Introduction
Undocumented economic migration has been at the forefront of European politics for over a decade. Two understandings dictate the public debate: nativism and liberalism. For nativists, migration undermines national culture and threatens native labour standards by introducing a population ready to accept low wages. Liberals express charitable sympathy for migrants fleeing poverty and claim that migration stimulates economic growth. While differing in cultural and ethical positions, both camps display a common methodological nationalism: the ‘push factor’ of migration is poverty in the sending country; the ‘pull factor’ of migration is wealth in the receiving country. Each country’s economy is analysed in isolation, and the political question of migration becomes (a) whether to grant assistance to a problem born elsewhere; and (b) whether migration is lucrative for Europeans.
This investigation challenges both nativist and liberal viewpoints by examining the connection between Senegalese outmigration and the degrading impact of foreign industrial fishing on West African marine life. The connection is made through a case study of Senegalese fishers now living in Badalona, Spain. Their personal histories show that the root cause of their migration is not timeless poverty endogenous to Senegal, but rather the robbery of West African fisheries. Furthermore, their experiences as illegalised migrants reveal how the impoverishment of their home country presses them towards danger and extreme exploitation under Spain’s regime of militarised borders. The results of this study challenge the dominant narratives by linking both migration from Africa and exploitation in Europe to modern imperialism.
The vast but statistically underreported use of illegalised migrant labour in Spain can be brought to light through fieldwork that taps into life histories of migrants. Similarly, tracing migration to ecological destruction requires an inquiry into concrete experiences of victims of degradation. By selecting interviewees according to their past profession, the aim was to gather retrospective accounts of specific labour and migration trajectories which could reflect instances of expropriation-driven migration.
Before turning to the personal histories of five Senegalese fishers, this article will lay out a basic theory of imperialism, followed by a brief history of Senegalese development and its fishing sector. The next section will make a Marxist intervention into the debate between liberals and nativists on the rationality of the border. Thereafter, the personal histories will substantiate the Marxist theory of the border and argue that the key to understanding migrants’ subjugation to super-exploitation in the global North is, in fact, their families’ continued impoverishment in Senegal. 1
The degradation of Senegalese marine life
Modern imperialism and ecological drain
In Marxist political economy, the working day is divided into paid labour time and unpaid labour time: value produced during paid time equals workers’ wages, while value produced during unpaid time is appropriated as profit. The capitalist places the value-laden commodity on the market for more money than initially invested; this cycle is the basis of capital accumulation. To wield control over the exploited workers, capitalist society requires a pool of unemployed people who can swiftly replace insubordinate workers and keep wages down. This pool of unemployed workers is called the relative surplus population (Marx 1990).
Throughout the last 40-plus years of neoliberalism, the relative surplus population of poor countries has been rapidly expanding, resulting in rising poverty and inequality (Hickel 2017). Austerity, land grabs, and unfair competition have set in motion peasant migrations towards the sprawling cities of the global South, creating what Davis calls a ‘planet of slums’. Among the slum dwellers is a gargantuan, one-billion-strong informal proletariat, a new form of ‘relative surplus population’: part of it a ‘stealth workforce for the formal economy’ and part of it ‘truly and radically homeless’ (Davis 2004, 23–27). Capital feeds off those trapped in southern slums, largely due to militarised borders that prevent northward migration. The globalisation of production is built on the back of this southern working class through outsourced commodity chains (Smith 2016, 199–200). Smith argues that world trade is characterised by asymmetry, with fiercely competing southern producers dominated by oligopsonistic multinational corporations from imperialist countries. In other words, with important exceptions mostly related to the emergence of Chinese high-value-added industry, there is no north–south competition (ibid., 84–86). The labour market, however, is defined by a global race to the bottom towards the cheapest labour. Immense wage differentials therefore exist between the imperialist core and peripheral countries, so that profits are made off wages that fail to cover southern workers’ subsistence costs (ibid., 188).
Due to global wage differentials, prices are systematically lower in the south, leading to unequal exchange: ‘for every unit of embodied labour and resources the south imports from the north, they have to export many more units to pay for it’ (Hickel, Sullivan and Zoomkawala 2021, 2). A study by Dorninger et al. (2021, 5) found that high-income countries supplement their yearly domestic extraction of raw material by 10 billion tonnes embodied in imports. Economic and environmental statistics often fall into the trap of methodological nationalism by excluding material and value embodied in northern imports, and thus ignore imperial manipulations that cheapen southern labour and resources (Hickel, Sullivan and Zoomkawala 2021, 2).
