For thousands of Nigerians, the road to paradise and a better life starts at a row of high-walled compounds in a well-heeled quarter of Lagos.

The capital city's embassy row marks the new frontline in the battle between, on the one hand, consular officials trying to keep would-be immigrants out of Europe and, on the other, the flight of an entire class of desperate and disillusioned Nigerians.

It's a struggle being played out throughout the developing world as Western states raise the bar against immigration and poor people devise ever more clever ways of getting around their rules.

Many applicants queue overnight for their brief hearing, but most will be unsuccessful. The queues are the tip of an iceberg, the only visible sign of a massive exodus.

Poor and middle-class, men and women, want out of a country that has cheated and dispossessed them over the past 30 years. An all-powerful army, a grasping elite, a currency in freefall - Nigerians are long past optimism. "A decade ago, a teacher could look forward to buying a car after a year's work. Now he'd be lucky to afford a bicycle," says one observer.

If escape can't be effected legally, then there are other ways. Touts outside the embassies promise to get fake visas for £700, and the going rate for a false passport in downtown Lagos is £2,000.

It's almost impossible to convey the level of difficulty of life in Nigeria. The electricity supply comes and goes arbitrarily; there's a petrol famine (even though Nigeria is the world's sixth-largest producer of crude oil); and corruption is endemic, from the wealthy elite siphoning off oil wealth to the teacher who demands a bribe for passing a student or the accountant who takes a cut from each of his new employees.

More than 70 per cent of the population live on less than $1 (84p) a day, according to the UN Development Programme. Some 92 per cent live on less than $2 (£1.68) a day.

On the road to Edo State, lepers wail at passing cars and scamper after notes thrown to the wind. Dozens of blind and maimed Muslim beggars line the entrance of the Catholic church in Benin City. And these are only the most visible forms of poverty.

Not that Nigeria has a monopoly on hardship. But this country is different. For a start, it has 120 million inhabitants, most of whom speak English. It has more professionals and graduates than elsewhere in Africa, and more of them unemployed. Nigerian communities exist throughout the world to welcome new arrivals.

For most, the road to escape is shrouded in secrecy, subterfuge, fraud and criminality. Shadowy networks of counterfeiters, hustlers, "sponsors" and other criminals have grown up to meet the demand. Extended families or criminal gangs run the supply lines that keep the flow of emigrants moving along well-trodden smuggling routes.

Businessmen stump up the price of a fake passport or a long-distance plane ticket - in return for a cut of the emigrant's earnings in Europe. Sponsors lure young girls with promises of work and then dump them into prostitution on the streets of Europe.

A diplomat in one of Lagos's Western embassies explains the modus operandi thus: "The name of the game is to get on that plane to Europe. Then documents can be destroyed or passed on to an accomplice. Every family hopes to get one member to the West to get citizenship and then hopes that others can follow later."

Trafficking in children is a particular problem. The Western embassy mentioned above recently discovered that one well-travelled Nigerian had brought 14 children - none of them his own - into Europe over the past two years. On another occasion, officials came upon a busload of children being matched off with "parents" immediately prior to their visa interviews.

The embassy official shows me the latest batch of rejected applications. There's a bank statement which was faxed from a public booth and is considered to be bogus. Another encloses a letter of invitation from a Nigerian businessman in Europe, also considered to be a ready-up.

Another application is refused because of discrepancies in the number of children the applicant claims to have between this and a previous application. The last rejection slip states the obvious: "You stated that you outstayed your last visa and failed to return to Nigeria. This was a mistake".

THE first stop on the road to the West is often one of the neighbouring countries in West Africa. In Togo, Benin or the Ivory Coast, travellers cool their heels until they are matched up with a suitable passport, which may be stolen, borrowed or counterfeited. The overland route, often followed by those destined for southern Europe, leads across the Sahara to the shores of north Africa, from where the refugees are ferried across the Mediterranean.

The other route, which may lead to northern Europe and then Ireland, sees the refugees fly to one of the main European hubs and then on to a final destination. To outwit increasingly stringent controls, a person might travel legitimately to a country with lax controls, such as Saudi Arabia, and use a fake document to get from there to Europe.

"I had no problem at immigration," recalls Lucy, who was deported last year from Germany. "It was not my passport, it was not my photograph, but they were happy."

"White people think we Africans all look the same," says another Nigerian, who claims it is common for Nigerians in Europe to have their passports sent home for use by other family members.

The main Western embassies have drafted in special staff to deal with visa fraud. An 80strong staff at the British embassy sifts through the pile looking for fakes. At the airport, special "pathfinders" try to catch anyone who has slipped through the net. DNA testing has been introduced to check on those claiming blood relationships with British citizens.

Some Nigerians scoff at their compatriots who flee to Europe claiming to be refugees from persecution. They say the time for making such claims ended in June 1998 with the sudden death of the last military ruler, General Sani Abacha. Since then, the civil rights situation has improved dramatically, with releases of political prisoners and a curtailment of executions.

Tribal and religious tensions remain high in some parts, however, and the economy is still in ruins.

"People will make up all kinds of excuses," says Banji Adisa, a senior editor with the Guardian newspaper in Lagos, which was proscribed for a year under the military.

"They find a ready excuse in political activity against the government. In the days of the military, that was true to some extent. But now we're back to democracy and nobody's persecuting anybody any more. It's very safe for people to come back and many already have."

There is embarrassment at the deportation of thousands of Nigerian prostitutes from Europe, but the remittances from other emigrants are a boon to hard-pressed families here.

It cuts no ice with Nigerians to refer to the 3,500 of their compatriots who sought asylum in Ireland last year. After all, what is this figure in comparison to Nigeria's population of 120 million? And what do the half-million or so refugees coming to Europe each year amount to in comparison to the tens of millions of refugees sheltered by the poorest African nations?

Even the Western diplomat admits that "you can't blame them. It's about quality of life". He says he's in the business of "stemming flow, not stopping it . . . You can't stop it. It's going to get much worse."