ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the contemporary developments within the field of transnational mobility between Europe and Western Africa, paying particular attention to Morocco. It presents the ethnographic insights into the transnational movement of popular class (sha´bi) Moroccan men, who arrived in Spain as irregular migrants in the 1990s, and new European nomads who engage in a mobile life between Europe, Morocco and other parts of Western Africa. The recession of 2008 pushed many Europeans to resort to peripatetic survival strategies or to migrate to places where they are able to reduce the living costs, for example to Southern Europe or to Africa. In Europe the Moroccan migrants often faced extremely difficult economic conditions, xenophobia and racism and lethal dangers as irregular migrants on the way to the West. The changing migration policy in the EU resulted in sharply reducing numbers of attempted arrivals and arrests of irregular migrants, but also lethal accidents in land and sea.