While these studies show an undifferentiated quantitative south–north drain, neoliberal policy has also generated qualitative changes in the primary resources flowing to the imperial core. In the case of India, Patnaik and Patnaik have shown how income deflation of the peasantry triggered a move towards the production of fashionable tropical commodities for export. Many peasants became dependent on international markets and, with less land dedicated to grain, a fall in income translated into a fall in grain consumption (Patnaik and Patnaik 2016, 102). In the case of Senegalese fisheries, the correlation between income deflation, export dependence and food insecurity holds. The argument of this article is that the extraction and export of southern workers’ sources of livelihood – foundational to the expanding relative surplus population – necessarily forces northward migration. The principal objective of such migration is to sustain families that remain in countries dominated by imperialism.
Colonial continuity and the debt trap
Since Senegal’s independence in 1960, the country has remained intimately tied to the old colonial power, France. These ties have been most apparent in military cooperation, the continued colonial currency – the franc of the African financial community, known as the CFA franc – and the protection of pre-existing property rights (Bobin 2020). Still, meaningful reforms distinguish the period between independence and the neoliberal turn in the 1980s, reflecting the possibility of a sovereign path to modernisation.
The country’s Agricultural Programme of 1966 began a short-lived era of state-led development. The state guaranteed fertiliser, seed subsidies and generous credit to village cooperatives, leading to increasing mechanisation. Rural support was complemented by import-substitution policies, protecting industrial ventures in vegetable oil, cotton and sugar (Oya 2006, 207). Still, without postcolonial land reform, traditional hierarchies remained entrenched. Village cooperatives became dominated by wealthy notable residents who used political connections to secure the best inputs and equipment. For poor farmers, the Agricultural Programme provided income for survival but was not a vehicle for development (Kelly et al. 1996, 17).
State-led development fell apart as the third world debt crisis span out of control. Contrary to the name, the debt crisis began when American banks became flush with petrodollars following the oil crisis of 1973. These banks created development loan schemes which quickly grew into a toxic subprime market. When the United States (US) raised interest rates and raw material export values declined, many developing countries became insolvent (Hickel 2017, 149–152). With Senegal’s foreign debt rising tenfold to US$1.1 billion between 1970 and 1980, the only solution presented by US-dominated international financial institutions was three successive ‘structural adjustment programmes’ (SAPs) within 15 years. These programmes were meant to whip poor, debt-ridden countries into shape by slashing education and health care budgets, privatising state enterprises and dissolving subsidy and credit programmes, all to pay back odious debts (Bonfond and Soumare 2011). The SAPs led to widespread rural migration towards coastal cities, where many found work in the coastal fishing economy. But the impact of the debt crisis stretched beyond the countryside and eventually reached the sea in the form of bilateral fishing treaties.
In 1960, fishing in Senegal’s coastal communities was still dominated by the ‘family boat’; the family patriarch and sons fished while the matriarch and daughters stayed ashore to wash, process and sell the fish. For many rural communities, on the other hand, fishing was a seasonal activity complementing agriculture. In a good year, peasants preserved enough fish to last until harvest, allowing for a nutritionally balanced diet and giving fish stocks sufficient regeneration periods (Duffy-Tumasz 2017, 190–210).
Mirroring the Agricultural Programme, state subsidies led to motorisation of the colourful traditional wooden fishing canoes called pirogues. By the 1970s, fishers were encouraged to take risky loans for modernised equipment (purse-seine nets, iceboxes, specialised rods, etc), a trend that grew with fishery exports in the 1980s. Upgrades were not financially accessible, and ownership of bigger pirogues became increasingly concentrated. The new, spacious boats absorbed large portions of the relative surplus population, leaving behind the malaise of the hinterland (ibid.). This was the local context for the devastating entrance of foreign fleets and foreign factories.
The importance of the maritime economy in Senegal cannot be overstated: 15% of working people are involved in the fishing economy, 70% of animal protein comes from fish and seafood, and other animal protein sources require higher purchasing power (ActionAid 2008, 4). Thus, prosperity or crisis for Senegalese fisheries affects the whole country – today the crises are manifold.
Enter the EU fleet
The waters along West Africa’s coast are characterised by upwelling, a phenomenon in which deep water is brought to the surface. Upwelling fosters a unique environment of low water temperature, high nutrient production and high biodiversity, and thus an abundance of marine life (Couper, Smith and Ciceri 2015, 12). This is one of the reasons West African fisheries attract international fleets. Fishing fleets target both demersal and pelagic species of fish, many of which have been deemed overexploited, according to UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports published in the last decade (FAO 2016, 61–62; FAO 2013, 68). 2
Between 1973 and 1982, the United Nations established exclusive economic zones (EEZs) which gave coastal countries exclusive rights over a zone of 200 nautical miles from their shores. However, to reduce ecological pressures on European waters, the EU took advantage of EEZs and entered into bilateral fishing agreements with several West African states, all of whom were on the edge of bankruptcy due to the debt crisis (Couper, Smith and Ciceri 2015, 53–54). Starting with the first bilateral agreement in 1979, the EU subsidised its own fleets by paying for roughly two-thirds of permission fees to Senegal. Any EU vessel was free to exploit the zone and only paid for fees based on the quantity of fish extracted (Kaczynski and Fluharty 2002, 79). This meant that EU ships were able to remain profitable even when stocks were overexploited, and that there was incentive to under-report catches.
