46: How Migration Management Deals Can Aid Autocrats

WEBVTT
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The movement of migrants from the developing world to wealthier countries is
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one of the defining international stories of our time.
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These people are moved by war, environmental disasters, dysfunctional states,
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higher wages, but all of them are met with skepticism, if not outright hostility, when they arrive.
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In the past decade, the European Union has used foreign aid to encourage governments
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in several Mediterranean, littoral, and African nations to stop migration at its source.
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These deals, worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars or euros,
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are often made with little public input and may end up harming the people that
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they're supposed to be helping. Welcome to Baker Briefing, where we make the news make sense.
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I'm David Satterfield, director of Rice University's Baker Institute for Public
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Policy in Houston, Texas.
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Kelsey Norman is a fellow here at the Baker Institute studying global migration.
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She joins me today with Nick Misinski, an assistant professor at American University,
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to discuss a recent book they co-authored on how these migration management deals
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come about and how they impact the governments and people on the receiving end
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of the aid. Thank you for tuning in.
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Kelsey, Nick, thank you for joining me today, and congratulations on your new book.
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Now, Nick, the book is provocatively titled Aiding Autocrats,
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Migration Management, Governments, and Repression in Africa.
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Can you tell us in a few sentences, what's your core argument?
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What's at the heart of the book?
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Well, migration management aid is a type of foreign aid that is used to control migration.
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Its hope is that by paying other countries, they can get at the root causes
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of migration to prevent emigrants to Europe or other rich countries.
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But it doesn't actually do that. A lot of economic studies show that that money
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doesn't actually lead to less emigration. And our book looks at the other question,
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which is then what does it actually do?
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And we trace the different ways that it actually leads to or supports authoritarianism or repression.
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And we have several different arguments and pathways in which that happens.
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Kelsey, the European Union and other international institutions have long argued
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that development funding to address the root causes of migration helps forestall
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people leaving in the first place.
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When you examine these deals, how is this aid utilized? And let me get to a
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more probing fundamental question.
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Is this really, at least in the last decade, anything other than a transparently
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labeled development assistance program?
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Is it really bribery to stop migration?
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Great question, Ambassador. So we look at a variety of different programs that
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fall under this large category of migration management aid, and you're right to.
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Assess that a lot of the programs do look like traditional development assistance programs.
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In fact, some of the existing development programs were basically repurposed
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under this pot of funding. So there really is a genuine, discernible development goal there.
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And programmatic activity, at least to some of this funding.
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That is the alleged ideology or narrative behind this type of funding,
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that if we can improve countries' governance systems, if we can develop them
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economically, people won't even want to migrate.
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They won't choose to leave their home countries or they won't choose to leave
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the countries in which they're refugees or asylum seekers.
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So as Nick said earlier, we know from other development studies,
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from economic studies, this doesn't actually stop emigration.
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So what we're asking is a different but related question, which is,
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well, then what does this do? What is the impact of this type of aid?
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And a lot of the aid doesn't just focus on that development work.
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It focuses on building out security capacity of countries that receive this type of aid.
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And that's where we see this kind of potential slippage in terms of impacting
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governance negatively through increasing authoritarianism or increasing repression.
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Nick, I'm going to get to you in just a moment, but I'll offer my own comments,
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having been chief of mission and heavily involved in many of the issues,
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both on the sending and receiving ends of migration.
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We're going to talk, Nick, about the, I think, pivotal inflection point,
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if you will, of 2016, Germany, Angela Merkel, and the acceptance of over a million
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migrants slash refugees.
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And the transformative impact that had, not just on the lives of those who sought
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refuge in Germany, but on the reaction to this extraordinary migration on European politics.
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I also am going to seek your commentary, and I'll be blunter than you, Kelsey.
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The EU pays Turkey, ostensibly, for migration management.
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What it's really doing is paying Turkey to halt trans-Aegean,
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trans-Balkan migration, and everyone on both sides understands the terms of the deal.
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The EU pays Egypt.
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In the form of development assistance. Yes.
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What that really is, is a response to the Egyptian government's clear message to the EU.
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You've got a nice continent there.
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What a shame if three million Africans were to appear tomorrow.
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It is a very transparent, on both sides, arrangement.
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You, sending potential government, stop migration from your shores across the Med.
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We, receiving continent, will pay you. And, I mean, both Erdogan and Gaddafi
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said these things explicitly as threats. Absolutely.
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Absolutely. And then we have a further case when it is not the EU paying to
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a government to stop this kind of migration.
