I don't understand why EU does not fund widespread anti-migration propaganda in those countries. Showing them that it's way more likely that they will lose all of their savings trying to get to EU and ending up in a prison like in this article would certainly turn some of them back.

People are replying "it's better than what they had" but that's often not true.

Many are promised something that does not exist, go through lot of danger only to discover that they were better off where they started. But now, they can't go back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_fz9EW5Iw

I think people don’t immigrate because of slightly better conditions. There’s a lot of hardship with being a refugee which won’t even end with getting a new citizenship. People sometimes do it to run away from i.e. Taliban, or bombs or some imminent danger.

_Most_ immigrants, like other humans, have a sense of self respect. I bet most of them prefer to stay in their own country even if the situation is worse than Europe if they know they won’t randomly get killed tomorrow.

That being said, of course, there are a group who abuse the system.

Edit: Corrected a statement in the first sentence to be more accurate.

It’s simple, and you said it: It’s better than what they had. The places they are coming from are terrible.

Not getting treated properly is not the same as not knowing if one is going to be alive today.

There are a lot of refugees in South Africa. Not sure if anyone actually knows how many because many are illegal.

Because it’s better than where they came from, usually.

What is an “economic refugee” anyway? Are Norwegians immigrating to USA “winter refugees”?

No, I assume that most of them flew across the Atlantic and went through US border control. We don’t have waves of Norwegians attempting to cross the US borders illegally on ships, like the EU has with African/Middle Eastern immigrants.

There are ample social services and NGO help in the EU that immigrants can take advantage of. Such programs don’t exist in most ME/African countries. Ironically, Norway and other Scandinavian countries do have these programs as well as stable economies.