Budgetary constraints from SAPs encouraged the export orientation of Senegalese fisheries. Fishers’ cooperatives, originally established to facilitate purchases, were eliminated by 1987, and fuel subsidy and credit programmes were similarly discarded (UNEP 2002, 12). However, free markets did not replace protectionism: in 1986 Senegal agreed to a 25% subsidy on fishery exports to the EU (ibid., 39). 3 Fishery exports to the EU also benefited from duty-free commerce; by 2002, the EU was the destination for 60% of Senegalese fishery exports, the equivalent of roughly 79,000 tonnes of mostly high-value species (ibid., 10). By 2017, the EU’s official share in exports fell to 40.9% – equivalent to 54,000 tonnes – however, it was still the largest export market (CBI 2018, 12).
The ‘free for all’ since 1979 ended with a new bilateral agreement in 2014, following an eight-year hiatus during which Senegal refused to renew the original agreement. Agreements since the renewal have limited the ships, species and tonnage relatively strictly. Still, as Antonova makes clear, the 2014 agreement does nothing to dismantle EU subsidy structures, highlight unfair competition between industrial fleets and pirogues, or address contradictions between exports and Senegalese nutritional requirements (Antonova 2016, 83–84). Revenue gained from bilateral agreements must also be compared to the natural wealth extracted. Under the current agreement, Gómez Gil has found that for each tonne of fish extracted by the EU fleet, the Senegalese state receives the microscopic sum of €0.005 (Gómez Gil 2021, 51).
Bilateral agreements can only account for the legal portion of the official catch. The sheer scale of illegal fishing may have influenced Senegal to return to bilateral agreements which at least generate some revenue. In 2005, the UN Development Programme recognised that in the wake of the disastrous SAPs, revenue from bilateral agreements constituted an ‘important source for debt repayments’ (Brown 2005, 3). In other words, odious debts generated mainly by shark loans coerced Senegal to accept bilateral agreements that sucked out its natural resources and sent the measly revenue gained in exchange straight back to the banks and private lenders of imperialist states.
Foreign fleets, false flags, fraudulent factories
Since the first bilateral treaty, an average of 800 EU vessels have been fishing in West African waters at any given time – legally (Couper, Smith and Ciceri 2015, 54). Illegal fishing, especially by European and East Asian ships, has been well documented. A 2009 study found that the rate of illegal fishing in West African waters was the highest in the world, totalling 34–40% of the registered catch between 1990 and 2003, compared to the global average of 18–21% (Agnew 2009, 2). Official data must therefore be assessed cautiously. Aside from equipment manipulation, illegal fishing takes three principal forms: false flags; illicit trespassing into EEZs without authorisation; and transhipments.
Officially 104 trawlers and eight tuna seiners fly the Senegalese flag. However, a major portion are only 51% Senegalese-owned, and usually this majority stake is held by a foreign shell company (Azaola and Carrasco 2016). Senegalese fishers’ organisations routinely deal with the ‘haunting question of joint ventures’ and are fighting to stop this devastating loophole (CAOPA 2019, 6). In 2017, a Greenpeace mission inspected ships across West African waters. They found that 34 out of the 57 fishing ships they inspected had an inactive automatic identification system, and all 57 automatic identification systems showed irregularities. Ships lacking entrance permits use occult automatic identification systems as their main mode of deception. Moreover, maritime trespassing often occurs at night, presenting a lethal threat to artisanal fishers (Greenpeace 2017, 20). Finally, Senegalese law forbade transhipments in 1983; however, every other West African country except Côte d’Ivoire permits it. This has a direct impact on Senegal as the transhipping vessels regularly trespass in the Senegalese EEZ (EJF 2013, 3). The Environmental Justice Foundation has caught several East Asian ships red-handed, transhipping through Las Palmas, Spain, an infamous port of convenience to illicitly enter the EU market (ibid.).
