Popular and political concerns about accelerating migration from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are often framed through migration transition theory, which posits that as poor regions develop, migration rates first rise and later decline after surpassing a certain development threshold. SSA is widely viewed by scholars, pundits, and policymakers as the region where migration rates have only just begun to climb the upward slope. Adopting a long-run historical perspective, we revise this image in three respects. First, although migration out of SSA has recently increased, Africans overall have not become more migratory since colonial times. The share of Africans living abroad was high in the 1960s, reflecting the legacy of large-scale interterritorial migration during the colonial era. Second, voluntary mass migration within Africa expanded rapidly in an era that is not typically regarded as “developmental,” after the abolition of slavery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Large numbers of voluntary migrants, often extremely poor by historical standards, moved toward zones of cash-crop production and mining, and later increasingly to urban destinations. Third, we argue that the recent surge in extracontinental migration reflects a shift in destinations within a much longer migration transition rather than its early stage. This shift was driven by narrowing spatial opportunity gaps within Africa, growing hostility to intra-African migration in the context of nation building, and the simultaneous expansion of capabilities and opportunities for migration beyond the continent.
Haas et al. (Fri,) studied this question.