ABSTRACT
In peripheral states across Africa and the Middle East, economic development has been crippled by falling commodity prices, debt crisis, and the growing economic disinterest and political indifference of people in the core. Government officials and social movements in core states increasingly view both strategies-migration and sectarian conflict-with alarm and have taken steps to close borders, patrol waters, "return' migrants, and contain conflicts in countries where infectious disease and sectarian wars are endemic. Government officials in many postcolonial states adopted several practices that slowed economic growth and accelerated demographic growth. Inadequate funding for public education made it difficult for poor households to send girls to school. In many African states, girls attend school less frequently and for fewer years, on average, than boys. The determined struggles of aspiring migrants to exit from impoverished and violent places and gain entry to more prosperous and secure places in the South and North has generated the rise of restrictionist anti-immigrant social movements.
