With the upcoming EU Heads of state meeting in Salzburg, Jesuits in Africa and Europe have expressed their concern over any narrative depicting migrants as a threat to Europe’s stability and prosperity. They call instead for more cooperation at various policy levels between Europe and Africa to fight against illegal immigration.
In a joint letter to the European Union Presidency, the Jesuit Provincials of Germany and Austria together with the heads of their joint Jesuitenmission offices, and the President of the Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar (JCAM) with his staff and collaborators said that “migrants are the symptoms of problems with deeper root causes, not the problem in itself.”
They underlined the urgent need to shift the attention towards the root causes of migratory movements, such as illicit financial flows.
“Currently there is more money leaving Africa in illicit financial flows through aggressive tax evasion and money laundering, than is, entering Africa in combined Developmental Aid and Foreign Direct Investment,” said JCAM President Agbonkhianmeghe E Orobator SJ.
“If Europe would support African governments in curbing those outflows, African states could secure much more funds for investing in infrastructure, education, and healthcare. This would, in the long run, keep Africans in Africa and ultimately curb illegal migration.”
By 2035, about 450 million young Africans will need jobs. However, only a little more than 110 million jobs will be created. Even now the majority of young Africans are without gainful jobs. In the wake of such a crisis, the Internet and social media have given human traffickers a new platform to recruit and lure desperate victims enticing them with an availability of jobs and welfare abroad.
This month, Pope Francis offered his prayer intention for the young people in Africa, that they may have access to education and work in their own countries.
“Africa is a wealthy continent, and its greatest, most valuable resource is its young people. They should be able to choose between letting themselves be overcome by difficulty or transforming the difficulty into an opportunity,” the Pope said.
The Jesuit Provincials of Germany and Austria, Fathers Johannes Siebner and Bernhard Bürgler, perceive many mutual benefits in developing and deepening relationships between Europe and Africa. These include a fairer trade system and exchange of technology versus one-way natural resources extraction or even balancing the demographic decline in Europe with demographic growth in Africa.
“Europe and Africa are in fact bound together as signatories to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Climate Accord, to the forthcoming Global Compact on Migration and several other accords. All this has to be transferred into pragmatic and binding political and legal instruments for mutual benefit,” they said. “We, Jesuits, are willing to help build bridges so that this will come about.”
Read the full letter and the back-up factsheet.