PART II CASE-STUDY: GUINEA-BISSAU
6. Migration and development in Guinea-Bissau: a macro-level overview
6.3.2 The Bissau-Guinean diaspora in the present day
Ascertaining the quantitative and qualitative features of the Bissau-Guinean diaspora is a task made difficult by several factors. First, the statistical data are scattered among different sources in different host countries, are not always made available due to the low absolute quantitative figures of the community in question and are plagued by issues of reliability (given the limited and fallible character of the data-collection instruments that support them). Second, depending on the host contexts, there is sometimes a considerable share of irregular migration flows and stocks that are statistically invisible. Third, with the exception of a few studies in Portugal and France, there has been a general lack of academic attention to Bissau-Guinean migrant communities in their countries of reception.
Fourth, in the case of migration to France, many migrants of Bissau-Guinean origin, as well as their descendants, are statistically invisible due to having migrated via Senegal and under Senegalese or French citizenship. And fifth, the flexibility of the flows in response to changing conditions, along with the porosity of some borders (between Guinea-Bissau and Senegal and between Portugal and Spain, for example), raise additional problems to the statistical depiction of this reality. All of these reasons require us to triangulate the available statistical information with (typically more up-to-date) ad hoc qualitative evidence, under the light of the historical processes described in the previous section.
The 2007 Global Migrant Origin Database (SCMR 2007), which was compiled based on a variety of sources, indicates Senegal as hosting the single largest Bissau-Guinean community abroad (estimated at 32,628), followed by Portugal (21,435), The Gambia (17,130) and France (8,125). These figures, added to relatively smaller communities in a variety of other countries, are consistent with the overall estimate of the total emigrant stock at 111,300, or 6.8% of the population, put forth by the World Bank (2011). However, there are indications that this database underestimates the actual figures in several cases, and that the latter overall estimate is therefore also likely to be an underestimation.
In the case of Senegal, it seems unquestionable that the 87,000 estimate put forth in the 1980s (Galli and Jones 1987) has gone down substantially, though hardly to the 7,500 in the late 1990s suggested in HWWI (2007). Solid evidence lacks in this respect, but in view of the ad hoc qualitative evidence, we may safely consider the SCMR (2007) figure of around 33,000 as an absolute minimum, and regard the Bissau-Guinean migrant community in Senegal as the single most numerous site of the diaspora (especially if The Gambia is included in this assessment). By and large, these migrants are concentrated in
170 the Southern region of Casamance and Dakar (as well as The Gambia), hail mostly from the Northern region of Guinea-Bissau and the Manjaco ethnic group, exhibit a high feminisation rate and have for the most part taken up relatively low-skilled occupations.
The Bissau-Guinean population in Portugal suggested in SCMR (2007) is likely also to constitute an underestimation. The Eurostat puts forth a less conservative figure91 (23,672 in 2010, downwards from 28,871 in 2008), while the Portuguese Foreigners and Borders Office refers to 19,817 Bissau-Guinean citizens in a regular situation by 31 December 2010, downwards from 22,945 in 2009 (SEF 2010). However, there is widespread agreement among researchers (e.g. Carreiro 2011; Có92) that if we add to these the number of Bissau-Guinean migrants in an irregular situation and those who have in the meantime acquired Portuguese citizenship, the number of people of Bissau-Guinean origin in Portugal probably adds up to some 40,000-50,000. Having said this, there are clear indications that this community has experienced a reduction over the last decade (for the reasons explained in the previous section), fuelling both some return migration to Guinea-Bissau and, especially, re-migration to contexts that have so far remained less visible from the statistical point of view: Spain, whose Bissau-Guinean community is estimated at 2,226 in the SCMR database but is surely several times stronger (the Eurostat estimating it at 6,679 in 2010); or the United Kingdom, where the SCMR estimate amounts to a mere 539, but where, according to qualitative evidence, the actual figure is in the thousands (albeit not acknowledged by Eurostat)93.