Along the Senegalese coast, particularly in Dakar’s export-processing zone, foreign-owned processing factories absorb catches for export. Ownership of these entities is often shrouded in secrecy. The shift to big pirogues stimulated rising fuel and material costs and drove artisanal fishers to target high-value catches for processing factories. As a result, pirogue catches grew from 130,000 tonnes per year in 1980 to nearly 350,000 tonnes per year by 2002 (UNEP 2002, 9). Rising exports overlapped with what the Patnaiks call ‘auto-income deflation’, where small producers turn to high-risk export ventures to offset falling living standards or exchange-rate depreciations (Patnaik and Patnaik 2016, 110). UNEP’s 2002 investigation concurs, showing rising fishery exports to 125,000 tonnes a year following the SAPs, which then fell to 94,000 tonnes by 1994 and resurged to 124,000 tonnes after the French-imposed CFA devaluation made exports competitive again (UNEP 2002, 18). However, a short-term fall in fishery exports does not necessarily stimulate higher food availability, since heavy pressure on fish stocks constrains regeneration.
An integrated study of fish stocks in 2004 revealed a significant decrease in the mean trophic level and the biomass of demersal species that were landed in Senegal; signs of a looming ecological collapse (Laurans et al. 2004, 163). By 2008, with high-value fish populations in free fall, fishery exports had decreased by 32%. As a result, pirogues have been forced to sail further out on high seas, on increasingly dangerous trips that last several weeks. Additionally, with demersal species such as sea bream and thiof freed up for export, Senegalese consumers have also suffered a restriction in their dietary variety. By the twenty-first century, local consumption centred almost solely on small pelagic species (ActionAid 2008, 4).
While purportedly attracting capital to Senegal, management of processing factories has been mostly in foreign hands: in 2008 over 80% of the added value of fishery exports was estimated to fall to European companies (ActionAid 2008, 8). Processing factories disproportionately hire female processors, many of whom have been pushed from traditional production to factory employment. In the 2000s, these women made €2–3 from a day’s work and saw their working days diminish with falling demersal catches (ibid., 4). Agri-food capital gains significantly from the starvation wages and price mark-ups that come with outsourcing by the processing factories. In addition, the risks associated with resource depletion and business fluctuations fall onto distant workers with no connections to the value-reaping multinational corporations.
The last few years have seen a uniquely dangerous boom in the processing industry in the form of fishmeal and fish oil (FMFO) factories. These factories undercut traditional processors of low-value pelagic species. FMFOs are particularly harmful to the environment since four or five kilograms of fish produce only one kilogram of fishmeal. By 2019 there were six FMFO factories in Senegal, most allegedly owned by Russian and Chinese companies, although ownership ties are murky. Fish oil flows almost solely to Europe, while fishmeal is split between the EU, Japan and other African countries (Greenpeace 2019, 25). Greenpeace has convincingly tied the West African FMFO trade to aquaculture and livestock, mainly in Norway, Scotland, Denmark, France and Spain. The major supermarket chains in the EU are all implicated (Greenpeace 2021). It is likely that the fact that fishers are increasingly present in recent emigration from Senegal can be tied to this latest phase of sea-life depletion. A 2021 study found that between 2008 and 2019 export levels of small pelagics rose from 71,000 to roughly 220,000 tonnes, while local consumption was cut in half, from 18 kg per year to 9 kg per year (Bara Deme, Deme and Failler 2022, 6). The ecological drain thus simultaneously disrupts Senegalese marine ecosystems and undermines the nutritional stability of Senegalese people; these facts must be accounted for in the analysis of Senegalese migration.
‘There won’t be any fish there for years and years’
Interviewing fisher migrants on their personal histories can help visualise the process of dispossession and its importance in their decision to leave home. Four of the interviewees for this investigation – Ousmane, Moussa, Lamine and Abdou – are from peasant or petit-merchant families. 4 They began fishing full-time during the crisis caused by the SAPs and migrated to Spain between 2000 and 2011. Only one interviewee, Souleymane, was from a relatively well-off fishing family in Saint-Louis. When he turned 18 years old his father gave him one of his dozen pirogues.
Moussa, who lived in the coastal town of Rufisque, grew up with access to his father’s boat and by the 1990s was fishing full time. Ousmane’s family were peasants from near Touba. Every year his father would go fishing in the Senegal river: ‘when he [Ousmane’s father] was young, things weren’t like how they were in our youth. He was living in nature.’ By the time Ousmane was an adult in the late 1990s his father had died. To save money for their widowed mother, he and his brothers bought a pirogue and all the gear for high-value demersal fishing. Besides Souleymane, who inherited his equipment and stuck to fishing within Senegal’s EEZ, the other men all responded to deteriorating conditions in their family lives by making risky investments in order to fish for high-value species for export. Ousmane noted that ‘with all the money we spent [on equipment] we had to sail far for a good catch’, often outside Senegal’s EEZ.
