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Comment by Parae | Hacker News Reader

Let me guess, you're from EU or USA ? Nationalism is not what's stopping most africans to move abroad. I'm lucky I was born in France so I don't have to bother with visa refusal like all my cousins in Algeria.

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I am from India.

India is orders of magnitude better than most African countries. At the very least it’s safe and you can make a living. Indians actually move back to India after living in the west which doesn’t happen with Africans all that often.

The average GDP per capita in Africa as of 2024 is around $2400 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1300864/gdp-value-per-ca...), in India it's around $2700 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/263776/gross-domestic-pr... ). A difference but certainly not orders of magnitude. Africa has some really dirt-poor places but so does India. The homocide rate in Africa is higher, around 13/100k vs 3/100k in India, but that's still less than the homocide rate in most south American countries, such as Brazil with 22/100k.

Let's not forget here that Africa is 10 times bigger than India, 5 times bigger than Bresil and twice as big as Russia. It's a very disparate continent. Algeria and DRC, the two biggest countries in Africa, have very little in common.

You’ve got to look at PPP because India is dirt cheap to live in. For instance India has a PPP GDP per capita of around $12,000 whereas Nigeria is around $4500 or Uganda is at $2500.

Africa is too big to describe at once. Though in the context of africa, you can paint trends.

e.g in Nigeria most professionals hardly earn $500. Now compare to zimbabwe - the same professional earns 2x-4x the nigerian wage. Yet Nigeria has higher gdp per capita.

so yeah gdp per capita or gdp per capita ppp - might really reflect the african dynamic.

Also, from watching a diverse group of colleagues and hearing migration process details, I have come to believe that, India has better diplomatic connections with most of the West compared to other APAC nations and the network of existing nationals are actually very helpful and large in most of the West, so they have much easier time moving, having initial support(very crucial when you just arrived and getting used to), information access and professional network.

Or to give a rather poor analogy for lack of better one, India has premium-business-class experience migrating to West, compared to other APAC, which are put through economy-saver class experience.

Since 2021 [1] it's easier to come to France as an Indian, that it is as an Algerian, or even worse, as a Nigerian or Palestinian.

[1] https://www.immigration.interieur.gouv.fr/Europe-et-Internat...

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