Debt Rattle June 12 2015
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Jack Delano Main street intersection, Norwich, Connecticut 1940 • Peak America: Our Run Is Over (Paul B. Farrell) • American Dreaming, From G1 to Bild
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle June 12 2015]Interesting article re the “economic” migrants from Senegal.
“Students there, Mr. Sidibé included, have cashed out their scholarships to pay traffickers for a ride to Tripoli. Even their professors have traded in paychecks to journey north, joining policemen, civil servants and teachers, said Souleymane Jules Diop, the country’s minister for emigrants.
“People don’t go because they have nothing, they go because they want better and more,” said Mr. Diop. “It’s aspiration.” […]
And yet many of its best and brightest young people are leaving. Almost 75% of people here surveyed in a 2013 Oxford University study said they wanted to emigrate in the next five years. Last year, the ministry of emigration nearly tripled the number of passports it printed from the previous year. […]
The result is a cycle that is making Senegal’s expanding economy hooked on remittances. Money sent home now accounts for 12% of Senegal’s economy—more than triple what it was in 1999. The suitcases stuffed with cash that fly into this country, along with other untracked transfers, might double that percentage, according to the emigration ministry. More than half the houses in Senegal have at least one family member abroad. In Kothiary, they are the homes with satellite TV.
“Everything you see, the pretty little mosques, the beautiful homes…it’s all financed by emigrants,” said Samba Gallo Ba, a government statistician responsible for Kothiary and its environs. “They’re the ones who can afford it. The state doesn’t have the means.”
So just as one corporation might offshore jobs to China (and the rest have to follow to compete), it appears this is happening in Senegal (remittances provide cell phones and laptops/TV’s, so others follow). These people are not fleeing war, but chasing money.
It appears the destruction of Libya has caused what these people see as a window of opportunity, a way to get through.
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