According to the interviewees, a good catch would amount to 70–100% of the initial investment, which they estimated at €1000 for several weeks’ worth of supplies at sea. The final sum was split between a crew of roughly a dozen men, with each man splitting the income among his family. Blemished or low-value catch was sold locally, through women fish processors. High-value catches, their main targets, went to factories in Dakar’s industrial zone where, according to Moussa, ‘bosses are Spanish … all the rest African. Like that it won’t cost them like it would [in Europe].’ All emphasised an imbalance between the factory price and the final selling price. As Abdou said: ‘it costs them €5 for the lot, and they sell it for €200.’ Moussa concurred: ‘these people, they fool you. If you wanted €1.70 for a kilo, they would pay €1.30’, emphasising that for Europeans ‘fish is money.’ Ousmane spoke at length about the need for a state purchasing agency to bypass foreign factory dependence. All spoke with animosity about the Senegalese governments that let foreign companies reap profits at their expense.
In a phenomenon not widely reported in the literature, Ousmane, Lamine and Abdou eventually began working as part of outsourced pirogue teams for European ships: Ousmane for a Spanish ship and Lamine and Abdou for Portuguese ships. Together with roughly 60 other pirogue teams, they would board European vessels and sail to other African EEZs, from Gabon to Angola. Here they would fish independently and dump their catch on the ship. Campaigns would last three months and work was constant: ‘you get up at 6 am. When your boat is filled you go back, offload and go back out. Until 7 pm, when you go to the ship, have dinner and sleep.’ Ship capacity was not a problem: all three of them reported transhipments to allow for the three-month haul, at the end of which a single pirogue (with roughly six people) could allegedly make between €1500 and €2000. However, wages were piece-rate, so there was no guarantee. While income was not significantly better than independent expeditions, what drew them towards the ships was the safety of a nightly ‘home base’ rather than sleeping in the pirogue.
Night-time shifts in the pirogue were plagued not only by strong waves but also by incessant incursions of European and East Asian industrial ships. ‘At night’, said Ousmane, ‘we make little traps to catch fish. And the captain of the [industrial] ship knows that he’s not supposed to enter because the [pirogues] are there. But then at night he goes trawling.’ Trawlers are particularly destructive to demersal species since they drag a net along the ocean floor to stimulate fish to rise from the seabed. Digging into the seabed causes severe and often irreparable damage (Couper, Smith and Ciceri 2015, 19). Ousmane continued with indignation:
the trawlers are bad. The worst of the sea … when they destroy the sea, we, the poor, can no longer fish. Because the fish that we are catching live hidden beneath the rocks. But if a trawler passes by, that’s it. There won’t be any fish there for years and years.
Trawlers endanger not just their traps and their catch, but also the lives of Senegalese fishers. Souleymane’s good friend disappeared – his pirogue was thought to have been run over by a trawler – and this spring Lamine’s brother was killed by a trawler at night. Lamine sat in silence before clarifying that ‘this happens every year to someone.’ When asked about interactions with the trawlers, Souleymane told of a widespread practice of resistance ‘without fists or words’ against ships that head in their direction at night. He explained with pride how they ‘would take a plastic barrel, fill it with gasoline, light it on fire, and send it towards the ship.’ The tiny flame is no match against the industrial ship, but at least it alerts the ships to the pirogues’ presence.
All interviewees denounced the trawlers and were adamant that a dignified life in Senegal was impossible under the current conditions. When asked about levels of fish stocks, Souleymane retorted: ‘Of course, man! That’s why I sold my pirogue and came up here to have a better life … I couldn’t fish anymore!’ Similarly, Ousmane’s assessment of Senegalese fisheries was ‘Bad! Very bad! That’s why so many people are coming here … always working more, earning less … the fish is far. Why is it far? The trawlers’ fault!’ Moussa, who has worked in a restaurant in Spain, made the connection between the drain of fish in their home and Spanish consumption: ‘fish that you see here in the restaurants … it’s from Africa. They always take fish that we can eat, take it to Europe or Asia … . In Barcelona, in Madrid, it’s all from Africa!’
The interview-based fieldwork gives a glimpse into how pirogue fishers became enmeshed in risky buyer-dominated commodity chains. Income deflation led interviewees to make risky investments and develop a dependence on high-value catches for export. Export-oriented fishing and foreign ships’ unsustainable fishing practices further threatened their livelihoods by depleting the stocks of high-value fish and pushing the fishing zone ever further from the coast. Furthermore, the interviews demonstrate the lethal threat of both sailing far in a pirogue and sleeping in the path of an industrial ship. To avoid the danger of encroaching ships and to secure income, some fishers entered even further into export-based commodity chains by seeking employment with transhipping European vessels. Most importantly, these fishers state that the overexploitation of West African fisheries pushed them towards migration, particularly due to the unsustainable and life-threatening practices of trawlers.
