Germany and Kenya have signed a Comprehensive Migration and Mobility Partnership which is celebrated as a “win-win” for both countries. While Kenya’s government is keen to appease its disaffected citizens with quick-fix job opportunities abroad, Germany remains far more reluctant to open its doors. In this contribution, we argue that agreements of this sort typically prioritise, first and foremost, the needs of states and capital rather than the autonomous desires, ambitions, and life projects of migrants themselves. Only if we learn to disentangle migration from the shifting predatory demands of states, capital, and nationalised borders can people truly stand to benefit.
On 16 September 2024, Germany and Kenya signed a so-called “Comprehensive Migration and Mobility Partnership” during Kenyan President William Ruto’s official visit to the German capital. The new bilateral agreement is one among several the German coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz has planned with countries such as Morocco, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Ghana, Philippines, Colombia, Uzbekistan, and Georgia. Kenya itself reportedly seeks to expand its existing labour agreement on healthcare workers with the United Kingdom, and is also about to close more comprehensive deals with Austria and Saudi Arabia. As early as December 2022, the current German government under Scholz struck its first such deal with India, a major export market and trading partner, “to facilitate temporary migration based on fair mobility” and with the stated aim of enabling “the transfer of skills to the home country of the migrants concerned in the interests of fair globalisation and decent work.”
While migration is vital for Germany, with its ageing population, pacts like this are a balancing act between addressing the labour needs of employers and industry and politically instrumentalising xenophobia which almost all German parties have strategically done to some degree. Globally, migrant labour agreements have a long history that goes as far back as the colonial era. Most prominent among later arrangements of this kind were the so-called “guest worker” programmes in Germany and other Western European countries after the Second World War. But even more recent debates have highlighted how such schemes are still bound up with the logics of racial capitalism, neoliberalism, gendered exploitation, and tend to produce conditions of unfreedom.
The new agreement between Nairobi and Berlin, the precise text of which is yet to be published in public gazettes, comes at a politically tumultuous time for both countries. The Social Democratic government under Scholz’s leadership has suffered a series of regional electoral setbacks at the hands of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) with its virulent anti-migration messaging. Instead of countering the rise of fascism, Scholz and the political centre have tried to re-capture right-wing voters by emulating the AfD’s nativism in word and deed. Only recently, his coalition government reintroduced border controls with neighbouring states in the Schengen area in a thinly-veiled populist effort to appease nationalist audiences. In an interview with the weekly Der Spiegel in October 2023, Scholz further demonstrated his “toughness” on the issue by declaring that Germany would “finally need to start deporting on a larger scale.”
Kenya’s President William Ruto and his Kenya Kwanza (“Kenya First”) coalition have also faced unprecedented domestic turmoil during weeks of popular protests by Gen-Z youth in June and July this year. In crackdowns, his security forces killed at least 61 protesters, while countless others were injured, arrested, abducted, or forcibly disappeared. The protests, which originally ran under the hashtag #RejectFinanceBill, were sparked by a new draconian finance bill that was expected to raise taxes among citizens who were already struggling to cope with spiralling unemployment, housing shortages, and high costs of living, but soon widened to demand Ruto’s resignation, as well as an end to graft and cronyism among the country’s political class.
What’s in it for Germany?
At the joint press conference in Berlin, Scholz stated that one of the agreement’s pillars was to “balance the skilled labour shortage” that Germany has been experiencing and which would only be exacerbated in “the next years and decades.” But, given the febrile xenophobic climate in Germany, Scholz was careful not to overemphasise the potential for long-term labour mobility, quickly adding that there was “the other side of the coin: effective procedures for returning those who have come to us from Kenya but don’t have a right of residence or aren’t eligible for it.” Making the provisions for forced returns sound like acts of compassion, Scholz promised that illegalised Kenyans in Germany “can now get more easily and more quickly back to their home country.”
