Monogamy is a sin @king_slayer03 - Twitter Profile

about 2 months ago

When the Nigerian economy fell into hard times in the early 1980s, the government issued a “Quit order” expelling undocumented immigrants. In the video below, Nigeria’s president, “Minister” Shehu Shagari fielded questions about the scale and the death of people during the mass exodus. Interestingly, there was not much improvement in Nigeria’s economy after the order was carried out. According to Dr Hashim Gibrill of Clark Atlanta University, “The economic impact was acute, notably in sectors like hospitality and construction, where many skilled workers were lost”. Many foreign manual labourers and skilled tradesmen vanished overnight, stalling building projects, while small businesses, hotels, and agricultural sectors lost a massive pool of cheap, reliable labour. At the same time, the policy failed to save the government economically as the economy continued to freefall. On 31 December, 1983, less than a year after the expulsion order, military Major General Muhammadu Buhari overthrew the government in a military coup, citing a completely ruined economy. Ultimately, historians agree that the 1983 expulsion was a severe humanitarian tragedy that caused massive regional disruption and provided absolutely zero economic relief to Nigeria. Now, to be fair, it makes total intuitive sense on the surface for people to believe that expelling migrants will improve their economic situation. That is precisely why political leaders throughout history have used this tactic because it relies on logic that feels like common sense, even though economic reality repeatedly proves it wrong. This is because from a purely intuitive standpoint, people tend to look at the economy as a zero-sum game, with jobs, housing, and government resources as a fixed pie. It sense that if there are 100 jobs and 20 immigrants occupy some of them, expelling those immigrants means 20 citizens get those jobs. Similarly, when unemployment and inequality are high, finding complex macroeconomic solutions takes years. But blaming a visible, distinct group of outsiders offers an instant, simple explanation for a complex mess, which makes it attractive to a frustrated public. But the thing is that in any economy, jobs are not a fixed pie, and when you suddenly remove millions of consumers from a country, as Nigeria did in 1983, the demand for bread, clothes, transport, and rent plummets. Businesses lose customers, revenues drop, and many end up retrenching more workers. Again, it’s common sense to assume a citizen will just step into an undocumented worker’s shoes. But in reality, citizens often refuse to work the same low-wage, backbreaking labour like seasonal agriculture. South African farmers routinely report struggling to recruit and retain local South African workers for these short-term, backbreaking harvesting seasons as farm work is highly intensive, temporary, and often located in remote areas. South African citizens, who have constitutional rights, families to support locally, and expectations of fair labor standards, rightfully refuse to work for these illegal, sub-poverty wages. So, this is less about citizens being “lazy” and more about the distortion of the labour market because undocumented workers lack legal protections, unscrupulous employers exploit them by paying well below the legal minimum wage and ignoring labour laws. Still, if those undocumented workers disappear overnight, many exploitative small businesses and farms face sudden operational collapse rather than a seamless transition to local labour. Needless to say, for South Africa, a sudden exit of regional labour, much like Nigeria experienced in 1983, would not solve South Africa’s unemployment catastrophe. Instead, it would instead cause immediate labour shortages in agriculture, spike food prices and shrink the overall size of the economic pie available to everyone.

44

519

254

357

53K

Monogamy is a sin

@King_Slayer03

Who to follow

Last Seen Users on Sotwe

Trends for you

Most Popular Users