It is noteworthy that all interviewees fished for high-value demersal species – including Souleymane, although he would also target small pelagic species. The size of the interviewee sample cannot confirm it, but future studies should investigate whether there is a distinction between earlier migration waves of fishers who primarily caught demersal species and recent migration waves of fishers who primarily caught small pelagic species. The latter would be due to the recently intensified export of small pelagics through the FMFO industry. Such an investigation could further confirm the causality of industrial overfishing in forced migration from Senegal’s coast.
Unlike the mainstream migration narrative, then, the case study of Senegalese fishers shows that undocumented economic migration takes place because of ecological robbery from imperialist powers. Poverty in Senegal cannot be divorced from the drain of Senegalese resources for European consumption. Ironically, if imperialist plunder is the major cause of migration, then ‘push factors’ of migration should not be linked to migrant-sending countries, but rather to migrant-receiving countries whose companies profit from the destruction of West African ecosystems.
Arbitrary yet rational: the border and the labour market in Spain
Human resources or illegalised workers?
It is clear that the dominant narrative around undocumented economic migration is flawed, since it ignores the culpability of imperialist countries in impoverishing the global South. In addition, the dominant narrative highlights the attractiveness of life in Europe as a key determinant of migration. Such attractiveness is often presumed rather than verified, and therefore the public debate usually centres around whether Europe can also benefit from migration.
The debate between liberals and nativists often dwells on pros and cons of so-called unskilled migration for abstract categories such as gross domestic product (GDP). Liberal economists like Jonathan Portes argue that borders are irrational impediments to the efficient allocation of human resources. As labour costs become more competitive with migration, native workers are laid off. But because of economic expansion most native workers benefit from new skilled jobs (Portes 2019, 14). Conservative economist Georges Borjas, often cited by nativists, agrees that migration adds to GDP; however, he contests the complementary movement of native workers to better jobs and therefore defends strict borders. He estimates that undocumented migration reduces native wages in the US by US$99–118 billion per year, while companies hiring illegalised labour gain a similar figure in profits (Borjas 2013, 2).
In short, liberals and nativists agree that economic migration stimulates growth in rich countries but argue about whether it is a net-negative or net-positive for the receiving country. Their models ignore power imbalances and exploitation, and centre on ‘income’ for particular actors and ‘output’ for the nation. Liberals conceptualise a ‘win–win’ abstraction, in which poorly paid foreigners set off a cascade of benefits for the entire country. Nativists prioritise the welfare of low-income sections of the autochthonous national group. Class blindness leads the debate to a dead end.
Cross’s work cuts through both arguments by showing how Spanish capitalists and the Spanish state encourage undocumented work and simultaneously institute a regime of racialised arbitrary rule on illegalised migrants. Once in Spanish territory, most migrants are handed an order of expulsion without actually being forcibly deported. Their residency in Spain is thereby officially illegalised (Cross 2013, 135). The law penalises migrants for residing in Spanish territory without permission, while simultaneously requiring three years of residency and a year-long 40-hour-per-week contract in order to solicit legal papers (Rodríguez 2021). Furthermore, there have been a range of regularisation programmes that are designed to suit the labour needs of the moment, but these frequently plunge migrant workers back into illegality once the programmes end (Sabater and Domingo 2012, 213).
Labour-intensive sectors in imperialist countries thus profit enormously from exploiting cheapened migrant labour. But capital as a whole also benefits from the illegalisation of an entire subsection of the working class. The separation between exploited legal and super-exploited illegal workers creates a dual labour market (Cross 2013, 86). Everyday fear fosters illegalised workers’ unique exploitability, characterised by exceptionally low wages and exclusion from social security. From the perspective of the boss, destitution generates flexibility: despite their relative immobility, illegalised workers are likely to travel wherever work can be found. Fear induced by illegality also stymies resistance to exploitation through unionising; when labour organising emerges, bosses can always turn to the authorities and legally repress their workforce (De Genova 2002, 429).
The concept of the dual labour market rectifies the error of nativists who separate native and foreign workers as if they were not both subjected to varying levels of exploitation. From the perspective of capital accumulation – contrary to the liberal understanding – militarised borders are indeed highly rational since they guarantee growth in key sectors and fracture working-class organisation. The Marxist framework in which value is extracted through exploitation shows how both mainstream positions are simultaneously right and wrong: illegalised labour power is cheap and flexible, and, precisely because it can replace less exploitable legal labour power, it facilitates economic growth.