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It is the Italian direct dealing with criminal organizations engaged in literal, criminal,
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and very abusive trafficking of migrants to the Mediterranean Southern Littoral,
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paying them to stop the process.
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We see a variety of deals here, right? These are really the headline-catching
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deals where it is a direct deal with a dictator to violate human rights, right?
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Our book tries to trace this down to sort of the everyday migration management
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that's happening that still has nefarious effects.
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The types of support that comes from this development aid, despite helping migrants,
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much of it is food aid, for example, there are ways in which we trace either
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aid gets diverted, it's directly funding repression via sort of financing or capacity building,
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or we say it also ties these actors to the state by centralizing control.
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And for example, in Ethiopia or Kenya, we can see examples of the government
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sort of channeling or redirecting the funding towards their allies or away from
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their enemies. So an example of this is during the Tigray War in Ethiopia.
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The Ethiopian government cut off refugee aid to the north, redistributed industrial
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parks to its allies in other areas, and prevented this. It really became a politicization
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of the migration management aid.
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Kelsey, you're looking in this book at four countries as case studies,
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Ethiopia, Kenya, as you just mentioned, also Egypt and Sudan.
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How did you choose these countries? What do they represent in terms of migration
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challenges? Great question. We wanted to cover a variety of countries in terms
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of their governance systems.
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So when we look at the range of countries we've included, we have a more democratic
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government in Kenya and less democratic governments in both Ethiopia and Egypt, as well as Sudan.
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And so when Sudan started receiving Mundi under this European Trust Fund for
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Africa that came about in 2015, it was a staunchly authoritarian government under Omar Bashir.
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Since then, Sudan has gone through various transformations, a popular revolution,
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a military coup, and now a civil war.
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And throughout that time, migration management aid was flowing.
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We're not arguing that migration management aid is going to turn a country from
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a democratic government into an authoritarian government.
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But we are interested in the more nuanced ways that this type of funding can
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help further capacitate authoritarian practices and actors within a state system,
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as well as the ways that it can influence repression, not just for migrants
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and refugees, but for citizens in these countries.
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So, Nick, you've talked about Kenya, the only democracy here.
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How were institutions rule of law?
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In Kenya, affected positively, negatively, or not at all, by this kind of aid?
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Absolutely. So Kenya is our best case scenario, right? We hope that by providing
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migration management aid or supporting the country in providing lots of funding
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to support refugees, that it could lead to more democratic spaces.
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And we do see some of that, right? There is the 2021 Refugee Act,
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which was heavily influenced by the aid to allow refugees to leave camps and get work permits.
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Now, the government previously had threatened again and again to close down
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camps and throw out the refugees. We argue that was part of a negotiation strategy to get more aid.
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The act, though, is quite a progressive act. Unfortunately, it hasn't been implemented,
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in part because the government has argued that there's not enough money to pay
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for the schooling, health care, or others for the refugees.
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And in the last several years, we've seen that since Trump came to power,
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but even before that, humanitarian funding, specifically for refugees has been
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going down, quite drastic numbers.
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Kelsey, in all of the countries you've looked at, and those beyond the case
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studies that you've reviewed, qui bono, who benefits from these deals?
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Well, as you already highlighted in your remarks, Ambassador,
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the authoritarian leaders are the ones who are really benefiting from these
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deals. And we see this kind of behavior being replicated again and again.
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So the landmark or the hallmark deal in the immediate aftermath of Europe's
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refugee crisis in 2015 led to the EU-Turkey deal.
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So Erdogan's government, you know, benefited from making it clear to the European
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Union that they had the capacity to stop that onward migration,
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and they had the capacity, as they demonstrated in 2020, to have it,
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to turn it back on, exactly.
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And as you alluded to in Egypt's case, Egypt saw what Turkey had done,
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came to the table with the EU, and said, we can also stop and start this migration.
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And they've made it clear to the Europeans that they are willing to do that.
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Should that aid stop? And they've been quite successful at getting aid under
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the EU Trust Fund for Africa, as we examine in the book, but also in much larger
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quantities since that time.
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And they have the threat of hosting large numbers now of Sudanese refugees,
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but also the European Union really views the entire population of Egypt as this
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potential migration threat. So 100 million people as possible migrants. Indeed, it does.
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And that more recent concern, the 3 million approximate number of new Sudanese
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refugees who moved across the border as a result of the outbreak of civil war.
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Before all of that, Egyptians were viewed as a potential migrant community because
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of the disastrous structural dysfunctions and deficiencies in the Egyptian economy.
