ABSTRACT
Morocco’s ‘radically new migration policy’ announced by King Mohammed VI in September 2013 was widely welcomed as an important symbolic break with the recent past. It was largely based on a report by Morocco’s National Human Rights Council (CNDH 2013) that called for the development of a national asylum system, the integration of immigrants and refugees, and most significantly in the short term, an ‘exceptional regularisation’ of undocumented migrants resident in Morocco. The previous legislation, law 02/03 passed in 2003, was Morocco’s first post-independence migration legislation, but it had never been popular. The security-focused approach, passed in the aftermath of the terror attack in Casablanca in May 2003, was harshly
The Journal of North African Studies, 2015 Vol. 20, No. 4, 590-604, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2015.1065043
criticised in human rights terms as excessively violent and in geopolitical terms as simply responding to the diktats of the European Union (EU) – Morocco had become the ‘gendarme de l’Europe’ in one widely repeated phrase (Belguendouz 2003). In the last few years, Moroccan immigration policy had become further mired in accusations of racism and abuse (Bachelet 2013). The new policy approach announced in September 2013 heralded refreshing change from this
pattern. It involved the elaboration of three new draft bills (projets de lois) on asylum, trafficking and a replacement for the problematic 02/03 law on immigration. The new approach brings a more humane focus, but also provides evidence of a more proactive stance, not simply responding to EU demands (Alioua 2013). This was particularly true of the regularisation of undocumented migrants that was announced in November 2013. More than any other element of the new policy, regularisation symbolised the desire to change. The first applications were received at a series of specially established offices in January 2014 and the end of the appeals process was announced on 9 February 2015. According to the official figures, 27,330 applications were received and 17,918 of them were granted a residence permit, initially for a year (Le Reporter 2015). This paper seeks to frame Morocco’s recent immigration policy change in terms of Sayad’s
celebrated analysis as ‘how the State thinks of itself’ (Sayad 1999, 6). This is not to deny the important human rights critique – it is true that Moroccan immigration policy, like that of many of its neighbours, often results in extremely harsh treatment of vulnerable migrants (see the reports from Médecins Sans Frontières 2013 and Human Rights Watch 2014). Morocco has become the focus for much of this critique, not because its policy is unusually bad but because the activities of civil society and foreign researchers are unusually unrestricted – certainly compared to Algeria, Libya or Egypt, where the treatment of migrants is worse but there is a very limited evidence base on these issues. Rather than focusing exclusively on the impacts of the regularisation, our aim is to set this
development against the broader geopolitical context of Morocco’s much heralded ‘grand retour’ to the African continent (Le Monde 2014). Understood against this geopolitical reorientation, the new immigration policy appears much more autonomous, however imperfectly it is being implemented. Sayad’s central argument is that immigration policy should not be seen as a purely internal matter, but must be related to the international elements of a State’s self-image (Sayad 1999). Seen in this light, as Morocco’s engagement with other African states develops, it is logical that this would have an impact on approaches to immigration. This paper investigates to what extent this is the case with Morocco’s ‘radically new’ approach to immigration and how far this may be interpreted as a proactive, rather than a reactive policy development. The following section examines the analytical basis to Sayad’s approach and argues that immi-
gration policy is never purely a question of domestic politics. The paper then turns to the experience of migrants, drawing on interviews with 50 migrants to Morocco, conducted in 2011 and 2012 within the Beyond Irregularity project (Cherti and Grant 2013). These interviews reveal the gradual development of settlement in Morocco and the increasingly prominent position of sub-Saharan African migrants in certain sectors of the labour market. The third section reviews the Moroccan government’s developing approach to these relatively new migratory movements. The final section concludes that these responses have moved away from a reactive position both to new migrants and to the international relations that have sought to influence Moroccan policy. This suggests that the ‘radically new approach’ to immigration has been led, at least in part, by foreign policy imperatives.
