Trump talks rudely to the Mexican authorities. It is not pretty but the man has a point: Mexican nationals living in America send back over $69 billion each year to their relatives in Mexico, while the cartels kill tens of thousands of Americans through fentanyl and other drugs smuggled across the southern border. If we stick to strict logic, the oppressor here is not living in the North, he is living down South, taking advantage of mass immigration. Of course, the Mexicans are not the only ones to play at this geopolitical game. Virtually all the countries of the former Third World are now involved in what is both a business and a new form of colonization. The Western elites have connived at it. The one exception is called Donald Trump.
Each year, immigrants send over $600 billion to their home countries. Africa alone gets $100 billion, of which Nigeria has the lion’s share, at over $20 billion. Morocco, my home country, gets more money from its remittances than it does from tourism – more than $11 billion last year. This is more than half of the revenues it gets from agriculture, an activity that employs over a third of its workforce. Think about it. Without having to put in a single day’s work, Morocco gets $11 billion from immigration, guaranteed year after year. Astonishing! It is as if Morocco had discovered a vast new reserve of oil and gold combined. No need to drill or to refine; just convince your population to leave the country – which is super easy, as a cocktail of incompetence and despair already drives millions of young people from their homeland. Provoking the required emigration requires no effort and no investment: bad governance does the job. And whenever a migrant makes his way to France or Spain – Bingo! The money starts flowing to his family via Western Union, whether from his work or from social assistance.
It is a shame that no prominent economist has framed the debate in these terms. Bad governance is profitable – very profitable – to the elites of the South. Morocco, however, is only a small player in this game. Other former colonies are winning the global remittance championship year after year: the Philippines ($40 billion in 2023), Egypt ($32 billion in 2022), Pakistan ($30 billion in 2024), and Nigeria ($20 billion in 2022). In Senegal, remittances amount to no less than ten per cent of its GDP. Why reform institutions, why improve productivity, why improve the quality of leadership, when bad governance delivers vast and unconditional international money transfers, free of auditing by the IMF or the World Bank?
From France alone, more than $10 billion is sent annually to Africa and the Arab World. Some of this money is generated by economic activity, both formal and informal – the rest by illicit activity and fraud. Charles Prat, a French judge, calculates the level of social benefit fraud relating to migrants and French nationals born abroad to be over $40 billion a year. This would buy the French Navy an aircraft carrier every year. A significant part of this bleeding is accounted for by some two million foreign-born ‘ghosts’ who are entitled to receive social benefits in France – retirement pensions, housing allowance, unemployment benefits and health insurance. Some live in France, others overseas. Algeria, for example, has the dubious distinction of hosting a record number of one-hundred-year-old men and women receiving a French pension. Some are probably dead but their sons forgot to mention it to the French Sécurité Sociale. When AGIRC-ARRCO, a French pension fund, commissioned an audit into a thousand Algerian beneficiaries living in Algeria, it only managed to contact half of them; the others were missing in action while still cashing their cheques.
Nevertheless, this dirty money represents a credible alternative to governmental and non-governmental humanitarian relief. Unlike development assistance programs, the migrant remittances are bureaucracy-free. No nepotism, no corruption, no political interference affects the stream of money. It lands directly in the pockets – or more accurately, the cell phones – of the people who most need it, whether to buy food, or to renovate their homes, or even build new ones. Some use it to pay their tuition fees, and all contribute to the public good in the form of sales taxes revenues each time they visit their local convenience store. In fact, this is probably one of the best and most enduring assistance plans ever devised. No white saviour is needed, no expats, no consultants; instead, black helps black, Arab helps Arab, and Latino helps Latino.
The drug is so good that countries have been addicted to it for years. Algeria is fighting like a lion any French politician who suggests tearing down a bilateral treaty signed in 1968 facilitating the entry and residence of Algerian nationals in France. For without the remittances of these nationals, Algeria would be forced to reform – or else face turmoil and revolution.
Transformational reform might seem a good idea, but unfortunately it requires an educated elite, and much of that elite has also emigrated north. For immigration is not limited to the poor and illiterate. The hospitals of Paris are manned and sometimes managed by eminent doctors from Africa and the Arab World. Engineers, businessmen, lawyers, IT specialists, bankers – they all settle in places like Dubai and Singapore. It is not poverty they are escaping, but suffocation. For it is systemic corruption and mismanagement that have prevented them from flourishing back home, from innovating and realising their potential. They move north in search of an ethical ecosystem where the good guys are rewarded and the bad boys are deterred. They are ‘ethical refugees’.
