ABSTRACT
This review of African migration since 1980 benefits from the increasingly comprehensive documentation of African population and migration. The United Nations (UN), World Bank, and African national statistical offices continue to advance the dependability of their reports on several migration processes. The data confirm several clear patterns. African population growth, consistently above 2% per year, supported migration especially to Africa’s growing cities and then to nearby countries for work. Yet a global African diaspora also grew in recent decades, sending settlers especially to Western Europe, West Asia, and Northern America, with smaller numbers to every other region. This expanded economic migration, both within Africa and overseas, and brought rising remittances to homes in some parts of Africa from migrants everywhere. At the same time, African social turmoil and environmental disasters caused displacement of many – expelling some from their homelands and displacing others within the nation. While these were the overall patterns, the national-level experiences of African migration varied sharply from overall norms and should also be considered individually.
