ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses labour migration to Europe from the perspective of migrants who belong to communities of nomadic people from the high plateaus of the Oriental region in Morocco. The pastoral Oriental has witnessed a number of transformations which have profoundly affected its population’s way of life such as sedentarization and informal cross-border trade with Algeria. Within two decades, the high plateaus of the Oriental have also become a territory of emigration, a pool of labour recruitment for southern Spain. Nomads and their sons are gradually converting into seasonal agricultural workers, contributing to the boom of industrial agriculture in southern Spain. Nomadism and migration constitute two forms of mobility between which Moroccan Oriental pastoralists maintain relationships of exclusion or of complementarity. Although nomadism is sui generis mobile, migration is a more recent experience, with new aspirations and values, richness and precariousness, hope and disillusionment. The pastoralists of the Oriental make a distinction between nomadism (rahla), nomadism outside tribal territory (hjer lawtane 1 ), leaving tribal territory (sometimes by up to hundreds of kilometres), and international migration or even final emigration. A stock breeder who has left his tribe for five years or more is not necessarily considered as having ‘emigrated’. He is a nomad; a forced exile following loss of livestock, these years are a mere episode in a trajectory marked by ups and downs. Nomads are known for being able to manage such oscillating fortunes (DPA, 2002). The aim of this chapter is to investigate these different kinds of mobility and to analyse its importance for pastoral households’ livelihood security. I argue that international migration can be considered as a new form of mobility which enriches the repertoire of nomadic mobility. Migration projects are family projects in which relatives expect benefits for their pastoral activity as well as an improvement in their living conditions. The effects of this international migration, however, depend on the migrants’ initial wealth, on their original location in the north or south of the Oriental and on the timing of the migratory project. Finally, I will reveal the limits of migration experiences, indicating that international migration is no longer an alternative for nomadic people. 2