GHANAIANS IMMIGRATION
SUMMARY
GHANA IMMIGRATIONS
By the mid-1990s, it was estimated that between two and four million Ghanaians, or 10 to 20 percent of Ghana's approximately 20 million people, were living abroad. Skilled workers and professionals dominated early flows from Ghana, but, by the 1980s, many semiskilled and unskilled workers chose to leave as well.
The next figure shows the main countries where the Ghanaians prefer to go:
United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom the number of Ghanaian immigration has been growing since the last 15 years. Results of the 2001 census of England and Wales identified 55,537 people who were born in Ghana, having increased 72 percent from 32,277 in 1991. Maybe one of the causes why Ghanaians immigrated to the UK can be attributed in part to steady growth in the number of Ghanaians who received student visas, work permits, and refugee status throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium.
Germany
There are also sizable Ghanaian populations in Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. Official German statistics state that there were more than 20,000 Ghanaian passport holders residing in Germany as of the end of 2004 (see Table 2). Ghanaians represent the third-largest African community in Germany after Moroccans and Tunisians.
Most of the Ghanaians arrived in Germany between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, a time when Germany had relatively liberal asylum and work authorization procedures. After 1993, Germany put in place a more restrictive migration policy, and the number of Ghanaians entering the country dropped significantly.
Netherlands
According to Statistics Netherlands, the country was home to 18,000 Ghanaians in 2003. However, researchers indicate that a more reliable figure is approximately 40,000, based on the number of Ghanaians residing in the Netherlands who registered to vote for Ghana's presidential elections in 2000.
Italy
In Italy, as in the Netherlands, Ghanaians began to settle permanently in the 1980s in their effort to escape turmoil at home. The 2004 Ghanaian population was 32,754 — almost three times the size of the 1990 population of 11,443. Most Ghanaians in Italy entered illegally or became illegal by overstaying visas but were able regularize their status by taking advantage of the numerous immigration amnesties the Italian government has passed in the last 20 years. As of January 2004, more than 3,600 Ghanaians had regularized their status under the 2002 amnesty, known as the Boss-Fini law.
Canada
Flows to Canada began in the early 1980s and intensified through the 1990s. The first arrivals included professionals, who gained entry because of their skills and education, and later asylum seekers, whose application numbers peaked in 1990 at 1,149. A 1999 survey of Ghanaians in Toronto showed that over 65 percent of Ghanaian asylum seekers came from a third country. Once accepted as permanent residents, Ghanaian residents took advantage of Canada's family-reunification policy to sponsor spouses, dependent children, and parents.
According to the 2001 census, 16,985 Ghanaians were living in Canada. Data from Citizenship and Immigration Canada show that an average of 960 Ghanaians gained permanent residency each year from 1995 to 2004.
United States
The Ghanaian population in the United States has grown rapidly over the last decade and a half, particularly between 1990 and 2000, when the population jumped from 20,889 to 65,570, or 210 percent. Family reunification, refugee resettlement, and the strong economy of the 1990s are the factors driving this increase. Many believe these figures to be undercounts, and nonofficial estimates reach as high as 300,000.
As is characteristic of immigrant populations, the majority of the Ghanaian population in the United States is of working age, and Ghanaian males slightly outnumbered their female counterparts in 2000.
NET RATE MIGRATION
Nowadays, we can found that in the past 7 years the immigration figures of Ghanaians citizens. The graphic shown below, means the number of persons entering and leaving the country per 1000 personas. When a number goes negative it shows immigration, when it is positive it means migration.
Immigration
The last information that was found, are figures from 2012, stating that in Ghana -0.56 people leave the country per 1,000 residents; occupying the 33 position of immigration in Africa
Inmigration in the past Centuries vs today
Also is posible to see that in the past times, Ghana presents a lot of Inmigrants to other countires and some of them were also inside of Africa. One of the most Important one was Nigeria. Is posible to see that a big part of people from Ghana migrate out of this country and It is estimated that about two million Ghanaians emigrated between 1974 and 1981, mainly from the south. Another indication of the number of Ghanaians who travelled outside is derived from the estimated number of Ghanaians among people deported from Nigeria in 1983. It is estimated that of the two million people deported from Nigeria in 1983, between 900,000 and 1.2 million were Ghanaians.
This graphics shows how in Nigeria, it exist a large number of Foreign Born people, and in this case they are inmigrants and as we could se before, most of them are from Ghana.
This graphic shows how in USA mostly, the amount of African people has been migratin. Also we cna see that in the last years, the Africans and mostly form Ghana, the migation has been growing, and has been afectin the number of people in other countries, and is posible to conclude that now days, the number of Ghanians Migrating to other countries has been being bigger and bigger every day.
REFERENCES
THE INFORMATION WAS TAKEN FROM:
· Taken from Index Mundi; www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=gh&v=27&l=es
· Taken from Migration Policy Institue (www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ghana-searching-opportunities-home-and-abroad); "Ghana: Searching for Opportunities at Home and Abroad"
FROM: JOHN ANARFI AND STEPHEN KWANKYE with OFUSO-MENSAH ABABIO
and RICHMOND TIEMOKO December 2003
FROM:
https://www.prb.org/Publications/Reports/2007/blackimmigration.aspx June 23, 2013