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So yes, absolutely. So I'm going to pose to both of you the true meta question here.
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You have in Africa and non-African countries who have access to Africa,
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Central Asia, Southwest Asia,
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a collection of historically legacy dysfunctional economic, political,
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social systems rife with massive corruption or beyond corruption.
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Simple kleptocratic governments.
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Internal strife, sometimes the level of Sudan's brutal civil war,
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sometimes less so, but conflict.
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These are countries unable historically to provide for their own populations.
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They are countries, many but not all, where the physical act of surviving in
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the midst of conflict becomes extraordinarily difficult.
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And there are basic issues of security, safety, beyond economic welfare,
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driving migration to a different, better place.
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The EU, maybe all developed countries, including the United States.
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Are facing significant political, social, and economic challenges themselves
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as a post-World War II era has come, is coming to a close.
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And questions about the resiliency, hope for a better future for their citizens,
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is a prominent feature. It's not just the United States.
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It's replicated across the developed world.
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Europe poses a number of examples of all of this, UK, France,
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Italy, Germany, recent and ongoing political development.
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What's wrong with closing borders through any means necessary to,
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If the motivation beyond racial, ethnic, sectarian justification is our political
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system is fragile to avoid further move to an ethno-nationalist right,
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this is the step we have to take.
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That's a real tough question. So I'll turn to you first. It's a tough question.
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Absolutely. I'll turn to you, Nick. Okay. Well, my first response would be moving
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to the middle or to the right doesn't actually address the real problem, right?
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When Europe has drifted to the right, in fact, the European Union,
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the European Commission, has adopted many of the far-right policies as their policies.
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Maloney, Prime Minister of Italy, proposed deporting people to Albania as a
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safe country, host place for deportees.
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The EU freaked out, said this is going to violate all human rights possibilities.
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Guess what? It's now European Commission's main policy. It was embedded in the
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EU Pact for Migration and Asylum.
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So they've moved to the right already, and the results? They're still losing
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elections. So it's not winning the elections the way they thought they would.
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The second thing I would say is that when we think about the good parts about
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the European Union, or America, democracy, rule of law, human rights,
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if it takes violating those things to prevent migrants, we don't even have democracy
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in our own countries anymore.
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Good response. We see in the EU, and we document it in the book,
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In order for them to pay the 5 billion euros to these African countries,
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they actually had to declare 17 African countries in crisis with no evidence,
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no other things, and then violated their own commissioning rule of law,
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which is that they have to have open bidding process, right?
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So they undermined their own democratic principles to push this money out the door.
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Maybe addressing sort of the first part of your question in regards to the status
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of countries that produce outward migration.
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So part of what we do in this book is look at the long colonial and post-colonial
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histories of each of these four countries that we examine in order to understand
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how migration management aid, even though it's growing and is becoming more
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prominent now, really reflects a long legacy
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of trying to control movement of people in order to.
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Establish power, in order to contain people effectively in peripheral areas.
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And I think Sudan, as one of the sort of worst case scenarios we examine in
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the book, illustrates how this type of approach that Europe and the U.S.
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Have adopted can go awry.
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So Europe chose to fund border control and capacitate border control
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in Sudan prior to the outbreak of the current civil war when the rapid support
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forces had been chosen as the primary border entity patrolling Sudan's northern
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border with Egypt and Libya.
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As a result, you know, not entirely because of that, but it did factor into.
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Seeing this entity, this that grew out of the Janjaweed militias of the early
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2000s, as a legitimate state actor.
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And that helped to provide them with legitimacy and helped give them power within the state.
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And now they are one of the two main entities engaged in this more than three-year
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civil war in the country.
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It was a factor. There were many other very indigenous and regional factors.
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Yes. And we are not saying that that is the only factor. But you can see how
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Europe's support of this entity helped to give them legitimacy and power within
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the state, in addition to funding from external sources like the UAE and Russia.
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However, we see now the long-term consequences are not less displacement and
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more state stability in Sudan. Rather, it's the opposite. Rather,
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it's the largest displacement crisis in the world and thus a further threat
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to Europe's major fears about irregular migration.
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Let's turn to the very specific subset of this problem, which is criminal trafficking.
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The organizations which move individuals not just from Africa across Africa to the Mediterranean.
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But from Southwest Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, into Africa to have access
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to the Mediterranean. This is not populations voting with their feet.
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These are criminally motivated for fee traffickers, which was a major source.
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And I'll ask you now a sort of substantive, quantitative question.