Despite the fanfare around future deportations, the number of Kenyans actually living in Germany is small: according to official statistics from Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees only 15.000 Kenyans are registered in the country, with just 818 facing deportation in September 2024. Even though the impact of this deal may therefore be minimal in real terms, its symbolism is still key. It signals to liberal voters in Germany the coalition government’s willingness to tackle labour shortages and assuage German capital while reassuring the far- and centre-right that the country is still prepared to uphold global mobility apartheid by cracking down on ‘illegal’ migration and those with no right to stay.
Exporting workers: Will Kenya(ns) benefit?
Sold as an opportunity to “unlock the potential of technology in Germany and [of] human capital in Kenya”, as Kenya’s President Ruto reiterated in numerous interviews, the agreement is equally important for his domestic standing. But while Scholz was cautious of opening Germany’s doors too wide, Ruto’s needed to be seen to be doing precisely that. In an interview with Deutsche Welle (DW) that same day, he claimed that “this agreement will unlock 250.000 job opportunities for young people from Kenya. That is a bilateral agreement between Germany and Kenya. It is a win-win. There is a big labour deficit in Germany. There is a big labour over-supply in Kenya.” This was repeated in a headline for Business Insider Africa shortly after. On Kenya’s Citizen TV news, the Labour and Skills Development Principal Secretary Shadrack Mwadime said that “…the reality is, the job opportunities available in Germany is about 1 million.” He went further to say that “the assumption was that Kenya was going to be given a quarter but these are jobs available to the entire international market so we can as well access more than the 250.000, it is dependent on how organised we are to access these jobs.” And yet, the agreement does not specify how many workers will actually benefit from the migration deal. Ruto’s pledge of jobs for Kenyan youth was therefore, above all, a piece of political theatre.
In light of domestic pressures in Kenya, the agreement promises at least symbolic returns for Ruto. Since his election in 2022, he has reinvented himself as the defender of “hustlers” and his country as a “hustler nation” full of innovative, hard-working, small-scale entrepreneurs. It is precisely this public image of surplus youth and creativity, born out of a highly precarious Kenyan economy, that he is now keen to use as a selling point globally. In doing so, Ruto has repeatedly invoked the demographic threat of the “youth bulge”: the idea that many societies in the formerly colonised world are experiencing a disproportionate growth in young people whose presence may cause conflict, political turmoil and violence, if ignored. Even during his election campaign, Ruto asserted that, “if there is one thing that we must sort out in Kenya it is the youth bulge and the unemployment that comes with it.” In short, Ruto is deploying the idea of a demographic “time bomb” of African youth to secure funding from global north countries like Germany whose political debates are rife with racialised fears of anarchy, terrorism, and political unrest from “uncontrolled” migration.
The migration agreement may serve as yet another way for Ruto to externalise the solutions to Kenya’s domestic woes with media pomp. In December 2022, the president promised that every citizen who attended the official Independence Day celebrations that year would be able to enrol in an online course on global entrepreneurship paid for by Arizona State University. While these opportunities did exist, Ruto raised eyebrows among commentators for making such low-impact promises to boost his popularity. In fact, despite cultivating an image as hustler-in-chief, Ruto’s government has in fact further aggravated the tax burden on youth, exacerbated the cost-of-living crisis, increased the price of fuel, and suppressed democratic protests against these policies.
While the German-Kenyan deal might benefit Kenyans selected to work in Germany in the short term, not much thought has been given to the consequences of this “brain drain”. As more details of the deal emerge, Kenyan officials have indicated that healthcare workers, such as doctors and nurses, are among those primed for export. And yet those professions are among the most in-demand within Kenya itself. The country has had perennial shortages of doctors which have meant that one doctor on average serves 5,263 Kenyans: more than five times the WHO recommended ratio. Further, Kenyan healthcare workers have repeatedly struggled for better pay and working conditions through industrial action in 2024 and 2017, facing threats from the government to fire striking doctors, arrest the union leadership, and reduce workers across the public sector. Despite access to quality healthcare being guaranteed under article 43 of Kenya’s Constitution, Ruto’s government has failed to invest in the workforce at home to ensure this right is realised for all. The narrative of labour “oversupply” in the country thus grossly misrepresents often tense labour relations and the ready availability of Kenyan workers to be “exported”.