The lived experience of illegality in Spain
There have been two surges in Senegalese migration to Spain: the first peaked in 2006 when 31,000 Senegalese people reached the Spanish coast, and the second has taken place over the last five years, with 58,569 Senegalese people arriving in Spain by sea in 2018 alone (CEAR 2019, 13). In line with the present study, the International Organization of Migration identified ‘scarcity of fisheries’ as a key driver of both migration waves (IOM 2019). A large portion of West African migrants, especially from coastal communities, attempt the voyage to the Canary Islands. Often, they sail in repurposed pirogues whose owners decide that people smuggling is more profitable than fishing, regardless of likely jail time (Gómez Gil 2021, 60).
The interviewees for this investigation were all homeless and without papers at the time of the fieldwork. The two that had resided in Spain for longest, Moussa and Ousmane, had held papers as part of the 2006–2009 settlement programme, but later fell back into illegality. As Ousmane explained,
since [I lost my papers] I have been suffering because I have not had stable work … I go to Andalusia to look for work [in agriculture] … and my problem is the problem of roughly half of all Africans here.
Aside from agriculture, the interviewees had worked informally in construction, painting, restaurants and even on Spanish ships as mariners. All complained of abusive treatment. Moussa was laid off by a restaurant and was not paid for an entire month’s work. When working as a mariner, he claimed that the bosses always sent him to do the most dangerous job. Eventually he sustained a severe injury and was left out of work without compensation. Ousmane said that occasionally agriculturalists withheld wages: ‘some bosses … you are with them for 29 days, but in your payslip you only get 15 … when you need the work, they know it, so they prefer to hold [the money] back.’ Others, like Abdou, Lamine and Souleymane, have worked collecting scrap-metal for sale when unable to find work. They are part of a huge informal recycling system in Spain, made up mostly of sub-Saharan migrants. Income in scrap-collection fluctuates wildly: ‘in a day’s work, sometimes you make €10. Sometimes you make €50. Sometimes you make nothing.’
Research from the International Labour Organization (ILO) supports the evidence gathered in these interviews: in 2020 the average pay gap for migrants in Spain stood at 28.3%, however for the bottom decile of wage earners this figure skyrocketed to 58% (Amo-Agyei 2020, 20). In other words, the poorest migrant workers in Spain will on average make under half the wage of a local worker in the same job, a fact that clearly demonstrates the super-exploitative effect of the dual labour market.
The accounts of the interviewees reinforce the ILO data and substantiate the claims of this article, revealing again the flaws in the liberal and nativist conceptions of migration. As opposed to the primordial cheapness of migrant labour that nativists presume, the dual labour market provides the possibility of hiring these illegalised workers which in turn may push native workers out of their jobs. However, the determining factor is the regime of illegality, not the migrant. The liberal ‘win–win’ scenario of efficient human resource allocation is equally fallacious. The Spanish state enforces these peoples’ destitution and desperation, and it is this that provides the growth effect in industries where they periodically work.
Still, capital is not only attracted to the low wages of illegalised migrant labour. Reproductive costs of labour are also externalised to migrant communities in Spain or families in Senegal. Without a residency permit it is difficult to receive health care or social security (Cross 2013, 104). State- or workplace-based childcare, schooling and pensions are also non-existent in a state of illegality. The nurturing of migrant workers is fully paid for by the state and civil society of Senegal, with Spanish capitalists reaping the final product: a fully capable and exploitable worker bereft of civil rights.
When Senegalese migrants in Spain have a source of income, most send a substantial part of their meagre salary to Senegal as remittances. As of 2017, remittance inflows formed an entire 10.2% of Senegal’s GDP (World Bank 2021a). Migrants’ wages are in some sense communal: remittances allow for a bit of respite as global commodity chains strangle their brothers and sisters in Africa. Unprompted, Ousmane described his philosophy:
when I am rich, [but] my brother isn’t rich, and my sister isn’t rich, and my family isn’t rich – for me, such wealth would be useless … that’s why I have left my country, to make enough money for my mother, my brother.
The interviewees reported sending back between €150 and €250 per month when income was stable. Remittances are often praised in development literature, as if additional income fosters upward mobility (Delgado-Wise 2014, 657). The accounts of the interviewees starkly contradict this benevolent tale. Ousmane usually sends €200 back home, of which the majority goes to his mother ‘so that she can buy her food, move around, and take the bus until next month’. Lamine sends money back to his four children that live in Senegal, hoping that this money can allow them to stay in school for longer: ‘what I’ve suffered I don’t want my sons to suffer’, he muttered, solemnly. Moussa similarly said of his brothers and their families, that ‘what [he] can give them is electricity, water, food, and that’s it.’ Only Souleymane – who acknowledged that his situation was extraordinary because his family owns several pirogues – manages to save money for the future. He was also the only interviewee that expressed any realistic hope of returning to a stable life in Senegal.
