ABSTRACT
Since the generalisation of the visa regime across the Schengen area in the 1990s, followed by the restrictions on issuing visas which now stand in the way of the majority of Africans wishing to migrate to Europe, staged transnational migration has become one solution for African migrants, opening or reopening new migratory routes from sub-Saharan Africa, through the Maghreb, to Europe. In this chapter, this phenomenon is referred to as ‘transmigration’, as explained and justified below. So, thousands of sub-Saharan transmigrants enter and relocate themselves collectively every year in the Maghreb, setting up stopovers which, since their establishment in the 1990s, have continued to serve as migratory staging posts for newcomers: these stopovers have a social history which has gradually become a part of migratory trajectories. This study of the sub-Saharan transmigrants’ transnational networks therefore asks how we should see the creation of the unrestricted spatial configurations produced by these moving populations, within a geopolitical context where the borders are not as porous as the term ‘transnational’ would suggest. In response to this, the notion of a stopover, seen simultaneously as an observation location, a methodological framework and an analytical tool, seems much more relevant than the notion of ‘transit’, which is too restrictive from a space-time point of view. This chapter develops and illustrates this idea, working from the example of Moroccan stopovers in the transmigration of sub-Saharan Africans.
