If hostility to immigrants were the offense that editors claim to care about, Nairobi and Banjul would face the same denunciation as Washington and Westminster.
Earlier this month, Kenya's president told a gathering of small traders at State House that foreigners running hawking stalls and petty retail shops must close, and he promised legislation reserving such low-skilled, low-capital work for Kenyan citizens. Soon afterward, Burundians in Nairobi were queuing by the hundreds at their embassy for travel papers, afraid that they would be harassed or attacked once the crackdown began. William Ruto had by then also ordered Tata Chemicals to leave Lake Magadi, where the company has mined soda ash since 2005. Although Tata insists that it is fully compliant and awaits the ministry's review, the president's message to foreign investors could hardly have been clearer.
Kenya is not an isolated case, because the same impulse has appeared in West Africa. Gambia's central bank has told the country's commercial lenders, Nigerian-owned branches such as Access, GTBank, Zenith, FirstBank, and Ecobank included, that any foreign staff who lack official authorization to fill expatriate posts must be replaced with Gambians before the year closes. Observers have criticized the directive as a retreat from the free-movement ideals that West Africa has long claimed for itself. Farther south, vigilante groups in South Africa forced foreigners to leave the country, and Ghana and Nigeria responded by chartering flights to bring their citizens home. Africans were thus being driven out of an African country by other Africans, and the governments of their homelands had to send aircraft to collect them.
When these episodes are set side by side, they reveal a common motive in protectionism and nativism. In Nairobi the question is who may sell goods on the pavement, and in Banjul it is who may sit behind the bank counter, so the grievance in each case concerns competition for work and market share. Neither government has claimed that the Burundian hawker or the Nigerian bank clerk is a drain on the public purse or a danger to women, and the remedy on offer is exclusion by law.
Exclusion of this kind is especially self-defeating in a region that suffers from a severe shortage of human capital. African countries produce too few experienced engineers, financiers, doctors, managers, and technicians to staff their own institutions, and an immigrant who crosses a border to work in one of those fields is likely to carry expertise that the host country does not possess. A Nigerian banker in Banjul brings credit analysis, risk management, and operating methods that were built over decades in a larger market, and when such a person trains local colleagues, the benefit remains in the country long after the employment contract ends. Governments that expel or exclude these workers therefore give up the cheapest route to skills they cannot yet produce at home, and they would serve their own citizens better by welcoming immigrants and pressing them to pass on what they know.
Africa's problem with immigrants is thus one of protecting jobs at the expense of development, whereas the Western debate has run along entirely different lines. In Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, the argument has centered on the fiscal cost of arrivals from the Third World, on pressure on housing and public services, and on the conduct of some of the men who arrive, including sexual offenses against women. Because Western welfare states offer housing, healthcare, and cash support on a scale that no developing country can match, they attract immigrants who are drawn by those benefits, and this gives Westerners a legitimate concern about the practicality of admitting large numbers of low-skilled workers from developing countries. Citizens who say as much are called xenophobes and racists even though their objection concerns arithmetic and has nothing to do with where a person was born.
That arithmetic has now been set out in detail by a new working paper from Usama Polani at Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research, which builds a sixty-year life-cycle model of the tax, welfare, and pension systems of Britain, Germany, France, and Spain. Since a family's contribution to the public finances depends on what every adult in the household earns, the paper focuses on migrants from Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, where very few women work outside the home and where the daughters of immigrants often remain out of work as well. The author calculates that a man who arrives with a wife who stays home and two children would need to earn more than roughly 70–80 percent of full-time workers in the country before his family pays in as much as it takes out. Even if his wife takes a job at the pay and hours typical of women from these backgrounds, he would still need to earn more than the typical full-time worker in the country, and any man who earns less than that leaves his family as a net cost to the taxpayer, … because a low-skilled worker by definition earns well below the median, the paper supports the view of ordinary Europeans that admitting such households in large numbers is impractical for countries that pay for generous welfare states out of the taxes of those in work.
Doubts about cost are compounded by doubts about honesty, since a system that cannot be sure who it is admitting cannot plan for what it will owe. The case of Care4Calais illustrates the problem, because the charity, which distributes aid to migrants in northern France, was reported by The Telegraph to have supported asylum seekers who challenged Home Office assessments that they were adults, and judges later ruled that the applicants had made a conscientious effort to mislead the authorities in order to obtain the benefits of being treated as a child. One Ethiopian man, identified as a 17-year-old, was found by a judge to be twenty-two.
The charity maintains that its casework helps people who were wrongly classified as adults, yet the courts found deliberate deception, and deception practiced to secure a legal status is fraud. Since children receive school places and council accommodation while adults are housed in hotels, each successful deception also adds to the fiscal burden that the Polani model describes, and Britons who worry that grown men are being placed in children's accommodation are therefore asking a reasonable question about whether their asylum system can be trusted.
Yet it is Westerners who are branded xenophobic for asking such questions, while the African measures described at the start of this essay pass almost without remark. Donald Trump's clampdown on illegal immigration in America and the rise of Reform in Britain receive relentless and moralizing attention, whereas a Kenyan president reserving trades for Kenyans or a Gambian regulator purging foreign bank staff barely registers as news. If hostility to immigrants were the offense that editors claim to care about, Nairobi and Banjul would face the same denunciation as Washington and Westminster. They do not, and the disparity shows that the outrage attaches to white countries defending their borders and is withheld from black and brown governments doing the same or worse. This is anti-white sentiment shaping editorial priorities, and it is a shame that the way Africans treat other Africans should go unexamined so that a comfortable narrative can survive.
https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/02/africans-against-africans-the-xenophobia-nobody-reports/