Adrift The Invisible African Diaspora

Part V: Conclusion

The perpetual dread of al-Shabab militancy drove Nimco Muse Ahmed, an impoverished Somali mother of two, to forge passage through the world’s largest subtropical desert, one war zone and an ocean crossing by flimsy rubber raft.

It was after arriving in Vienna, the proverbial “City of Dreams” that routinely tops UN prosperity indices, when she threw herself from the top floor of a former military barracks to the concrete below.

“I was in a chemically-induced coma for some time and broke both legs and the backbone,” says Ahmed, describing the convalescence that followed her first suicide attempt at Austria’s government-sanctioned refugee encampment at Traiskirchen, a former artillery cadet school located outside the capital.

Her dread had turned to despair on an unseasonably warm autumn night, shortly after learning her application for asylum had been rejected. Trying to muster the will to shrug it off as yet another stumbling block along the path to a better life, she says it was being awoken by a fistfight between neighboring Somali and Syrian refugees over a missing cellphone that pushed her to the brink.

“I was desperate because of difficulties and the fact that I still lacked reception as an asylee,” she says of the moment she decided to end her life. “People in Africa — especially Somalia — I would say, ‘There is nothing in Europe, so don’t dream about it.’”

Hardly emblematic of what most sub-Saharan migrants endure after arriving in Europe, key facets of Ahmed’s story nonetheless mirror the common hardship of the uprooted masses.

Like the majority of an estimated 1 million other refugees who arrived in 2015 alone, her search for a better life meant leaving behind a family — whose savings she drained to gamble with death on the high seas — only to find herself homeless and, without a passport, stateless on a strange northern continent.

Unlike the Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi nationals who constitute Europe’s largest portion of irregular arrivals, however, Ahmed says sub-Saharans face a unique type of discrimination. Throughout immigration centers and encampments across the continent, she says, they’re treated as second-class citizens by their Arab and Afghan counterparts. The scuffle over a missing cellphone pushed her to the limit, she explains, because it was just the latest in a series of petty squabbles among desperate coteries of foreign nationals, and it was bound to end like the rest of them. Because the better-educated Syrian refugees could communicate their side of the story to camp officials, her African roommates, regardless of whether they actually stole the phone, would inevitably take the blame.

Policy in Limbo

For refugees such as Ahmed, there are no easy answers. With the 28-member EU still reeling from 2015′s unprecedented migrant influx, battles over Greek debt and multiple terrorist attacks, the political unity required to find a solution is in short supply. Indeed, the most recent European Economic Forecast predicts an additional 3 million migrants in the coming year, and Britain, one of Europe’s “Big Three” states, is poised to hold a referendum on whether to leave the bloc, a move that could precipitate a further continental unraveling.

EU policymakers have no silver bullet to resolve the crisis; despite a pledge to relocate 160,000 eligible asylees across member states, as of Dec. 12 only 159 people had been settled. Canada welcomed a plane carrying the first of 25,000 Syrian refugees on December 11, while U.S. legislators are just gearing up for a second round of debates on President Barack Obama’s proposed plan to grant asylum to 10,000 Syrians. Immigration remains a polarizing issue on the American campaign trail, where leading Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump has vowed to restrict entry to Muslims and deport any Syrians who might arrive under an Obama program. Despite substantial White House movement on immigration policy, even efforts to award visas to former Afghan and Iraqi battlefield interpreters have come up woefully short.

As individual European nations work through asylum applications, management of refugee arrival hot spots in Italy and Greece has largely fallen to a hodgepodge of international aid organizations, volunteers and municipal authorities.

“Why is it that months into this crisis, it is still almost exclusively volunteers who are providing those arriving on Europe’s shores with … life-saving assistance?” Peter N. Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director, wrote after a recent stint in Greece. “Why should volunteers still be providing life-saving medical care on the rocks of Lesbos, with not an ambulance provided by any government or inter-governmental organization in sight?”

Some news reports echoed the criticism, saying EU representatives are hard to find on the front lines of the crisis.

“Border management is primarily a responsibility of the national authorities,” a European Commission spokesperson said via email. “The European Commission and EU Agencies help and support member states and national authorities managing the situation on the ground — but they do not replace member states.”

Beyond domestic policy, the EU has sought to tackle root causes of flight from Africa. At a November summit on migration, EU and African Union leaders established a $1.9 billion emergency trust fund to help African countries repatriate displaced nationals. Malta, the island nation hosting the summit and once a top destination for migrants, pledged $270,000.

A month later, EU officials launched a $2 billion initiative to stem illegal migration from Africa by spurring jobs and development programs in the continent’s top migrant- and refugee-producing nations.

Grand strategies to stabilize the Mediterranean basin pre-date Gadhafi’s fall. In 2011, Italy’s then-foreign minister, Franco Frattini, called for a new intercontinental order.

“The EU, other world powers and international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund should urgently develop an equivalent of the Marshall Plan for Mediterranean economic stability,” Frattini penned in a 2011 Financial Times op-ed, citing the U.S. initiative to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. “This plan must mobilize a critical mass of new European and international financial resources, in the order of billions of euros, to modernize the economies of the region and improve investment.”

Frattini urged EU officials to remove trade barriers between Mediterranean countries and to work on the strategy with the United States, “whose role remains crucial.” He encouraged more access to higher education — to strengthen the workforce and dissuade youths susceptible to terror organizations’ recruitment — and called cross-Mediterranean job-training programs “the best way to curb illegal immigration and trafficking.”

Conversely, one prominent migration analyst says the problem won’t be solved by addressing Africa’s push factors alone.

“The real problem is that individual states are not willing to take responsibility, because they behave very nationalistically and think they have to respond to xenophobic tendencies within their own countries,” Hein de Haas, a University of Amsterdam sociologist, told VOA, describing the crux of the crisis as the inability of member states to find a common response.

With refugees of conflict and political persecution protected by UN conventions, the EU’s increasing economic openness, he said, creates a demand for cheap migrant labor that’s incompatible with restrictive immigration measures.

“Whatever you think of the issue, you can’t deny that smugglers have a field day when you close borders,” he said. “So there’s no point in blaming the smugglers, when in fact the border restrictions have created this phenomenon in the first place.”

Because grand development strategies require generational timelines — and because there may be a fundamental disconnect between prevailing migration ambitions and EU trade and immigration policy — Elizabeth Collett, Brussels-based director of the Migration Policy Institute Europe, suggests looking to smaller-scale, regionally targeted economic planning.

“Large-scale development policy alone won’t limit migration,” she told VOA in a ranging interview on EU immigration policy. “But there are things that are much more specific in the short-term that aren’t necessarily about limiting mobility, but are about trying to create opportunities that don’t require people taking extremely dangerous journeys to what can often be a very disappointing end.”

Perhaps the question is whether the EU can refocus efforts on replicating what Gadhafi’s Libya once reliably provided: smaller industrial hubs of growth and job opportunities that offer people such as Nimco Muse Ahmed a third option that entails neither a return to the life she knew, nor the struggle to create a new one in Europe.

But even short-term stabilization initiatives may prove hopeless in the wake of a shaken post-Gadhafi Libya, whose porous borders only fuel anti-immigrant sentiment across various EU member states. While migration policymakers grapple with solutions, it may well be the answer lies not in the federal offices of Brussels, but where each story of displacement begins: in the careful — or too often incautious — weighing of risk and reward that guides so many along this perilous path.

Peter Cobus contributed reporting from Washington, DC.