Abstract
Fatalities from illegal immigration from Africa is an important issue, representing a major challenge for both major migrant sending and receiving countries. Nonetheless, almost nothing is known about how the illegal migration intentions of potential migrants are formed. This paper aims to explain the factors behind the formation of these intentions to migrate illegally by using an original survey among urban Senegalese individuals. Remarkably, the results show that potential illegal migrants are willing to accept a substantial risk of death (25% at the median). Furthermore, the paper also finds that the price of illegal migration, migrant networks and high expectations play important roles in the decision to illegally migrate. Moreover, I find that, contrary to conventional thinking, stricter immigration policies deter potential legal migrants more than potential illegal migrants.
Highlights
Illegal or undocumented migration from the developing world to rich countries raises many important issues at the political, economic and humanitarian level
While massive waves of illegal migrants from Africa arrive in Europe on a regular basis and many more die on their way, illegal migration has mostly been studied in the context of Mexico and the United States (Gathmann 2008; Hanson 2006; Orrenius 2004; Orrenius and Zavodny 2005; Ryo 2013)
2 Background on illegal migration from Senegal While the phenomenon of migrants landing in a host country without proper authorization is not new, new methods of illegal migration that push the envelope of safety are continually being developed as a means of side-stepping restrictive immigration policies
Summary
Illegal or undocumented migration from the developing world to rich countries raises many important issues at the political, economic and humanitarian level. Since the fall of 2005, people in Europe have regularly witnessed tragic events related to illegal migration from Africa, such as the Ceuta and Melilla tragedy, as well as media images of people disembarking onto European coasts Such events show how strongly migrants are motivated to leave their country at any cost with the hope of finding a better life. After 2000, the intensification of the border controls at the Straits of Gibraltar have increasingly driven illegal migrants to use boats to reach European coasts such as Lampedusa, Sicily or the Canary Islands (Adepoju 2008; De Haas 2006) Many of these people are originally from Senegal, a country affected with the departure of many migrants illegally. The comparison in terms of GDP per capita (Constant 2005 US$) shows that the GDP per capita is evaluated at 790 US$ for Senegal, 25,486 US$ for Spain and 33,493 US$ for France (World Bank 2009)
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