Berkley Center

USA, Spain, France, Italy, Canada—anywhere would be better than here, Senegal. I often pass signs for a lottery whose grand prize is not millions or billions of CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine) but a United States visa. And for some who cannot afford air travel or for whom the visa process will yield nothing, the only viable solution may be a treacherous week-long journey in a small, wooden fishing boat, with Spain as the most likely destination.

Whence this desire to emigate? I've often encountered Senegalese who see no future in Senegal and believe that they see the better life that inevitably awaits them in a richer country. A professor here who served as a government official early in his career expressed, as many others have, a deep pessimism about the Senegalese government's capacity to ameliorate the country's economic standing. In his view, politics are the realm of rent-seekers who laze in their comfortably salaried positions and who don't have the courage to make politically difficult decisions for fear of alienating voters. It’s easy to share my professor's sentiment, as, according to IMF data, Senegal ranked one hundred eighty-eighth in the world in per capita GDP growth from 1980 to 2007. And official unemployment stood at 50.7 percent and 54.1 percent in Dakar in 2005 and 2006, though official unemployment is likely overestimated because of widespread participation in the informal sector.

Conceptions of the destination countries and emigration also seem to be inflated with idealism, even if the widespread exposure to emigration ought to attenuate this over-optimism (according to the World Bank’s 2011 Enquête Migration et Transferts de Fonds au Sénégal, 33.8 percent of Senegalese live in households with international migrants). The financial boon of emigration is undeniable: the average remittance from an emigrant to his/her former household is 1,203,347 CFA, or about $6,000, which is over four times the Senegalese per capita income. This figure comes from surveys not of emigrants, but of Senegalese households that once held emigrants, an important distinction because expectations of emigrants do not necessarily match the realities in foreign territory. Despite the fact that emigration is fraught with economic, social, and linguistic difficulties, prosperity is taken as a given and the sort of struggle detailed in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. Visits by family or to family are also viewed as customary, and round-trip plane tickets from any OECD country to Senegal normally cost upward of $1,000. I recently visited a small village on the Senegalese coast, and my hosts speculated about a man from the village who had moved to the United States 15 years ago and had not once returned. Many emigrants have grown up surrounded by the narrative that emigration unequivocally equals success, and in challenging that narrative they would risk being marked as failures in lands where failure is near impossible.

While the “promised land” narrative persists at a household level, what is the outlook for Senegalese emigration at a macroeconomic level? On the one hand, remittances can provide much needed financial relief to families in Senegal; on the other hand, the country may lose some of its most talented and brilliant students and professionals to pastures that are perceived of as greener. The aforementioned professor came to the United States in the 1980s to work with the World Bank, and rather than attempting to put roots down in America, he returned to Senegal because he believed in the future of his nation. Now, he says, if faced with the same situation, he would remain in the United States without a second thought. Whether other Senegalese share his opinion or not, they deserve at the very least a re-examination of emigration narratives before they undertake that enormous journey or judge those who have.