Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
The influx of communities from across the region, particularly the Sudans and the Horn of Africa, has triggered discussion that needs to be mainstreamed.
Immigration isn’t new. As early as the 1920s migrant labour was being carted around the region, including from present-day Rwanda and Burundi, to work on rubber, coffee, tea and cotton plantations. They followed the labourer from the Indian sub-continent who came to build the Uganda Railway and stayed on, mostly in commerce.
Political winds over the decades that followed blew people back and forth: Ugandans fled into the region under Idi Amin, then hosted people from Rwanda, DR Congo, Sudan, Somalia, and even Kenya when violence visited those places.
So why the renewed discussions? Recent arrivals tend to turn up not in refugee camps, but in urban areas where they live cheek-by-jowl with ‘natives’.
This proximity affords a higher degree of scrutiny of their culture for better or worse, and social media allow for the sharing of very personal experiences. Ideologically, your columnist supports open borders. Yet the inevitable friction is reduced when hosts are more welcoming, and when emigres respect local rules and customs and try to fit in, without losing their sense of self, identity, or culture.
Policymakers need to pay attention to the ongoing debate for at least three reasons. First is history. Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians who refused to take up Ugandan citizenship in 1972 and the Mabira riots in 2007 against plans to hand part of the Mabira Forest reserve to the Mehta family, originally from India, to expand their sugarcane plantation, are a reminder of how quickly and explosive these matters can be if not managed carefully.
Insufficient public participation in the making of public policy, including on migration, could see abrupt reversals especially when the political mood or leadership changes. It is useful to listen to the street. Second is the process of integration. Émigré communities, be they Ugandans in Boston, Chinese in the Philippines or Eritreans in Kansanga, tend to stick together.
These communities recreate the social bonds left behind at home, ease survival and smooth the entry of later arrivals. The resulting ‘ethnic enclaves’ can be sources of new culture including food and music, but they can also be isolationist ghettos that are distinct and cut off from the rest of the society.
Preventing this is a shared responsibility. For instance, giving new arrivals access to existing schools – a key theatre of integration – means that they are less likely to form their own school systems. Émigrés, too, need to do more to learn the local languages, cultures and customs. Inter-marriages, when they occur, are rather effective social icebreakers.
The third and perhaps more important point for policymakers is the social economic aspect of this argument. The discussion comes at a time of record high emigration from Uganda.
Young Ugandans are flying off to (mostly) the Middle East to supply their labour in exchange for wages. Their places back home are being taken by migrants from across the region, but with an important difference: these are mostly capitalists setting up enterprises, not job seekers. There are many complaints about migrants into Uganda, for instance, that they are causing rent inflation and taking over retail and real estate businesses – but I have yet to hear of complaints about these migrants taking over jobs meant for locals, say in the civil service.
On the other hand, there are many complaints about Ugandan workers being mistreated in the Middle East and so on, but hardly any about them setting up businesses there and outcompeting locals. This is a crisis of capital, not labour.
Ugandans have too much of the latter and not enough of the former. Young Ugandans are also being moulded into labourers, not entrepreneurs. In fact, the few Ugandan (and many migrant) business owners tend to be happy with immigration: it increases demand for goods and services (landlords in Muyenga are not complaining) while reducing the cost of labour. The problem, therefore, is that there are too many Ugandans set up to work and not enough set up to employ.
One solution to this problem is to make it easier for locals (and I daresay migrants) to set up and sustain small businesses, and to provide opportunities for those with high job-creating prospects and strategic impact to scale. We shall return to this argument next week. For now, as we ponder the new neighbours next door, we might reflect on the idea that everyone is an alien somewhere.*And yes, your columnist is a Coldplay fan.
Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.
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X: @Kalinaki
