Immigration to Ghana

Features of skilled immigration

Ghana has a skilled worker immigration policy aimed at creating a highly skilled and knowledgeable Ghanaian population, capable of creating wealth for Ghana and rapidly increasing the Ghanaian economy GDP output;^[6] and has recruited highly skilled professional experts in the fields of information and communications technology, manufacturing, health care, construction, finance and banking, retailing and the oil and gas industry sectors of the Ghanaian economy.^[6]

Skilled worker immigrants in Ghana include Indian, South Korean, Japanese, Malaysian, Cuban, Lebanese, Chinese, German and Dutch nationals and however after seven years as Ghanaian permanent residents with the Ghana Card permanent residency; skilled workers have gone on to become Ghanaian nationals.^[7][8] Since 2012, Ghana has also had its highly professional skilled worker expatriates returning from the diaspora back to Ghana.^[9]

Return to roots: African Americans in Ghana

As reported by the journalist Lydia Polgreen in a New York Times article, the fact that Ghanaian slave exports to the Americas were so important between the 16th and 19th centuries means that Ghana currently is trying to attract African slave descendants from the Americas in order that they settle there, and so that they return to make the country the new home to many descendants of the Ghanaian diaspora - though not all are of Ghanaian descent. Accordingly, as reported by Valerie Papaya Mann, president of the African American Association of Ghana, thousands of African Americans are already now living in Ghana, at least for part of the year. To encourage migration or visits by the descendants of enslaved Africans from the Americas, Ghana decided in 2005 to offer them a special visa and grant them Ghanaian passports.^[10]