May I interject on your conversation, Brehs?
I may be able to add a little clarity on the whole degree thing. @GrindtooFilthy, please feel free to add, correct, or refute my points because this was an East African trip that may or may not translate to your country.2 years ago, I left the US and got involved in some charity work in Mombasa that eventually expanded inland to Nairobi and outwards to Daresalam. The ultimate goal of the organization that I traveled with was to aid young women in obtaining an education within Kenya, and thus provide them with options beyond hospitality(usually maid work), street vending (locals call them kiosks), nightlife, or low paying service jobs ( at the East African equivalent of the Verizon store or Foot Locker).
During my time out there, I discovered that African nations( Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda to be specific) had a many many many colleges. But the quality of these institutions was “questionable”. The same way we have the whole Devry/Everest/ U-of-Phoenix issue in the US, they also have their own institutions bordering on diplomaMill status. These diplomaMills usually outnumber legitimate schools. My organization made it a requirement that students aiming for these institutions received NO funding because these “questionable” colleges often did not prescreen students, did not have reputable professors, did not have proper curriculums, and often preyed on poor students by offering courses for a tenth the tuition of national colleges. In many cases, these colleges would be shut down by national authorities only to be reopened in another jurisdiction only a week later.
I’m willing to venture that many of the migrants that you cite @Captain_Crunch, come from similar institutions to the ones I mentioned above because their barrier to entry is slim. Did the book you cited clarify where these Nigerian migrants got their degrees? Not all degrees are equal. From my experience, only the main national university or jurisdictional colleges in a country would be equivalent to the degrees we got in the US. Only the students at these main institutions could be considered “elite” or even middle class because these main universities often require wealth or social connections to get into a competitive program.
Just as DeVry preys on broke people and provides “degrees”, similar forces could be at play on the continent and be propelling these migrants with “degrees” into the US. I doubt a Cac immigration agent from Little Rock, Arkansas could decipher the intricacies of the Abuja, Kinshasa, or Nairobi higher learning systems. I had to be on the ground to understand it myself.
So an immigrant with these “questionable” credentials could legitimately finesse their way into the US.As a loosely related note, @Captain_Crunch you mentioned that degree holding students were elites. And because they were elites; they could reasonably have profited from slavery. I challenge this point because here; the degree holding immigrants are certainly “elites” for holding degrees, but they are “elites” out of guile. And unlike money, guile is not unique to slave trading families.
