Why global migration policy dies without North Africa

Air-conditioned diplomacy has a way of creating fictional victories. Earlier this month, delegates at the second International Migration Review Forum in New York City adopted a Progress Declaration celebrating the advancement of the Global Compact for Migration. Meanwhile, bodies continued washing ashore along the Central Mediterranean route. Geography, rather than ideology, is where the Global Compact begins to unravel.

Friction during the forum exposed deeper fractures within global consensus on migration. Washington’s rejection of language linked to demographic “replacement” fears signaled that even major powers no longer agree on the political meaning of migration itself. At the same time, European countries continue demanding labor while hardening borders, as African governments demand mobility while receiving containment contracts. In other parts of the world, economies and societies welcome migrant labor while avoiding permanent integration. Consensus survives only at the level of abstraction.

North Africa, meanwhile, sits at the center of these contradictions.

Migration policy discussions often divide countries into neat categories: origin, transit and destination. North Africa breaks that model entirely. Every state from Morocco to Egypt occupies all three roles simultaneously. Citizens leave. Foreign migrants pass through. Refugees settle permanently. No other sub-region carries all three burdens at once, while also increasingly tethered to Europe’s security architecture. Failure to recognize that reality explains why global migration governance keeps producing declarations rather than systems.

Scale matters here.

Mid-2024 estimates placed the number of international migrants at about 304 million people, or 3.7 percent of the global population. Remittance flows reached about $905 billion globally, eclipsing foreign direct investment into many developing economies and vastly exceeding aid flows. Entire national balance sheets now depend on migration-linked income. Egypt, for instance, remains among the world’s largest remittance recipients with receipts totaling some $42 billion in 2025. Similarly, Morocco relies heavily on diaspora transfers that contributed some 8 percent to gross domestic product last year. Tunisia, on the other hand, increasingly views outward migration as a social pressure valve.

Beyond financial flows, brain drain across North Africa is no longer a temporary leak. Stubbornly high youth unemployment across North Africa continues feeding outward movement, especially among university graduates. Engineers from Tunisia drive taxis in Paris. Egyptian medical professionals relocate to the Gulf and Europe. Moroccan tech workers increasingly seek employment in Spain and France.

Human capital extraction has become structurally normalized, and Europe quietly benefits from the arrangement. Worsening labor shortages across Europe are incentivizing an exodus of North Africa’s most talented youths. Yet European politics reward deterrence theater rather than honest labor policy. Governments therefore externalize migration management to North Africa while continuing to absorb migrant labor indirectly through irregular channels.

Containment has become an organizing principle of European interventions on northbound migration. European funding for Libyan militias, Tunisian coastal enforcement and regional interception mechanisms effectively moved Europe’s southern frontier deep into the Sahara. “Europe’s doorstep” can now be found around Agadez, Sabha and Sfax.

Agadez especially reveals how migration governance actually functions. Niger’s northern hub evolved into one of the most sophisticated informal mobility corridors on earth before crackdowns disrupted the ecosystem. Drivers, smugglers, document brokers, fuel suppliers, and local officials formed a shadow logistics network capable of moving thousands across the desert every month. Supply chains existed. Price structures existed. Risk premiums existed. Migration through the Sahel came to resemble commercial freight movement.

Mounting European pressure fractured the system without replacing it. Routes became more dangerous and decentralized after anti-smuggling crackdowns. Smuggling fees increased. Armed groups gained influence over desert crossings. Migrants shifted toward deadlier routes through southern Libya and eastern Algeria. Containment therefore redistributed risk rather than reducing movement.

And Libya became the epicenter of the distortion.

Global migration policy fails the moment North Africa is reduced to a buffer zone instead of treated as a co-architect of mobility itself.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

More than 700,000 migrants remain inside Libya according to estimates, though the true figure is likely higher given militia-controlled zones and undocumented labor markets. Many migrants no longer possess the resources to continue toward Europe or return home. Kidnapping economies emerged around migrant detention. Forced labor systems developed around agriculture, construction, and informal extraction industries. Human trafficking has since merged with militia financing as oil revenues became politically fragmented. Yet European policymakers still frame Libya primarily as a border problem rather than a state-collapse problem.

Tunisia faces something similar though under different conditions.

European funding agreements designed to curb crossings have intensified domestic tensions by converting Tunisia into a de facto holding area. Anti-migrant rhetoric has surged amid economic deterioration and rising unemployment. Sub-Saharan African migrants increasingly encounter arbitrary detention, expulsion into desert zones, and social hostility.

Egypt occupies another category entirely.

Cairo rarely receives recognition as one of Africa’s largest destination hubs despite hosting millions of refugees and migrants from Sudan, Syria, Eritrea and Yemen, and even as far south as Zimbabwe. Sudan’s war accelerated the trend dramatically. Informal integration inside Egypt’s urban economy now functions on an enormous scale. Refugees work in retail, construction, domestic labor, transport, and small commerce despite legal ambiguities. However, Western migration discourse still treats Egypt mainly as a transit state even though many migrants never leave.

Regional governments understand the contradiction more clearly than most international forums. April’s gathering in Cairo of African countries aligned with the Global Compact reflected growing recognition that migration management cannot operate through distant universal frameworks detached from regional realities.

North African governments, above all else, seek transactional balance rather than moral lectures.

Regularization mechanisms represent one unavoidable issue. Migrants already embedded in North African economies cannot simply be detained indefinitely. Urban integration requires schools, health systems, housing support, labor protections, and municipal planning. It all requires resources and funding that North African countries simply do not have, yet European funding overwhelmingly prioritizes interception hardware instead.

With Africa’s population projected to rise sharply while Europe ages rapidly, coupled with climate stress, conflict and poverty intensifying displacement or altering regional mobility patterns, movement becomes rational adaptation rather than abnormal disruption.

However, global migration forums will continue to produce declarations, as Brussels continues funding interceptions. Some leaders may continue speaking about “combating smugglers” or “stemming irregular migration,” but none of what follows will alter the geographic reality sitting directly below Europe.

Boats will launch nightly from western Libya and Tunisia because North Africa has become the compression chamber for three continents at once: African demographic pressure, European labor demand, and global governance paralysis. Global migration policy therefore fails the moment North Africa is reduced to a buffer zone instead of treated as a co-architect of mobility itself.

And, as always, policy fantasies will eventually collide with geography, and geography always wins.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. X: @HafedAlGhwell