Drawing on the interdisciplinary research projects of scholars from various social science and humanities disciplines, this book explores how African migration to Western countries after the neo-liberal economic reforms of the 1980s transformed West African states and their new transnational populations in Western countries.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

The West African Sahel is predicted to be heavily affected by climate change in the future. Slow-onset environmental changes, such as increasing rainfall variability and rising temperature, are presumed to worsen the livelihood conditions and to increase the out-migration from the affected regions. Based on qualitative and quantitative data from study areas in Mali and Senegal, this book examines the relationship between population dynamics, livelihoods and environment in the Sahel region, focussing specifically on motives for migration. Critiquing the assumption that environmental stress is the dominating migration driver, the author demonstrates the important role of individual aspirations and social processes, such as educational opportunities and the pull of urban lifestyles. In doing so, the book provides a more nuanced picture of the environment-migration nexus, arguing that slow-onset environmental changes may actually be less important as drivers of migration in the Sahel than they are often depicted in the media and climate change literature. This is a valuable resource for academics and students of environmental sociology, migration and development studies.

Spurred by major changes in the world economy and in local ecology, the contemporary migration of Africans, both within the continent and to various destinations in Europe and North America, has seriously affected thousands of lives and livelihoods. The contributors to this volume, reflecting a variety of disciplinary perspectives, examine the causes and consequences of this new migration. The essays cover topics such as rural-urban migration into African cities, transnational migration, and the experience of immigrants abroad, as well as the issues surrounding migrant identity and how Africans re-create community and strive to maintain ethnic, gender, national, and religious ties to their former homes.

This book explores the processes of migration and integration within the West African sub-region and unearths subsisting promises and failures of the ECOWAS' intent of transmuting the sub-region into a single socio-economic (and political) entity.

Originally published in 1974, this volume deals with studies of migration from census and other data, variations in scale, distance and duration of various types of migration, social relations of migrant populations with their home areas and their host communities, and expectations and valuation of migrants concerning rural and urban life. It also examines interrelations between levels of migration, labour supply, wage rates and unemployment in urban centres, the impact of different types of migration on the national economy and economic planning and governemnt measures and conflicting interests of the labour supplying and receiving countries. The introduction analyses the main economic and political factors and the socio-economic consequences and problems brought about by migrations in and between territories.