However, what ought to be a tragedy does not cause the ruling elites to lose any sleep, for the brain drain is easily compensated by the consultancy inflow. Complex projects, strategic planning, change management are all taken care of by the likes of McKinsey and Deloitte. There is an abundance of value-added know-how in the world; one need only launch an RFP and pay the subsequent bills. China, Turkey and even France are compensating for the brain drain by building and maintaining infrastructure across Africa. Algerian highways, for example, have been taken care of by Chinese contractors. And overall, it is less expensive to pay a Chinese company in euros to build a railway than to have it built by one’s own nationals, because when one’s own nationals are engineers and project managers, they bring with them political and ethical requirements that are hard to meet. An engineer will request good schools for his kids, aspire to democracy, and challenge corruption. A Turkish one, by contrast, will do his job, send his bill, and keep his mouth shut.
In the West, the crème de la crème of the South’s elite seldom uses its liberty to denounce bad governance in its countries of origin. Instead, its members get involved in the host country’s artistic and political scenes and declare themselves to be victims. Those who do feel gratitude are deterred from voicing it by loudmouth compatriots who accuse them of being ‘native informants’. As for the South’s lumpenproletariat, youngsters full of rage and testosterone head north every day. Instead of raiding the presidential palaces in Algiers and Conakry, hordes of young males raid the city centres of Milan, Cologne and Nantes. Sending their masses dangereuses overseas is a blessing for the South’s ruling elites. Their unruly masses cause problems elsewhere and whenever they are caught committing crimes, they merely have to say they are victims of racism. Their home countries refuse to take them back, use red tape to slow deportations, and invoke sovereignty to ensure the North is awash with convicted criminals roaming its streets and harming its population.
This is double Bingo for the failed elites of Africa, the Arab World and Latin America – but double tragedy for its peoples. In the South, the export of their good elites damages the prospects of the wider population; while in the North, people merely feel they are being invaded. They are forced to watch the colonization of their country and remain silent, because if they object, they are accused of being ‘racist’ by their own ruling elites. In fact, their ruling elites are even more cynical than those of the South. Because the newcomers are used to derelict schools and hospitals at home, they are easy to please, and happy to accept the minimum standard, or worse. They tolerate a twelve-hour wait in the emergency department of a hospital that would drive a Frenchman crazy. The same applies for public services and political participation. They don’t care about the rise in inequality because they come from countries deprived of a proper middle class. They are fine with a world composed of oligarchs and the wretched, a world where the rich buy allegiance not by setting a virtuous example but through the crumbs they hand out.
The globalists of the Left call this progress. A more accurate term would be retroaction.
Any alternative to this nightmare would entail a total reset of the North-South relationship – a relationship that ought to centre on the interests of the mass of the population, both North and South, not minister to the greed of the elites. The first step would be to assess relations on a bilateral basis, founding them on an honest appraisal of the monetary flows between countries North and South. In other words, how many billions of dollars does Algeria extract from France, net, every year? Honest relationships must be founded on facts, not propaganda. The second step would be to build long-term partnerships where immigration is converted into a genuine opportunity, by facilitating easier legal entry for the good migrants, and faster deportation for the bad ones.
In addition, there must be a radically new approach to diasporas. Host countries have the fundamental right to monitor diasporas and to ensure that they do not become fifth columns in their own backyards. The good migrants must be integrated; the bad migrants – the ethnic gangs, the Salafists etc – who prefer invasion to integration, must be neutralized, politically and morally.
However, this necessitates a political revolution. The twenty-first century will be the Century of Identity. All political thinking must recognise that the preservation of identity precedes human rights, because the man who forgets who he is forfeits his self-respect. Besides, if France becomes a subsidiary of Algeria or Mali, the latter will lose a prosperous and friendly partner. The dissolution of identity is a lose-lose game. The preservation of identity is a fundamental human right. The peoples of the North are entitled to it just as much as the peoples of the South.
Driss Ghali is a Franco-Moroccan writer now living in Sao Paulo, Brazil. His recent books include A Counter-History of French Colonization (Vauban Books) and L’identité d’abord : Lettre ouverte d’un immigré aux Français qui ne veulent pas disparaître (L’artilleur).