The qualitative characteristics of the Bissau-Guinean community in Portugal reflect the superposition of the various waves of migration into this country over the years, including relatively skilled migration in the post-independence period and as of the 1998- 99 civil war, relatively low-skilled and predominantly male labour migration between the mid-1980s and mid-2000s, and migration by university students. There is thus an over- representation of Bissau-Guinean migrants both in the lower-skilled secondary segments of the labour market (especially cleaning and construction) and amongst very highly-skilled professionals (especially medical staff, but also engineers and academics, with implications for discussions around the issue of the ‘brain drain’ and potential initiatives to mobilise skilled elements of the diaspora) (Có 2007; see also this section, below).
91 http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/population/data/database#
92 Interview no.3.
93 Interviews no.2, 3 and 8. Additional qualitative evidence is provided in Carreiro (2011).
171 Of all the countries hosting sizeable communities of Bissau-Guinean origin, France is likely to be the one where statistical under-representation is most severe. The SCMR estimated this community at 8,125 in 2007, while the Eurostat refers to 2,491 in 2005 (oddly, downwards from 7,596 in 1999) and the French INSEE94 indicates a mere 1,714 economically active persons of Bissau-Guinean citizenship in 2006. However, there can be little doubt that France remains one of the two most quantitatively significant sites of the Bissau-Guinean diaspora in Europe (along with Portugal), even if it fails to show up as such given the large share of these migrants (and their descendants) who have either Senegalese or French citizenship. Mr. Huco Monteiro95, an informant with inside knowledge of this community, estimates the total number of people of Bissau-Guinean origin and their descendants to be in the vicinity of 50,000, a figure that is much more consistent than those mentioned previously in this paragraph with such other figures as the estimated 200 Manjaco migrant and HTAs extant in France (GRDR 2010). This is a community that has long reached its maturity, is well on its way to formal assimilation (if less so to substantive assimilation, if by the latter is meant de-segregation and upwards social mobility96) and which has experienced a substantial decrease in new flows. However, it maintains important linkages with Guinea-Bissau that should not be overlooked as a consequence of its statistical invisibility.
This overview of the Bissau-Guinean diaspora in the present day is made complete by reference to those other contexts that, for various reasons, have emerged as important at various times in the recent past, but on which little information is available: Germany (SCMR est.: 5,701, associated with student migration and the subsequent emergence of autonomous migration linkages); other overland destinations in West Africa like the Republic of Guinea (est. 7,326), Burkina Faso (7,448) and Ghana (6,107), on which even less is known but where Bissau-Guinean migration is likely to be mostly associated with trade networks and labour mobilisation from below97; Cape Verde, where an estimated 10,000
94 http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/detail.asp?reg_id=99&ref_id=pop-immigree-pop-etrangere
95 Anthropologist, former Minister of Education and himself a former member of the Manjaco migrant community in France. Interview no.1.
96 Interviews no.1 and 3.
97 To these, we might also add Angola, facilitated by the Lusophone connection and as a consequence of the oil-fuelled economic expansion in the latter country in the last decade. Many Bissau-Guineans have sought to migrate to this country in the last few years and regularly congregated in significant numbers outside the Angolan Embassy in Bissau in an attempt to obtain work visas. However, the Angolan Government has shown little willingness to authorise labour immigration, and it is unlikely that the number of Bissau-Guineans in this country exceeds a few hundred or at most a few thousand.
172 Bissau-Guinean citizens are estimated to reside98, typically consisting of low-skilled migrants (largely in an irregular situation) but also including many school teachers and other skilled professionals who left Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verde by the hundreds in the post-independence and structural adjustment periods99 (many of whom subsequently re- migrating to the United States, following Cape Verdean migration routes); and Brazil, Luxembourg and the United States, whose Bissau-Guinean populations, brought into existence as a consequence of various dynamics mentioned previously in this chapter, are statistically small but nevertheless important in several respects (Carreiro 2011).