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If you look overall at trans-Mediterranean migration patterns, how much of it today.
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Is criminal organization managed in terms of bringing them to the shores.
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Putting them on craft of some kind, and launching them?
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Smugglers step in when there's a need, right, when there's a demand.
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And right now there is a huge demand for irregular migration because there aren't
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regular pathways for people to arrive in Europe, whether it's through economic
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visas or resettlement opportunities for refugees and asylum seekers.
00:17:39.295 --> 00:17:43.578
So smuggling has emerged as an industry by which people are able to travel.
00:17:43.769 --> 00:17:47.255
Sometimes smuggling can turn to trafficking, and obviously that is highly problematic.
00:17:47.255 --> 00:17:52.405
But I would say that that hasn't precluded European funding of those very institutions,
00:17:52.405 --> 00:17:54.433
especially in Libya, as you mentioned earlier.
00:17:54.642 --> 00:17:57.935
We have two competing governments. Europe funds both of them.
00:17:57.935 --> 00:18:01.805
And they're very much embedded with these same networks that facilitate irregular
00:18:01.805 --> 00:18:03.691
migration of people towards Europe.
00:18:04.010 --> 00:18:07.295
And there's a really interesting expose that came out in the Egyptian case as
00:18:07.295 --> 00:18:11.365
well recently of how because of Europe's rewarding of
00:18:11.685 --> 00:18:15.925
combating smuggling, there's a new micro-industry that's emerged whereby the
00:18:15.925 --> 00:18:20.295
Egyptian state is accusing people of smuggling, repurposing or recycling their
00:18:20.295 --> 00:18:22.905
cases all throughout the Egyptian security system.
00:18:23.149 --> 00:18:26.035
And then reporting back to Europe saying, look how many people we've arrested
00:18:26.035 --> 00:18:30.005
for smuggling, even though those people are not smugglers. The same people arrested
00:18:30.005 --> 00:18:33.824
again and again. It's inflating the numbers so that Europe pays it more money.
00:18:33.975 --> 00:18:36.199
So it's also sort of creating these industries.
00:18:36.477 --> 00:18:42.358
I have to cite history, though. If those professional criminal smugglers,
00:18:42.561 --> 00:18:47.652
people who are moving people, cannot deliver the goods to their destination.
00:18:48.006 --> 00:18:50.856
To Europe, If the disincentives, physical.
00:18:51.305 --> 00:18:53.125
Financial, whatever the consequences
00:18:53.125 --> 00:18:57.287
for governance, status of those trafficked or migrant persons...
00:18:57.745 --> 00:19:02.140
In the place they've wound up. Irrespective of that, over time,
00:19:02.407 --> 00:19:07.637
doesn't migration get dissuaded, at least the criminally moved migrants?
00:19:08.171 --> 00:19:12.681
When the word gets back, you're not going to make it to European shores.
00:19:12.681 --> 00:19:16.791
So it's more complicated than this. The studies that we have now show that the
00:19:16.791 --> 00:19:22.221
changes in policy and the programs that we're studying don't actually change migration intentions.
00:19:22.221 --> 00:19:25.991
People still want to move, in part because they're fleeing conflict,
00:19:25.991 --> 00:19:29.881
their asylum seekers, others because they're moving because of economic reasons.
00:19:29.881 --> 00:19:34.427
But those intentions are not changing because of these policy programs.
00:19:34.787 --> 00:19:38.938
What does change is their ability to do that. And the U.S. Southern border is the case right now.
00:19:39.263 --> 00:19:42.611
The Trump administration in the last year has successfully closed the border.
00:19:42.611 --> 00:19:45.300
I mean, we can see it across the border in all of these policies.
00:19:45.526 --> 00:19:49.851
It's very hard for anyone to get across, which means that people have been pushed
00:19:49.851 --> 00:19:54.331
back and are looking at other ways to move around, not because they're not moving
00:19:54.331 --> 00:19:57.181
and they've just decided they're going to stay in a place, they're moving in other places.
00:19:57.181 --> 00:20:01.631
So there's a new political economy of Latin America where people can move and
00:20:01.631 --> 00:20:06.661
are looking for safety. I would add the actions undertaken by this administration,
00:20:06.661 --> 00:20:10.161
indeed, by the final year of the Biden administration.
00:20:10.998 --> 00:20:15.247
Matched almost precisely the motivation of the government of Mexico
00:20:15.613 --> 00:20:21.243
for its own internal reasons to crack down on the flow across Mexico's southern
00:20:21.243 --> 00:20:28.575
border, the Darien Gap, and ungoverned space on that border to highly govern space to stop the flows.
