30 Hein de Haas
Egypt, has mainly been oriented towards the oil-rich Gulf countries and, to
a lesser extent, Libya. As a consequence of the consistent southward expan-
sion of Europe’s economic heartland, the Euro-Mediterranean ‘migration
frontier’ – the imaginary line separating immigration and emigration
countries (Skeldon 1997) – has also shifted steadily southward.^2 In this
process, the place of North African and Middle Eastern countries in the
global migration order seems to be changing. This is mainly exemplif ied by
increasing transit migration and even settlement migration from Western
and Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, respectively. This poses the
challenging question of whether these latest developments are heralding
further southward and eastward shifts of the Euro-Mediterranean migra-
tion frontier and whether the current emigration countries in North Africa
and the Middle East might increasingly evolve into areas of immigration
and settlement.
In popular perception, countries in the Middle East and North Africa
tend to be seen as a ‘migration liability’, linked to the image that galloping
population growth, economic misery and political oppression will fuel an
ever-mounting ‘migration pressure’ from this region. However, besides
revealing a clearly xenophobic undertone, a closer look at factual trends
shows that such representations are fundamentally f lawed. Not only do
they deny the huge demographic, economic and political changes that have
taken place in the region in past decades, but they also obscure the huge
diversity between countries within the region.
For instance, the popular perception that the region will remain an
almost inf inite pool of young, unemployed migrants ready to move to
Europe as soon as they are presented with the opportunity ignores the
fact that all countries have achieved dramatic declines in fertility over
past decades. In some cases, such as in Turkey, this is combined with
steady economic growth and increasing political freedom. In such cases,
it cannot be taken for granted that the emigration potential will remain
invariably high in the near future. However, a combination of economic
stagnation, political unfreedom and rising aspirations due to increased
access to education and media may well increase emigration potential
from other countries. This chapter analyses how migration patterns from,
within and to the Middle East and North Africa may evolve in the next few
decades. In order to capture the variety in migration history and patterns,
as well as the diverging economic and political trends in the region, this
2 Along with the expansion of the EU there has been an eastward shift of this migration
frontier into Eastern European countries.