The Place of Egypt in the regional
migration system as a receiving country
Ayman Zohry
Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 19 - n°3 | 2003
Electronic reference
Ayman Zohry, « The Place of Egypt in the regional migration system as a receiving country », Revue européenne des migrations internationales [Online], vol. 19 - n°3 | 2003, Online since 09 June 2006,
connection on 30 September 2016. URL : http://remi.revues.org/2664 ; DOI : 10.4000/remi.2664
1. Historically, Egypt was a land of immigrants not emigrants (Sell, 1988). Egypt has been an area of international migration (migration from the eastern and the north-eastern Mediterranean countries to Egypt). In the past, foreigners were coming to Egypt while Egyptians rarely migrated abroad till the mid 1950s. The ancestors of the Egyptian people include many races and ethnic groups, including Africans, Arabs, Berbers, Greeks, Persians, Romans, and Turks. This paper surveys Egyptian immigration with emphasis on emigration to complete the picture. The study is migrant-focused, though some elements of Egyptian government policy are also included. Sections on migration to Egypt focus mainly on refugees, using as examples the largest populations from Palestine, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, because they form the majority of new migrants to Egypt. These sections are primarily concerned with the policies of the Egyptian government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which decides refugee status in Egypt. To take a migrant-focused approach to immigrants — mainly refugees — who come from at least 30 different countries, would require political and economic analyses of their countries of origin, and this is beyond the scope of this study.
2. The dominant geographical feature of Egypt is the River Nile. The Nile represents the main source of water for agriculture, and consequently is a major determinant of the spatial distribution of population and economic life. Rapid population growth is one of the crucial problems that hinder development efforts in Egypt. While the doubling of Egypt’s population between 1897 and 1947, from 9.7 million to 19 million, took fifty years, the next doubling took less than thirty years, from 1947 to 1976. Today, Egypt’s population approaches 70 million. The annual population growth rate is around 2 %. About 95 % of the population is crowded onto around the 5 % of the total land area that is formed by the narrow ribbon of dense population and agriculture that follows the course of the Nile. The remaining 95 % of the land is desert. Although it can be seen as a kind of ‘natural response’ to the geography of economic opportunity, migration to large cities has further imbalanced Egypt’s population distribution.
3. Associated with rapid population growth is a high level of unemployment. Official estimates placed unemployment at about 8.4 percent in 2000/2001 down from 9.2 percent in 1991/1992. Independent estimates push the number to 14 percent (Zohry, 2002). However, to control unemployment, Egypt will need to achieve a sustained real GDP growth rate of at least 6 percent per year. The economy has to generate between 600,000 and 800,000 new jobs each year in order to absorb new entrants onto the labor force. Between 1990 and 1997, however, only about 370,000 new jobs were created each year. The size of the informal sector and the level of over-employment in the public sector add to the complexity of the problem.
4. This study relies mainly on secondary data. Primary data come from my observations and informal interviews with senior officials in the Ministry of Manpower and Emigration while working as a consultant in the Integrated Migration and Information Systems project (IMIS). It should be borne in mind that migration data are generally incomplete, based more on estimates than hard facts, so that even simple trends are often hard to confirm.
للقراءة والتحميل اضغط هنا
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق