At the bus station in Agadez, a town in northern Niger that serves as a gateway to the Sahara, a dozen men – their faces masked by turbans and sunglasses – clambered onto the back of a battered pickup truck headed across the desert to Libya.
Several men with legs dangling over the side of the vehicle shouted “Italy, Italy!”, gripping short wooden poles that they hope will prevent them from falling off along the way.
“If I earn enough in Libya, I’ll stay there. If not, I’ll leave for Europe,” said Abdoulaye Diallo, a 40-year-old from Guinea, speaking at a nearby migrant compound in late April.
Niger’s military leaders in November scrapped a European Union-backed law that criminalised people who aided migrants. Since then, vehicles like this one headed to Libya have joined weekly convoys of Nigerien security forces headed northward, instead of taking circuitous routes through the desert to avoid detection.
Migrant flows have sharply risen since the law was overturned. Over 128,790 migrants were observed leaving Niger in March, 68% more than in March 2023, according to Reuters calculations based on the most recent data from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), a UN agency.
And the price charged by people smugglers to cross the desert from Niger to Libya has fallen to around $170 per person from $500 when the law was in place, the IOM said in a report last month.
The reversal of the law triggered alarm in Europe. In the run-up to this week’s elections for the European Parliament, some far-right parties have predicted an influx of illegal migrants.
But nine migration experts and representatives of migration-focused organisations painted a more cautious picture, noting that data on migrants reaching Europe via the Mediterranean does not show an increase, although they say those numbers could increase in the future.
“When I hear politicians say that there is an immigration emergency or talk of an invasion: no, this is not the case,” said Flavio di Giacomo, the IOM spokesperson for the Mediterranean. The UN agency is not expecting migrant flows on this route from North Africa to rise dramatically in the coming months, he said.
“This is a humanitarian emergency. It’s not an emergency in terms of numbers.”
In fact, arrivals via the central Mediterranean are down 62% from January to April, the EU border agency Frontex said in a May report. This was partly due to poor weather that complicated the sea crossing, di Giacomo said.
The IOM also points to historical trends showing that 80% of African migrants tend to stay in Africa, part of a centuries-old tradition of free movement of economic migrants.
But two officials in the region, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said Libya and Tunisia have also intensified efforts to turn back or detain migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean, after receiving EU money to curb migration. The EU said last year it was investing 800 million euros across North Africa until 2024 to tackle the problem.
