4.2. Contemporary migrants and their children Migration has continued and amplified since independence, the vast majority within the West African region.154 Contemporary labour migration within West Africa includes both highly-skilled and unskilled migrants. The highly-skilled include doctors, paramedical personnel, nurses, teachers and others who have moved from countries such as Ghana and Benin, where education standards have been higher, to other countries in the region (and beyond), attracted by relatively higher salaries and improved working conditions. These migrants are more likely to be documented, and to obtain the correct paperwork to regularise their status. Lower-skilled migration includes those working in the agricultural sector (as wage labour or tenant farmers), in mines and other industries, and in smallscale business and trading concerns. The main traditional countries of immigration in the subregion are Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria; the major labour-exporting countries include Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Togo.155 Senegal has been both a labour-exporting and labour-receiving country; and in recent years has also become a transit country for migrants to Europe; though migrants seeking to leave the region are, as the sea route via the Canaries has become more difficult, increasingly transiting through Mali and (especially since the conflict in northern Mali) Niger for the trans-Saharan route. West Africa is also host to irregular migrants from other regions of Africa or other parts of the world, some of whom become stranded in the region after trying and failing to reach intended final destinations in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere, or after being deported from countries that they have entered without the correct papers. A joint UNHCR and IOM manual on mixed migration flows in West Africa published in 2011 noted the complexity of contemporary migration: All countries in West Africa are places of origin, transit and destination of complex population movements. Migratory movements between West Africa and other parts of world as well as intra-regional movements raise significant legal, socio-economic and protection concerns. Niger, for instance, faces a multiplicity of migration-related challenges as it is at the crux of a broad range of migratory movements, such as the temporary movement of Fulani herdsmen searching for greener pastures; the cross-border trafficking of children to work in gold mines; refugees on secondary movement; migrants in transit who rely on the informal economic sector for survival, mostly around Agadez; increasing emigration by often highly-educated Nigeriens seeking better opportunities abroad; and increased internal displacement due to environmental degradation, droughts and flooding. The complexity of these migratory movements, with their national specificities, calls for enhanced cooperation amongst all stakeholders along migration routes.156 There is, of course, also significant migration within each country. The first series of population censuses carried out in West African countries in the mid-1970s revealed that, already, almost a quarter of the population was not living where they had been born, whether that was elsewhere in par le Haut-Commissariat aux Droits de l’Homme, Examen Périodique Universel : Côte d’Ivoire, September 2013. See also Mirna Adjami, Statelessness and Nationality in Côte d’Ivoire, UNHCR, forthcoming 2015. 154 In 2006, intraregional migrations represented 90 percent of all West African migratory movements; IOM and UNHCR, Protecting refugees and other persons on the move in the ECOWAS space, 2011. 155 Aderanti Adepoju, “Fostering Free Movement of Persons in West Africa: Achievements, Constraints, and Prospects for Intraregional Migration”, International Migration, Vol. 40, No.2, 2002, pp.3-27. 156 Protecting Refugees and Other Persons on the Move in the ECOWAS Space, IOM and UNHCR, 2011. 49