The Migration-Development Nexus in Selected African States: Is the Implementation of EU Migration Policies Development-Friendly?

In response to increasing numbers of asylum applications and a perceived ‘migration crisis’, the EU introduced a new concept of a ‘Migration Partnership Framework’ in 2016. Within this framework, the EU seeks to support and reinforce migration management in countries of migrants’ origin and transit. This new emphasis on externalizing migration policies to countries in the Global South has caused controversy. As the framework is largely financed by development budgets, NGOs accuse the EU of using development policies, intended for poverty eradication, to obtain domestic security goals. The question therefore is to what extent the EU’s security priorities may override its development agenda. The aims of this chapter are first, to analyze the implementation of the Migration Partnership Framework and second, to evaluate whether the concrete implementation of the framework is development friendly. The chapter shows that the awareness of the potential of migration for development has hardly guided policy choices and that the Migration Partnership Framework is not particularly directed at development. Because we argue that development-orientated migration policies do not have to be juxtaposed to migration policies aiming to increase security—they can be interlinked—the chapter concludes by identifying three ways in which EU migration policies can contribute to development in migrant-sending countries.