Unless their families own capital, remittances will typically serve to top up incomes in Senegal that cannot provide subsistence. Rather than wealth flowing out of Spain to develop Senegal, the living labour power of Senegal flows to Spain to be super-exploited by Spanish capital, with Senegalese families receiving the leftover crumbs.
The labour-intensive sectors where the interviewees sought employment are also among the most ecologically wasteful industries, which links back to the original dispossession of the interviewees and their families. Lawrence has written of the ‘dreadful irony’ whereby Senegalese peasants whose tomato crops were originally undercut by processed European canned tomatoes end up as migrants collecting the tomato harvest in the monoculture fields of Lombardy and Andalusia (Lawrence 2008, 198). Moussa’s abusive work experience as a mariner on a Spanish industrial ship in West African waters bears a similar poignancy. The infuriating scenario of illegalised migrants drawn into the very commodity chain that continues to expropriate their compatriots resonates with Moussa’s comment that ‘all the fish that you see here in the restaurants … it’s all from Africa.’ Moussa and Souleymane also both faced exploitation in these restaurants, where mounds of seafood end in the bellies of wealthy tourists. The interviewees have been moved from the beginning to the end of the commodity chains that dispossess their families. Meanwhile, as wealth is extracted from Senegal and poverty worsens, their families become ever more dependent on remittances for bare survival.
During the interviews there was usually no need to infer the connection between their fishing experience and their decision to leave home: most made the connection when asked about how fish stocks changed over time and the possibility of ‘living well as a fisher today in Senegal’. Nonetheless, all interviews began with the more open-ended question of why they ‘left Senegal’, to which everyone but Souleymane, responded: to help their families back home. Viewed from this perspective, the ‘pull factor’ of migration is not the wealthy life of Europe, but rather the possibility of familial subsistence back home. If self-exposure to the lethal violence of borders and a life of illegality is all done for income to sustain the family in Senegal, then ‘pull factors’ must be linked to the immiseration of the migrant-sending country rather than the wealth of the migrant-receiving imperialist country. The mainstream use of the push/pull language to understand migration becomes meaningless once one moves beyond methodological nationalism and recognises how imperial plunder determines both the push and the pull of migration.
Conclusion
Both liberals and nativists make a twofold error. First, they trace the roots of migration to isolated phenomena in countries of emigration. Then, after presuming the attractiveness of imperialist states, their class blindness traps them into a fruitless debate between an absurd discourse of growth on the one hand and racist confusion on the other. By examining personal histories of groups of migrants with similar professional backgrounds, it becomes clear that the notion of migrants escaping home-grown poverty is flawed.
In the case of Senegalese fishers living in Badalona, the income-deflationary impact of the debt crisis and neoliberal austerity led them into export-oriented commodity chains which – driven overwhelmingly by foreign fleets and factories – drain Senegalese fish stocks. The overextraction of fish pushed the interviewees to migrate, but any income they gained would flow back and act as a buffer against the continued imperial plunder of their homeland. Conveniently for Spanish capital, these fishers are subjugated under a regime of illegality which periodically inserts them into highly exploitative labour-intensive sectors. In many cases, their jobs lie at the far end of commodity chains whose extraction process begins in Africa.
The situation in Senegal today is grave. Even before the pandemic, over half of the country lived on less than US$5.50 a day at purchasing-power parity (World Bank 2021b). The pandemic has also renewed the debt crisis which was never solved by the SAPs in the first place. As the state goes bankrupt, the temptation to sell off Senegalese marine life may become irresistible. The most recent example: in May 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz offered to support British Petroleum in developing offshore gas in Senegal’s EEZ, a project that is set to ‘destroy a giant coral reef [and] use up to 1% of the world’s 1.5°C carbon budget’ (Ba and Böhling 2022). The multi-layered crisis of Senegalese marine ecosystems is on course to worsen. It is imperative to understand the migration waves that will emerge.
As the global ecological crisis deepens, migration studies will inevitably shift focus towards climate refugees. Tracing expropriation through the personal histories of climate refugees may be less clear cut: a record-breaking hurricane does not have the same agency as a European trawler. Still, methodological nationalism cannot be allowed to muddy the waters, because the facts are clear: the global North is responsible for 92% of emissions that exceed planetary boundaries (Hickel 2021, 1). Personal histories contextualised by critical scholarship may help draw the conversation towards a recognition of the ecological drain of modern imperialism – the foundation of many migrants’ social exclusion.