states respond?

Here's a great graphic on the current scale of the migration crisis in the EU. The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) has lots of information about the crisis. The EU is discussing whether to adopt quotas to distribute refugees across member states. The Common European Asylum System explains much of the EU rules regarding asylum seekers.