[BRIEF NOTE] The steady drift north

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Pearsall's Books, Pearsall Helms notes that the question of illegal migration is becoming more complicated by Morocco's evolution into a country that also receives immigrants, as detailed in Hein de Haas' October 2005 report "Morocco: From Emigration Country to Africa's Migration Passage to Europe" at Migration Information.

Each year, several tens of thousand of sub-Saharan Africans are believed to migrate to Spain through Europe. Since the mid 1990s, Morocco has developed into a transit migration country for these migrants, a mixed group of asylum seekers and, increasingly, labor migrants. They generally enter Morocco at the border east of Oujda from Algeria after they have crossed the Sahara overland, usually through Niger.

Once in Morocco, they often attempt to enter the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla by scaling the tall border fences separating these enclaves from Morocco. Because Spain has few repatriation agreements with sub-Saharan countries and because of identification problems, many migrants who manage to get in are eventually released. In September 2005, at least five people died and more than 40 were injured in such a massive border-crossing attempt in Ceuta.

Initially, this flow from sub-Saharan Africa seemed to be a reaction to political turmoil and civil war affecting countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d'Ivoire. Since 2000, however, migrants tend to come from an increasingly diverse array of origin countries. New origin countries of such transit migrants include Nigeria, Senegal, the Gambia, Liberia, Mali, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Niger, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Cameroon.

Recently, even migrants from Asian countries, such as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, have transited through Morocco via the Saharan route. They are mostly flown in from Asia to West-African capitals. From there, they follow the common Saharan trail via Niger and Algeria to Morocco.

Although most migrants consider Morocco a country of transit, an increasing number of migrants who fail to enter Europe prefer to settle in Morocco on a more long-term basis rather than return to their more unstable and substantially poorer home countries. Probably several tens of thousands have settled in cities like Tangiers, Casablanca, and Rabat on a semi-permanent basis, where they sometimes find jobs in the informal service sector, petty trade, and construction. Others try to pursue studies in Morocco.

Yet sub-Saharan migrants face substantial xenophobia and aggressive Moroccan and particularly Spanish border authorities. Since most of them have no legal status, they are vulnerable to social and economic marginalization.

In September 2005, a Moroccan newspaper compared sub-Saharan African migrants to "black locusts" invading northern Morocco. Frequent round-ups have occurred in immigrant neighborhoods and in improvised ad-hoc camps close to the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and larger cities, and unauthorized migrants are regularly deported to the Algerian border.

As de Haas notes, the Moroccan state just isn't prepared to deal with large-scale immigration. It still is geared towards using outwards migration as a tool of state control, the depopulation of poor, mountainous, and traditionally rebellious areas by migration to Moroccan cities and to Europe, the European migrant communities in turn sending back well over a billion US dollars worth of remittances to bolster the country's balance of payments and subsidize rural areas. The yawning gaps in human and economic development between Spain and Morocco ensure continued migration northwards, regardless of the continued failure or happy revival of the Euro-Mediterranean project.

More's the pity, then, that no one's prepared properly for this future. Just take a look at the 2002 Human Rights Watch report Nowhere To Turn: State Abuses of Unaccompanied Migrant Children by Spain and Morocco for an idea of just how badly things can go.