Harte Zeiten für Afrikas Flüchtlinge[Hard times for African refugees]

Flight and migration from the Third World countries have assumed a previously unprecedented scale in the last decades. They are expected to exceed all that has been happening before. Africa is particularly affected by these migratory movements. Although, in the early 1990s, the influx of Africans to Europe has grown considerably, African, not European countries have to bear the main burden of these refugee movements. Both, the causes as well as the effects of the flight and migration are different, depending on the social group and strata to which they belong. The already poor and deprived, the elderly, women and children, suffer the most. African refugees are particularly disadvantaged in Europe for a variety of reasons against their fellow-sufferers from other regions of the Third World. To the extent that flight and migration cause social and economic problems at home and overseas, the interest of politicians is also increasing to exploit these problems for their own purposes. The tactics of some African statesmen to use the migratory pressure of African refugees and migrants on Europe as bargaining chip for more development aid, and the alliance of German domestic and development policy in matters of preventive "avoidance of causes of flight" through development assistance are only two sides and the same medal. Both arguments do not stand up to an empirical review. In the medium term, development aid shall increase the willingness of the young and most agile to emigrate. The current domestic political problems of Germany concerning the influx of refugees can not be solved in this way. The right of asylum, which is intended primarily to protect politically persecuted persons, is obviously sidelined by the mass migration of economic refugees from the Third World. It should therefore be supplemented by a socially as well as economically balanced immigration legislation.