The return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office at the White House on January 20, 2025, may mean an attrition of Nigeria’s $20bn annual diaspora remittances, two United States-based scholars have said.
The two US-based scholars, Prof Aminu Gusau and Prof Nimi Wariboko, were guests on Inside Sources with Laolu Akande, a socio-political programme aired on Channels Television on Friday.
“One vital issue that I need to mention is the issue of immigration and how it will affect Nigeria. If Trump decided to do what he did the last time of massive deportation, of course, it would affect the economy of Nigeria because the remittances of Nigerians (abroad) to Nigeria would drastically go down,” said Prof Gusau, a scholar and research affiliate at the University of Kansas.
Wariboko, a Social Ethics Professor at Boston University, United States, corroborated Gusau’s view, saying Trump is determined to promote white supremacy and this may affect the Nigeria-US economy.
His antecedent tells us that this is a man that is going to promote white supremacy or even in another form: ‘America First’ in everything and that might not augur well for Nigeria or for Africa,” Wariboko said.
Trump, the 45th President of the United States (POTUS), staged a comeback when he wrestled power from incumbent Joe Biden after he trounced his vice, Kamala Harris, at the November polls.
The Republican powerhouse is billed to be inaugurated as the 47th POTUS come January 2025. One of his campaign promises was a sweeping overhaul of US immigration policy with mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. He has threatened to carry out what he described as the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history”, one that has sparked global conversations.
Trump’s latest threats is a reminder of his immigration policy during his first term as POTUS. In 2020, the Trump administration added Nigeria to a list of countries whose citizens will in some way be restricted from entering the United States because Nigeria didn’t comply with identity management and information sharing criteria.
Approximately 376,000 Nigerian immigrants live in the United States as of 2015, according to official sources. Nigeria is the largest source of African immigration to the United States.
The United States is one of the top destinations for migrating Nigerian youths and the middle class in search of greener pastures. Nigerians in America form a bulk of the total diaspora bulge which contributes more than $20bn annually to Nigeria’s economy, according to the 2023 data from the World Bank.
Trump, the elected 47th president, of America is yet to officially announced his position on Nigerian, Africans and any parts of the world immigrate to America, despite the speculations.
