Is African Immigration to Europe Driven by Chinese Land Grabs?

An anonymous commenter suggests:

The backward focus of Western progressives also obscures the massive land grab in Africa today. Industrial agriculture and logging, both chinese and western, displace subsistence peoples into urban slums. But *this* neo-colonialism serves the interests of the economic upper stratum and is rarely reported upon as such. The american left, useful idiots that they are, see only the rear-view mirror of history and their own navels.

I’d also suggest the immigration pressure on Europe is an effort to redomicile this excess population (in service of the same economic interests).

That’s a pretty interesting idea.

It’s not uncommon down through history to have a farm population scratching out a marginal living using traditional means off land that a few bright guys then figure out can more profitably be repurposed for other uses. The peasants are driven to emigrate by insiders cashing in on the value of the land. The most famous example were the Enclosures in Britain, but NAFTA’s destruction of small corn farmers in Mexico is a more recent instance.

Africa is an enormous amount of land that traditionally wasn’t fully exploited.Francis Galton suggested 142 years ago that the Chinese would make far more off African land than Africans would.

But now there are a billion Africans, so they have to be redomiciled somewhere if the African land is to be most profitably exploited.

We are blind: mass immigration into the US and EU driven by land appropriation in Mexico and Africa. Of course, the pundits are now claiming that all those African immigrants (colonialists) entering Europe are really middle class people with middle class skills, so not to worry.

A century ago, mechanization of American agriculture drove both Whites and Blacks off the land into the cities, too. Burgeoning industrialization absorbed them, in part because the skills needed in the factories weren’t all that great nor all that different than what a farm worker had. Globalization has reversed American industrialization and created a large, truly surplus (not Marx’s lumpenprolitariat) worker population. A significant fraction of China’s rural population moved to industrializing cities, also.

Reportedly,China has purchased quite a bit of Ukrainian farmland in the western part of the country. Could that be a contributor to the civil war now underway there?

There might be a little bit here, but usually the extra money from higher-value land use goes to creating urban jobs. It looks like the extra money is funding migration from Africa. Or, indirectly, the added wealth brings internet access and information that shows the West as a place with easy women and loot; thus time for a road trip.

The NAFTA thing is often cited, but I looked at a couple reports that had the Mexican farm population staying the same with farm subsidies increasing to account for NAFTA. I ask everyone who mentions this if they know any immigrants from Mexico that have been displaced by NAFTA, and no one has.

(Source:unz.com,)