The bus station in Agadez, a remote town of low mud-brick buildings in the West African nation of Niger, is humming again.
Every week, thousands of migrants from West and Central Africa leave the station in this gateway city to the Sahara in a caravan of trucks, traveling for days to North Africa, where many will then try to cross the Mediterranean in a attempt to reach Europe.
For years, that gate was closed, at least officially. The country’s European-friendly government banned immigration from Agadez, and in return the European Union pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Niger’s coffers and the local economy.
But last summer, after generals seized power in Niger in a military coup, the European Union suspended financial support for the government – and in response, the generals cut a migration deal with the European Union in November. The gate is once again open and a fresh flock of hopeful immigrants are once again passing through, much to the relief of many locals.
“Immigration is how we get by,” said Aicha Maman, a single mother who runs a business helping migrants and served a prison sentence in Agadez last year for trafficking.
Niger’s decision, however, has worried European officials, who fear the end of cooperation with Niger will lead to many more people attempting the treacherous journey north.
The land route through the Agadez gateway in Niger is seen by many migrants as less expensive and less dangerous than the ocean route across the Atlantic – in rickety boats from the west coast of Africa via the Canary Islands. Even with the Niger route officially closed, migration to Europe in 2022 reached its highest point since 2016.
Immigration is once again high on the agenda of many European governments and far-right parties seeking to expel migrants are on the rise months before crucial elections for the European Parliament, one of the European Union’s three main institutions.
Emmanuela Del Re, the European Union’s top diplomat for the African region that includes Niger, said in a recent interview that Niger’s military junta is retaliating against the European Union because it refuses to recognize the junta: “They are using immigration as blackmail against the European Join.”
In Agadez, a desert outpost that has been at the crossroads of trade and migration routes for centuries, thousands of households relied on transporting, housing and selling goods to migrants.
With immigration legal again, opportunity returns: Young men buy new pick-ups to drive people north. Businessmen who arranged accommodation and transport of migrants were released from prison.
Inside her mud-brick home on a recent morning, Ms. Maman said she intended to restart her business of housing migrants in houses known locally as “ghettos” and connecting them with drivers — a business she’s relied on for years to to support her children and her parents.
“We have always considered migration an economic activity,” said Mohamed Anacko, the top political official in the Agadez region. “It’s not trafficking, it’s transportation.”
Two men in their 20s rested in a shelter on the outskirts of Agadez on a recent morning. The men, who are identified only by their first names to avoid being identified by authorities, had arrived from neighboring Nigeria days earlier and bought the water containers, sunglasses and scarves needed for the three-day trip to Libya.
Their journey would have been illegal weeks earlier under Niger’s anti-immigration law, but now they were free to go north: One of the men, Abubakar, said he would be looking for a building in Libya, but as a fan of the Real Madrid soccer team , which was intended to eventually reach Spain. The other, Adamou, said he had his eyes on Paris, but first, any menial job in Libya would do.
Already, up to a hundred pickups, with 30 passengers crammed into each, leave Agadez every week under military escort to protect them from bandits. Before Niger’s government repealed the law last year, a few dozen trucks were leaving illegally, local authorities and investigators say.
Few people have any incentive to keep the size of these caravans down: when Niger began implementing its anti-immigration law in 2016, thousands of locals lost their only source of income. Agadez was effectively turned into a border post for the European Union, thousands of miles from European shores.
Countless people crossing Niger never try to reach Europe. Many work in North African countries for a few years before returning home.
But hurt by the 2015 migration crisis, when more than a million people arrived in Europe mainly from the Middle East and Africa, the European Union has been trying to keep migrants out, providing financial support to some key transit countries in exchange for tougher border controls.
For Niger, it was an attractive exchange.
Until last summer’s coup, the European Union had provided nearly $1 billion in bilateral aid to Niger’s government since 2014, according to official bloc figures, on top of the hundreds of millions spent by individual European countries.
The European Union has also promised to help those living off migrant businesses in the Agadez region to find new jobs. But local officials in Agadez say the promised funds have benefited only about 900 of the 6,500 people involved in the migration.
“Those who were making millions from immigration were offered much less,” said Dr. Rhoumour Ahmet Tchilouta, a migration researcher from Agadez, about the millions in local currency, equivalent to thousands of dollars, that some could earn in a month.
Even so, more than four million migrants have passed through Agadez since 2016, according to the UN migration agency.
Those who wanted to leave hid in “ghetto” houses hidden behind high metal gates in residential neighborhoods. Or they bypassed the city and escaped police surveillance by following uncharted paths, resulting in thousands of deaths or disappearances, according to aid groups.
“The Sahara is swallowing countless migrants, like the Mediterranean,” said Azizou Chehou, head of Alarm Phone Sahara, a non-profit organization that rescues migrants stranded in the desert.
Tens of thousands of others have traveled through Agadez in the opposite direction: on their way back from North Africa, after being pushed back by militias in Libya or security forces in Algeria. From Agadez, the UN migration agency repatriates them to their countries of origin with the financial assistance of the European Union.
Agadez has become the chokepoint where those seeking to reach North Africa intersect with those returning home to West or Central African countries, and where stories of hope and suffering collide.
One morning last month, in one of these dilapidated houses, some Sierra Leonean men awaiting repatriation chatted with other migrants from their country heading north.
Among them was Mabinty Conteh, 23, who was carrying her 9-month-old niece. Ms Conteh said her sister, the baby’s mother, died last year and that her parents had died of Ebola years ago. She wanted to reach Italy via Libya, but she ran out of money.
“I have no family left,” said Mrs. Conteh, who had sold clothes in Sierra Leone. “I have nothing.”
Her compatriots tried to discourage her, sharing stories of sexual violence and beatings by border guards in Algeria and sexual slavery in Libya. In interviews, more than a dozen migrants described being held in horrific conditions in Algerian prisons and then forced to walk for hours through the desert before being brought to Agadez.
Alfred Conteh, a 29-year-old truck driver from Sierra Leone (no relation to Mabinty Conteh) described how inmates in an Algerian prison were so thirsty that they would steal bottles of each other’s urine. Mr Conteh said he had been waiting months to be repatriated.
“I’m tired of this thing and I just want to go home,” he said.
But neither laws nor reports of atrocities deter immigrants.
“People want to leave, no matter how much anyone stops them,” said Demba Mballo, a Senegalese immigrant who settled in Agadez and now connects migrants with drivers. “We don’t encourage, we don’t discourage. We only facilitate”.
Omar Hama Saleh contributed to the report.
