Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

Chapter IFinal ReportTable 4.2.1 Outward Legal Migration Stocks in Arab Mediterranean Countriesby Groups of Countries of Destination (a)DestinationcountriesCountriesof originYearArabCountriesEuropeOtherCountriesTOTALMorocco 2007 (b) 281,631 2,837,654 173,314 3,292,599Algeria 1995 66,398 991,796 14,052 1,072,246Tunisia 2008 (b) 153,256 873,947 30,594 1,057,797Egypt 2006 1,928,160 106,398 381,400 2,415,958Jordan 2008 (c) 141,202 36,432 177,634Syria 2000 (d) 130.178 130.178Lebanon 2005 (c) 187,219 109,104 258,487 554,810TOTAL (e) 2,757,866 4,918,899 1,024,457 8,701,222a) Estimates by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics indicate a number of 4,707,471 Palestinian emigrants, butthis includes all the Palestinian diaspora, the vast majority of which was born after 1948 and can hardly beconsidered as migrants. Hence we have removed Palestine from this table.b) National Background Paper (Mahjoub 2009).c) National Background Paper (Saif and El-Rayyes 2009). Due to missing statistics, “Other countries” indicates thefigure of Jordanian immigrants in Database on Immigrants in OECD Countries. According to some estimates,Jordanian emigrants could amount to 500.000.d) Syria has no official statistics for its nationals abroad. The figure of the Database on Immigrants in OED Countrieshas been included in the “Other Countries” column, but the total number of emigrants probably exceeds 1 million.e) If Palestinian, Syrian and Jordanian migrants not considered in this Table are accounted for, the total number ofAMC migrants will easily exceed the 10 million mark.Source: Fargues (2009) and National Background Papers based on national sources.In the Egyptian economy, international migration has played an important role over the last threedecades. Egypt has been a major labour exporter since the early 1970s, exporting both educated labour(mainly to the Gulf States and Libya, but also to the US, Canada and Australia) and uneducated labour(to Jordan, Lebanon and Europe) and becoming the largest labour exporter in the MENA region inabsolute terms. In 2005 according to CAPMAS there were around 2.8 million emigrants, 71% ofwhom were temporary and 29% permanent; 95% of temporary migration was to Arab countries, andless than 4% to Europe. According to the 2006 Census, there were 3.9 million Egyptians abroad in thatyear. This is 8.6% of the working-age population. According to the ELMPS 2006, 4.8% of householdshad a member of the household working overseas. However, it is important to remember that this figureunderestimates the real number since it does not include migrant households who are currently overseas;i.e. it does not include migrants with their families currently overseas.In Lebanon, it has been estimated that there was a stock of almost 560,000 first generation migrantsin 2005, i.e. close to 20% of the working-age population. It is also estimated that somewhere between15,000 and 20,000 people emigrate every year (Characteristics of Emigrants, 2000), around the samenumber of net new entrants to the labour market (which reveals a rapidly increasing migration rate).59