Migrations in Africa. The Case of West Africa and Why There is not an "invasion" of Europe

The main objective of this work is to analyze the migratory dynamics that are carried out in West Africa based on the question that emerges from the dominant discourses regarding the alleged invasion of African migrants to Europe, especially after 2015. Since that year, the most frequent slogan has been that of "Large waves of refugees arrive in Europe". However, reality shows that there is no such invasion in absolute quantitative terms, but there is an increasingly racist and xenophobic discourse that speaks of the "migration crisis", which alerts about an alleged invasion of Africans to the continent, when, in fact, almost 80% of those who emigrate from their countries go to another country on the African continent and only the remaining 20% "try" to cross to Europe. And this last figure represents an extremely small percentage of the population in relation to the European population. Based on fieldwork in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger carried out for a doctoral dissertation, the reflections on the problem posed are aimed at dismantling ideas widely disseminated by the media and certain academic fields in relation to migrations and sub-Saharan movements towards Europe, in many cases based on representations linked to "the flight from the continent", "wars", "ethnic conflicts" and "the invasion of migrants to Europe", among others.