Migration as an act of resistance

Public debate in Egypt and the Arab region has long been dominated by stereotypes that portray migrants and refugees as either a national security threat or a burden on the economy. There are, however, deeper intellectual approaches that radically reframe the question and place migration in a broader historical and political context.

One of these approaches comes from E. Tendayi Achiume, a law professor and former director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In her influential paper, “Migration as Decolonization,” Achiume concludes that today’s cross-border movement is not merely a contingent result of poverty or war, but an extension of a long colonial history that remains unresolved.

In the paper’s introduction, Achiume explains that European colonialism was not a passing episode but a project that reshaped entire economies and societies, redrew borders, and directed human and natural resources to serve Europe’s imperial core.

This legacy left the global South, including Egypt, economically and politically subordinate, unable to pursue independent development or build systems that ensure a dignified life.

From this perspective, Achiume argues that contemporary migration from South to North is not a deviation from the “natural order” of international relations. It is a tacit rebalancing between what colonialism looted and the opportunities and rights the marginalized now seek.

Here we find a different, more radical view of international migration as part of the long story of colonial injustice that redrew the world map and imposed economic, political, and cultural subordination on the peoples of the global South.

Seen like this, migration is not a security issue or a humanitarian crisis but a historically and morally grounded right linked to the colonial legacy.

The colonial mindset

In Egypt’s case, this analysis carries particular weight. After Britain seized control of Egypt in the late nineteenth century, the country became, in effect, an “economic annex” to European interests.

Cotton monoculture was the clearest example. A single crop dominated vast tracts of farmland, not to feed Egyptians but to supply British textile mills with raw fiber.

This economic model narrowed choices for Egyptian farmers, undermined self-sufficiency, and created vulnerabilities that endure today.

Over time, Egypt did not break free of this cycle. Beginning in the 1970s, when the economy opened up to global capital on unequal terms, it entered new forms of dependency under neoliberal policies.

These policies deepened social and economic disparities and pushed millions of Egyptians to migrate, whether to the Gulf or Europe, in search of a better life.

Egyptian migration thus becomes part of the long history that links old colonialism to new forms of economic domination.

At the same time, Egypt, an exporter of migrants for long, has become a key waypoint for migrants and refugees from neighboring states. With wars in Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Libya, and crises in the Horn of Africa, Egypt has become a destination for hundreds of thousands seeking safety.

Official and media discourse often frames them as a problem or a threat, without acknowledging that their presence is tied to a regional and international order where old colonial interests overlap with contemporary interventions.

The wars that displace people did not emerge from a vacuum. They are the cumulative product of external manipulation and internal weakness.

Egypt’s story is mirrored across North Africa. In Tunisia, thousands of young people still make the dangerous trip across the Mediterranean each year to Italy or France. The weight of colonial history lingers there too. France once reshaped Tunisia’s economy to serve European markets, and decades later, market reforms after independence widened poverty instead of easing it.

Morocco tells a similar story. A long history of French and Spanish colonialism and an economy reliant on raw material exports and migrant remittances have made migration part of the social fabric.

These experiences from Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco reveal a bigger picture. Migration is not only the movement of individuals but a revolutionary collective act rooted in a shared history of colonialism and dependency.

When an Egyptian, Tunisian, or Moroccan migrant heads to Europe, they are not going to an entirely alien place. They are moving towards a center that, for decades, extracted their countries’ resources. Here, migration becomes a form of “decolonization,” an effort to reclaim opportunities stripped away over time.

What about Europe?

If migration is described there as a “crisis,” it is important to understand how the continent sets policy in light of its colonial past.

Since the 1990s, with the Schengen Agreement, Europe has redrawn its borders in a way that embodies a stark contradiction. Borders open wide to European goods and capital but close tighter to people coming from the South.

European asylum rules, especially after 2015, tightened procedures and restricted freedom of movement, without accounting for migrants’ colonial-era ties to Europe. Some even speak the languages of their former colonizers and have longstanding ties to them.

France, which hosts the largest North African community in Europe, is emblematic. On paper, French law treats migration from Morocco or Algeria as “economic,” ignoring how France itself reshaped those economies during decades of colonial rule, pushing entire generations to seek work abroad.

Italy, today, casts migrants from North Africa as a “security problem.” But it was the colonial power that ruled Libya until the 1940s and took part in rearranging the map of the Mediterranean to serve its interests.

In this sense, European migration policies continue a colonial mindset. Europe keeps its markets open but its doors shut to those seeking a share of what was taken.

It is the same equation Egypt has known since the nineteenth century. Cotton left freely for the mills of Manchester, but the Egyptian farmer had little freedom to choose what to plant or how to live.

Correcting a skewed balance

Seen through Achiume’s lens, Egypt, like other Southern states, occupies a twofold position. It exports labor because of weak development and limited opportunity, and it receives waves of refugees from a fractured neighborhood. In both cases, the common denominator is a colonial past and asymmetrical relations with the major powers.

This understanding requires a reset of local policies and narratives. Framing refugees in Egypt as a “burden” ignores the colonial roots of the crises that forced them to flee. Likewise, seeing Egyptian migrants in Europe as merely “job seekers” ignores how their choices are constrained by a global economic system designed to keep the South subordinate.

The understanding of migration as “an anti-colonial act” is also a call for a broader emancipatory project that recognizes human mobility not as a threat but as a natural response to historical inequality.

In the Egyptian context, migration policy should not be reduced to narrow security or economic logic. It should be understood within a longer struggle for justice and independent development.

European colonialism was not only military conquest. It was an unjust redistribution of resources and power that created vast disparities between North and South. Those disparities did not end with political independence, but persisted through new forms of economic exploitation and cultural dependency.

When peoples of the South migrate to the North today, they are exercising a right to reclaim a portion of the resources and opportunities historically taken by colonialism.

Migration, then, is not a “threat” to the sovereignty of wealthy states, but a mechanism for correcting an out-of-kilter historical balance. It is a modern form of “decolonization” through which migrants seek to break the artificial borders drawn by empire and reclaim their standing and right to share in global wealth.

The path forward is to recast the international discourse on migration to recognize that Third World citizens hold a historical right to move, live, and integrate within the global sphere. They are not parasites on the West.

In this sense, migration becomes an instrument of historical justice more than a passing crisis, contrary to how Western right-wing forces portray it.

Reframing our discourse in this way opens the door to a radical policy shift. Rather than fixating on barriers and restrictions, states can pursue forms of cooperation and integration that restore dignity and rights to migrants and refugees.

This vision can also help build a new public awareness that links Egypt’s domestic issues to global dynamics and positions Egypt as an active agent, not a passive recipient.