8 - Drivers and Patterns of Ethiopian Youth Migration to Global Destinations

Summary

Introduction

For a number of years now Ethiopia has had one of the highest emigration and asylum-seeking rates of all the countries in Africa. This has resulted in the emergence of a vibrant Ethiopian global diaspora. Every year, an estimated six hundred thousand Ethiopians migrate to major destination countries in the Middle East, Europe, the US, South Africa, and Australia. About 70 percent of Ethiopian migrants to international destinations comprise young men and women aged between sixteen and twenty-two, who undertake risky journeys over land and sea to reach African, Middle Eastern, and European destinations. While low-skilled young men from villages tend to disproportionately migrate southward to South Africa, the less educated young women migrate to Middle Eastern and Gulf countries for domestic work. But those who travel northward to Europe are a mixture of young men and women, whether educated or less educated, from both rural and urban areas of the country. International migration is also accompanied by a wide range of return migrations and circulation between Ethiopia and international destinations.

Structural, social, familial, and individual conditions drive youth emigration from Ethiopia. However, these categories of factors are interrelated, overlap, and often causal. They are therefore analytic categories rather than distinctive typologies. We need to move beyond a simplistic and deterministic push-pull model of migration if we want to study the specific challenges of young people in Ethiopia and the intermediate conditions that generate migration aspirations, decisions, and sustain continued migrations overtime. This would shed more light on the complex migration patterns and mass migratory exits of the youth from Ethiopia. There are different levels that inform the decision to migrate. Some young people are desperate due to challenging personal, political, and economic conditions and take dangerous overland journeys to destinations where they seek asylum or stay clandestinely. Others take safer paths, such as travelling for education and through family connections to leave the country both voluntarily and legally. In between there is formal labor mobility to Gulf States through the facilitation of overseas employment agencies. The divide between forced and voluntary migration is therefore not a binary opposition but a continuum and a matter of degree, and migrants leave for mixed reasons using mixed methods.