00:20:28.901 --> 00:20:30.485
So it was a combined effort.
00:20:30.955 --> 00:20:38.105
And yeah, within Latin America, the pattern of migration across our U.S.
00:20:38.263 --> 00:20:44.353
Southern border has shifted some years ago, from a majority of Mexican undocumented
00:20:44.353 --> 00:20:50.413
crossings to third national undocumented crossings, including from Africa,
00:20:50.413 --> 00:20:53.064
from Central Asia, from Southwest Asia.
00:20:53.528 --> 00:20:59.733
Who used visa-free entry to countries all across the Southern Hemisphere to get into Mexico.
00:21:00.133 --> 00:21:04.813
That is all being addressed right now. It'll be fascinating to see as we look
00:21:04.813 --> 00:21:10.273
over the next several years, how enduring are the steps a variety of governments,
00:21:10.273 --> 00:21:12.733
but notably the Mexican government and U.S.
00:21:12.733 --> 00:21:17.445
Taken, does it endure as a significant deterrence?
00:21:17.892 --> 00:21:20.463
One of the things I think we have to point out, though, is that these policies
00:21:20.463 --> 00:21:26.133
are based on a fiction that the places that we're pushing people back to are
00:21:26.133 --> 00:21:29.943
safe, right? So one of the ways the EU got the EU-Turkey deal through was that
00:21:29.943 --> 00:21:32.613
they designated Turkey a safe country, right?
00:21:32.944 --> 00:21:36.868
Now, Turkey is not a safe country for many of the people who were being pushed back to it.
00:21:37.176 --> 00:21:40.243
Similarly, the Trump administration has said many of the countries it's made
00:21:40.243 --> 00:21:44.281
deals with, think of El Salvador, think of Equatorial Guinea,
00:21:44.507 --> 00:21:47.485
these countries now have migration deals with the U.S.
00:21:47.660 --> 00:21:51.253
But have terrible human rights records. And that's a fiction.
00:21:51.253 --> 00:21:55.303
We have to ignore or overlook the rule of law and the real designations by the
00:21:55.303 --> 00:21:59.083
State Department that they're violating human rights in order to deport or push
00:21:59.083 --> 00:22:00.500
back people to these countries.
00:22:06.964 --> 00:22:13.919
These issues that you write about in your book are going to be absolutely salient priority issues,
00:22:14.557 --> 00:22:20.246
for virtually every country in the developed world, from Scandinavia to Japan
00:22:20.362 --> 00:22:25.964
to countries in this hemisphere, including the United States and Mexico.
00:22:26.086 --> 00:22:28.089
There are no easy answers here.
00:22:28.356 --> 00:22:34.614
This is a fraught moment for both the developing world and the developed world,
00:22:34.614 --> 00:22:38.154
perhaps the most such since the end of the Second World War.
00:22:38.154 --> 00:22:41.069
All of these questions are going to be scrutinized.
00:22:41.307 --> 00:22:48.714
How do you manage a phenomenon which is not going to go away at any point in
00:22:48.714 --> 00:22:50.049
the predictable future?
00:22:50.531 --> 00:22:55.564
And I'll add a dark note, because the engines driving conflict,
00:22:55.904 --> 00:23:03.621
safety, economic disaster are endemic and will not be resolved in our lifetimes.
00:23:05.843 --> 00:23:10.664
So these engines are going to keep churning away. It is how we respond to this
00:23:10.664 --> 00:23:19.055
enduring phenomenon as democracies, as states that view themselves as historically refuges.
00:23:19.212 --> 00:23:23.324
Although the history is a mixed bag for all of us, for Europe,
00:23:23.324 --> 00:23:27.931
for the United States, for countries in Asia, how do we cope?
00:23:28.227 --> 00:23:32.709
These are challenges that are political, they're social, they're moral,
00:23:33.069 --> 00:23:36.209
and they're cultural for all of us across the world.
00:23:36.325 --> 00:23:40.215
But thank you very much for the book and for the discussion.
00:23:44.103 --> 00:23:47.668
This has been Baker Briefing, where we make the news make sense.
00:23:48.044 --> 00:23:52.564
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And just to remind Kelsey Norman, Nick Misinski are co-authors on Aiding Autocrats,
00:24:06.706 --> 00:24:12.674
Migration Management Governments, and Repression in Africa, published by Cambridge University Press.
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