ABSTRACT
Over the past six decades, international migration has played a crucial role in the Moroccan political, economic, social and cultural landscape. Despite the unequal impact of migration at different geographic and social levels, migration has contributed to the development of Morocco through improving people’s living conditions, stimulating the economy via a diversification of investments, raising the education level of migrants’ children and enabling the upward mobility of disadvantaged social groups. International migration has also transformed many rural sending regions into urbanised centres with more opportunities for their inhabitants and internal migrants. These transformations have triggered debates about the emergence of new forms of inequality, but have also indirectly benefited non-migrant households (see de Haas 2007 for a literature review on existing empirical research about the effect of Moroccan migration in the regions of origin). Moroccan emigration started to increase in the 1960s. Migrants initially left from specific rural
areas in the Souss and the Rif regions, and headed towards France. Emigration expanded progressively to other European countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. The first migrants were mainly unskilled men who were often recruited through guest worker programmes. After the 1973 oil crisis, the demand for labour migrants decreased in many European countries, but Moroccan migration continued as migrants progressively settled in Europe and were joined by their families. Moroccan migrants gradually diversified in terms of gender, socio-professional background, regions of origin and countries of destination. In the late 1980s and in the 1990s, southern European countries experienced economic growth and became important destinations for Moroccan migration. Increased restrictions in European visa regulations and immigration policies in the early 1990s, on the one hand, and the weaker state intervention in Spain and Italy compared to other countries in western Europe, on the other, also fostered irregular movements and the overstay of migrants who could easily work in the informal economy (Massey et al. 1998; Solé 2004). Over time, many irregular migrants could get a legal residence and work permit through regularisation schemes. With the outbreak of the global economic crisis, regularisations and the upward professional
mobility of Moroccan migrants in Europe became more difficult. In recent years, unemployment severely hit Moroccan migrants, especially in Spain, where more than 55% of the active Moroccan population was unemployed in 2010 (Arslan et al. 2014). Those who did not lose their jobs in the wake of the economic crisis often experienced a worsening of their working conditions. At the same time, more and more Moroccans started to return to Morocco for more or less longer periods because of unemployment (Capote 2015; Cohen et al. 2011). This new economic context and the decreasing work opportunities in Europe might have challenged the positive value of migration to Europe among Moroccan non-migrants. In times of recession, previously involuntary nonmigrants – those who would like to migrate but are not able to do so (Carling 2002) – may have become voluntary ones when they started considering immobility as a better alternative to migrating to Europe under uncertain working and living conditions.
