The Story Behind Ethiopian Migration

The major reason of mass exile being mal-governance, this book vividly shows the yawning gap between African people and their leaders. It exposes most African leaders who bear more allegiance to their bank balances than to their country, the constitution, the flag, and their peoples future. Using my experience as a journalist for over 48 years, covering major events in Ethiopia/Africa, I have tried to bring a close-up portrait of the problems in Ethiopia, and more broadly the horn of Africa and the continent as a whole. This book illuminates the root causes of mass exile, the major problems in Ethiopia, and how that links back to the lack of freedom of expression. I have tried to situate current events in a larger historical backdrop by paraphrasing, summarizing, and quoting from historians excerpts, using description and analysis, part political travelogue, part contemporary history to bring the region to life, and answer one key question. Why so many Ethiopians are going in mass exile? The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the economic, political, social and environmental causes of human migration out of Ethiopia/Africa. It is an invitation for discourse, to explain, engage and encourage all those concerned in the fate of Africa to wrestle with the challenges facing the continent today, without being burdened by a troubled past or daunted by a challenging future.

At a time when policies are increasingly against it, international migration has become the subject of great public and academic attention. This book departs from the dominant approach of studying international migration at macro level, and from the perspective of destination countries. The contributors here seek to do more than 'scratch the surface' of the migration process, by foregrounding the voices and views of Ethiopian youth-potential migrants and returnees-and of their sending communities. The volume focuses on the perspective and agency of these young people, both potential migrants and returnees, to better understand migration decision-making, experiences and outcomes. It brings together rarely documented cases of young men and women from several communities across Ethiopia, migrating to the Gulf and South Africa. Explaining the agency of local actors-prospective migrants, brokers and sending families-Youth on the Move illuminates the pervasive, persistent failure of state attempts to regulate migration. Moreover, it examines the financing of migration and the sharing of remittances, within a culturally situated moral economy. While accounts centered on economics and political violence are important, the contributors demonstrate compellingly that these factors alone cannot provide a full understanding of migration's complexity, nor of its social realities.

With a tenfold increase in remittance flows over the last 25 years, the diaspora's role in the development efforts of the global South has gained broader interest. Besides financial remittances, flows of skills and social remittances have gained attention, particularly the relevance of diaspora associations as drivers of development. This book explores the engagement of Ethiopian diaspora associations in Germany for their home country's development. It investigates the policies of the Ethiopian and Germany governments, and the opportunities the policies generate for diaspora engagement efforts.

Between 1977 and 1985, some 20,000 Ethiopian Jews left their homes in Ethiopia and embarked on a secret and highly traumatic exodus to Israel. Due to various political circumstances they had to leave their homes in haste, go a long way on foot through unknown country, and stay for a period of one or two years in refugee camps, until they were brought to Israel. The difficult conditions of the journey included racial tensions, attacks by bandits, night travel over mountains, incarceration, illness, and death. A fifth of the group did not survive the journey. This interdisciplinary, ground-breaking book focuses on the experience of this journey, its meaning for the people who made it, and its relation to the initial encounter with Israeli society. The author argues that powerful processes occur on such journeys that affect the individual and community in life-changing ways, including their initial encounter with and adaptation to their new society. Analyzing the psychosocial impact of the journey, he examines the relations between coping and meaning, trauma and culture, and discusses personal development and growth.

The migration of Ethiopians across international borders is a recent phenomenon because of the limited integration of the country and society to the global economy. Since it was never colonized – aside from the Italian occupation of 1936-1941 – Ethiopia’s economy and society were not directly impacted by the ebb and flow of the global economy, and thus never generated international migration. Beginning in the 1970s, due to factors such as famine, rural poverty, civil war, and political repression, an unprecedented number of Ethiopian migrants began to leave their country in search of better, more secure lives. Today, this diaspora constitutes a distinctive community dispersed across the world, but bound by a common feeling of collectiveness and a shared history of the homeland. The contributors to this volume draw their work from a wide variety of interdisciplinary fields and provide new critical insight on Ethiopian migrants and their diaspora communities. What has emerged from these scholarly works is the recognition that the Ethiopian diaspora – although separated by oceans and nations, by politics, ethnicity, class, gender and age – are carving out a social and material world born out of their particular circumstances both "here" and "there". This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

This book tells the stories of the Ethiopian women who migrate to work as domestic workers in the Middle East. Drawing on qualitative research in Ethiopia, Lebanon and Kuwait, the author reveals how women’s aspirations to migrate are constituted within unequal gendered structures of opportunity in Ethiopia and asks us to consider how gender, race, class and nationality intersect in the construction of migrant subjectivities and agency. By analysing the impact of migration on social reproduction both in Ethiopia and the destination countries, the book offers fresh empirical and theoretical insights into the largest stream of women’s autonomous international migration from Africa.

Between 1977 and 1985, some 20,000 Ethiopian Jews left their homes in Ethiopia and embarked on a secret and highly traumatic exodus to Israel. Due to various political circumstances they had to leave their homes in haste, go a long way on foot through unknown country, and stay for a period of one or two years in refugee camps, until they were brought to Israel. The difficult conditions of the journey included racial tensions, attacks by bandits, night travel over mountains, incarceration, illness, and death. A fifth of the group did not survive the journey. This interdisciplinary, ground-breaking book focuses on the experience of this journey, its meaning for the people who made it, and its relation to the initial encounter with Israeli society. The author argues that powerful processes occur on such journeys that affect the individual and community in life-changing ways, including their initial encounter with and adaptation to their new society. Analyzing the psychosocial impact of the journey, he examines the relations between coping and meaning, trauma and culture, and discusses personal development and growth. "His beautifully written bookof great importancebrings the reader close to a community whose miraculous destiny serves as an inspiration."--Elie Wiesel Gadi BenEzer is a senior lecturer of psychology and anthropology at the Department of Behavioral Sciences in the College of Management in Tel Aviv. In the last two decades, he has worked as a psychotherapist and organizational psychologist with the Ethiopian Jewish immigrants in Israel. He has written extensively on Ethiopian Jews, trauma and life stories, and cross-cultural psychotherapy. His book on the immigration and integration of the Ethiopian Jews has become the main text on the subject in Israel.