…Consequently, many Arabs say in surveys that they wish to emigrate or are thinking about this. The Arab Barometer project that surveys the entire region every few years recently released the results of its 2018-19 fieldwork.
In a June 2019 report entitled Migration in the Middle East and North Africa, by Michael Robbins of Princeton University, it noted that about one in every three citizens across the Arab region is considering leaving to live abroad.
“This level represents a dramatic increase since 2016, which ended a long-term decline in the percentage of citizens who considered migrating,” Robbins said. He pointed to Jordan as an important example of how this emigration option continues to spread among the citizenry, as the percentage of those who wish to emigrate is 23 points higher than it was just two years earlier.
In Morocco the increase was 17 points in that period, along with smaller but sizeable increases in Egypt (+10 points) and other countries.
The percentage of citizens wishing to emigrate is highest in Sudan, at half of all citizens, while more than four in 10 wish to leave Jordan and Morocco. In Iraq and Tunisia, 33 percent say they wish to emigrate, while in Algeria the figure stands at 30 percent, in Egypt 28 percent, in Palestine 27 percent, and Lebanon 26 percent.
Equally troubling for most Arab countries are the reasons people wish to leave, and their status in society. More likely to want to emigrate are citizens who are young, well educated and male, with over half of 18-29-year-olds thinking about migrating in five of the 11 countries surveyed.
The same holds in most countries for the better educated. The educated young should be the pillars of any society’s economic growth, so their topping the charts of those who wish to exit is a troubling sign of hard times today, and more difficult years ahead.
Those who wish to depart say economic issues are key in motivating them to do so, as does corruption (especially among the young), followed by other reasons.
Read full article at The New Arab
