African migrant hub reopens
Seen by many as path to Europe
AGADEZ, Niger — The bus station in Agadez, a remote city of low mud-brick buildings in the West African nation of Niger, is buzzing again.
Every week, thousands of migrants from West and Central Africa leave from the station in this gateway city to the Sahara aboard a caravan of pickup trucks, traveling for days toward North Africa, where many will then try to cross the Mediterranean in a quest to reach Europe.
For years, this portal was closed, at least officially. The country’s government, friendly to Europe, outlawed migration out of Agadez, and in exchange the European Union poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Niger’s coffers and the local economy.
But last summer, after generals in Niger seized power in a military coup, the European Union suspended financial support to the government — and in response, the generals severed the migration arrangement with the European Union in November. The gate is once again open, and a fresh flock of hopeful migrants is once again passing through, to the relief of many locals.
Niger’s decision, however, has caused alarm among European officials, who fear that the end of the partnership with Niger will lead many more people to attempt the treacherous journey north.
The land route through the Agadez gateway in Niger is thought by many migrants to be less expensive and less dangerous than the ocean route in the Atlantic — on rickety boats from the west coast of Africa through the Canary Islands. Even with the Niger route officially closed, migration toward Europe in 2022 reached the highest point since 2016.
Migration is once again topping the agendas of several European governments, and farright parties looking to expel migrants are on the rise months before crucial elections for the European Parliament, one of the three key institutions of the European Union.
Emmanuela Del Re, the European Union’s top diplomat for the African region that includes Niger, said in a recent interview that Niger’s junta was striking back at the European Union for refusing to recognize it: “They’re using migration as blackmail against the European Union.”
In Agadez, a desert outpost that has been at the crossroads of trade and migratory routes for centuries, thousands of households had relied on transporting, accommodating, and selling goods to migrants.
With migration legal again, opportunities are back: Young men are buying new pickups to drive people north. Entrepreneurs who arranged housing and transportation for migrants have been released from prison.
“We’ve always considered migration an economic activity,” said Mohamed Anacko, the top civilian official in the Agadez region. “It’s not trafficking, it’s transportation.”
Already, up to 100 pickups, with 30 passengers squeezed in each, leave Agadez every week under military escort to protect them from bandits. Before Niger’s government repealed the law last year, a few dozen trucks were leaving illegally, the local authorities and researchers say.
Few people have any incentive to keep the size of these caravans low: when Niger began implementing its antimigration law in 2016, thousands of locals lost their only source of income. Agadez essentially turned into a border post for the European Union, thousands of miles from European shores.
Countless people transiting through Niger never try to reach Europe; many work in North African countries for a few years before going back home.
Still, scarred by the migration crisis of 2015, when more than 1 million people reached Europe mostly from the Middle East and Africa, the European Union has scrambled to keep migrants at bay, providing financial support to some key transit countries in exchange for tougher border controls.
For Niger, it was an appealing trade-off.
Until the coup last summer, the European Union provided nearly $1 billion in bilateral aid to the government of Niger since 2014, according to official figures from the bloc, on top of the hundreds of millions spent by individual European countries.