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Flashmag February 2019 www.flashmag.net
Apart from Western propaganda, which always make some believe that it’s better in the West than in Africa, or in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the realities on the ground are scathing.
On average, the gross domestic product of countries of the northern hemisphere is 1200 times higher than those of the countries of the southern hemisphere, and with the globalization of consumption, a citizen of the southern countries with his salary cannot, in general afford the last cry of technology devices, like his western counterpart, yet they all have access to the internet and are necessarily influenced by international and economic news. To fill this gap, the principle of creating a preferential economic system for markets where the GDP of the population is low, has often been mentioned, but it runs counter to the economic laws of profit, because it would be difficult to sell on the Internet a music that was produced with the same means at a price of positive discrimination for Africa and Latin America.
As nature hates imbalance, the shady economy or black market has logically imposed itself to fill this lack of demand mismatch, with the ultra-expensive supply. Also, piracy has found an ideal market to spread. It is not so surprising to see a movie that has just been released in Hollywood to be hustled by street vendors in Douala or Lagos. In the same way networks of counterfeit technology or even the theft and smuggling of technologically advanced devices have developed to bring to African and Latin American the benefits of technology at an affordable price.
The breakthrough of China in Africa with cheap technology is also explained, when one takes into account the gulf of purchasing power that exists between the citizens of the countries of the northern and southern hemisphere.
.Between the middle of the 19th century and the 1930s, emigration from Europe to America and from Asian workers to plantations and large shipyards in America, Africa and Asia involved 100 million peoples. For a world population which in 1900 was four times lower than that of 2019. Similarly, after the Second World War the reconstruction of Western Europe, was made with the help of immigrants from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. It is estimated that more than 60 million European migrants settled in Western Europe.
The explosion of conflict over the influence and access to resources during and after the end of the Cold War has created an astronomical number of refugees around the world. However, many do not admit that the greatest number of refugees settle in priority in neighboring countries. The number of refugees identified by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees increased from about 1.5 million in the early 1960s to 12 million in the late 1990s, of which nearly 5 million in Asia and 3.5 million in Africa. And the available data suggest that the majority of new migrants and refugees are now heading to other southern countries, neighbors or from the same region, and not to the countries of the North.
The West in general, has always encouraged immigration when it suited its economic situation, and paradoxically the European countries like Spain, Italy, Greece or Portugal which today have completely closed their frontiers to immigration are those who for more than a century have provided the largest group of immigrants around the world. In Africa, for example, business houses founded by Greek immigrants have existed for generations, while Italian immigrant communities are well known in North America and Latin America. During the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, migrations to Western Europe and North America from less affluent countries, neighbors and faraway, were officially encouraged.