Mass Arrests Of Now-Fearful Immigrants

The buses crammed full of juvenile men leave each afternoon from this engaged market in Nigeria's largest city, some with bruises round their faces and cuts on their arms.

A series of raids by Nigerian authorities in recent days has brought worry to Katangua Market in Lagos, where immigrant labor makes the market thrum in the middle of stacks of secondhand apparel, footwear, purses and other accessories that are prepared along slender dirt alleyways. Immigrant employees, who arrive mostly from neighboring Niger to the north, are finding themselves aimed at by security agencies anxious about a growing Islamic extremist insurgency in to the north Nigeria that could disperse southward.

Nigeria's porous boundaries and corrupt bureaucracy permit persons to go in the country, giving extremists the possibility to freely move and bypass capture. But those identical boundaries give those living in poverty in neighboring nations a possibility to profit from money. Now even immigrants with correct journey documents concern they'll be rounded up as well.

"If they arrive here and apprehend me and I don't have my papers, I don't know what's going to happen," said Abdu Tanimu, a leader of Nigerians working in the market. "I don't understand what's going on out there."


Immigration raids have occurred before and even have a location in the slang of oil-rich Nigeria, home to more than 160 million people. The colorful recycled plastic sacks carried by travelers in the district are renowned as "Ghana-Must-Go," a quotation to when Nigeria booted out Ghanaians and other immigrants in 1983 as oil prices disintegrated and the country's economy cratered.

Today, immigrants make up much of the menial work workforce in Lagos. Nigerians impel wheelbarrows and convey goods on their heads in markets, while others assist as barrier sentries and evening watchmen in financial properties and residential homes. juvenile men from Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana and other countries also crowd into the city, looking for occupations.

While some convey a proper passport and work permit, the most of immigrants easily cross the border without papers. Some go through with a payment of less than $1 to immigration officials. other ones easily drive through the unpatrolled sandy extends of the Sahel into Nigeria.

That loose arrangement is now being challenged, although, by a growing signal of shootings, bombings and kidnappings conveyed out by Islamic extremists in Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north. Since 2010, the extremists' guerrilla campaign has slain at smallest 1,548 persons, according to an Associated Press enumerate. Authorities and citizens increasingly worry that aggression could disperse into Lagos and Nigeria's mostly Christian south, potentially destabilizing the territory.