Living in the age of Migrations

Here are some extracts of an interesting article on migrations in Cape Verde (link included).

An estimated 200 million people live outside the country of their birth, and they help support a swath of the developing world as big if not bigger. Migrants sent home about $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign aid budgets combined. Those sums are building houses, educating children and seeding small businesses, and they have made migration central to discussions about how to help the global poor. A leading academic text calls this the “Age of Migration.”

“You have a Cape Verdean here who would cut his right arm off to go back,” said Mr. Gomes, who lives in a one-room hovel without running water or electricity.

Without migration, Cape Verde would not exist. The 10-island chain, 385 miles off the coast of Senegal, was uninhabited until the 15th century, when Portugal settled it with two migrant streams — Europeans and African slaves. Cape Verde became a creolized mix of both continents and a supply depot for the slave trade.

“We asked for workers, but we got people,” is a famous European lament.