Finally, the Kenya Kwanza government has touted the deal as a foreign exchange earner through remittances to be sent back home by those working abroad. According to the Central Bank of Kenya, there was about $3.2 billion sent back home from countries worldwide as remittances in the past eight months of 2024. Given that remittances from Kenyans living in Europe was only about 17% of those $3.2 billion, the amount of money sent back from Germany is unlikely to be particularly high. Moreover, it is unclear how such family remittances will contribute to providing much-needed public goods in health, education, and social welfare without further exacerbating the vicious cycle of service privatisation catering to the burgeoning urban middle- and upper-middle class.
A “win-win” for whom?
On the surface, labour agreements such as this may appear to satisfy both the needs of “sending” and “receiving” countries. But critical questions about labour rights, immigration status, residency rights, and social protections remain. Germany’s deal with India offers glimpses of where the partnership could be headed. Unsurprisingly, large parts are dedicated to exchange of migration data, preventing and fighting irregular migration and trafficking, voluntary returns, creation of a joint working group on migration, return and mobility issues, and both parties give only a soft pledge to “favourably consider” visas for each other’s citizens. There is no reason to believe that Kenya, a country a fraction the size of India and with less strategic importance for Germany, would get more favourable conditions. In fact, Kenya has previously sent migrant workers to countries in West Asia and the Gulf, where scandals of mistreatment, exploitation, and rights violations were rife. In Germany itself, a country that does not use racial categories even for the purpose of official initiatives against racism, discrimination has grown in recent years. The systemic exclusion of negatively racialised migrant workers has been documented since the earliest “guest worker” programmes until today.
Labour agreements typically prioritise and protect the interests of capital and nation-states, not the ambitions, freedoms, or life plans of migrants themselves. They are what abolitionist scholar-activist Harsha Walia calls a form of “neoliberal insourcing” by which foreign-trained workers are brought into an economy while retaining the racial division of labour. “Borders do not collapse under neoliberal globalization,” she writes, but their instrumentalisation “segments labor and acts as a spatial fix for capital accumulation.” Foreign (non-citizen) workers are only allowed to enter, and stay, if they can benefit employers in destination countries and—given current political anxieties in Europe—can also be easily returned back “home,” once they have served their “purpose.” But this legal route to employment works in tandem with the systematic illegalisation of scores of other exploitable migrants who keep many European and North American economies de facto afloat.
Ironically, the hustlers and unemployed youth that Kenya’s President Ruto portrays as his core constituents are unlikely to even benefit from the deal. Rather, young professionals with higher education will leave a country that has failed to prioritise the welfare of its own citizens and workers in search of better pay and anticipated futures. But their plans might clash with the restrictive vision of states like Germany which often reduce them to “resources” to be imported, harnessed and, later, returned.
Beyond predatory states and capital
Besides catering to the needs of the two states—for Kenya to rid itself of “surplus workers” and for Germany to fill “gaps” in its labour market—the migration partnership is hardly a cause for celebration. In a world in which global (visa) apartheid reigns, allowing some to prove their “usefulness” by becoming precaritised migrant workers is not a sign of progress. Rather, it signals capitalism’s incessant reliance on racialised workers with tightly circumscribed rights to move or stay for the process of accumulation. As so often, Kenya’s migrants themselves are cast as “cogs” in an inter-state agreement on trade, economy, and profit-maximisation and not as autonomous actors with desires and life trajectories of their own. Their much-cited role as “surplus” to be put to work is hereby indicative of the anticipated value to be skimmed off their labour and mobile lives. But only if we learn to disentangle migration from the shifting predatory demands of states, capital, and nationalised borders—and prioritise building equitable social relations based on welfare, solidarity and mobility justice—can people truly stand to benefit.