ABSTRACT
The Moroccan migration experience to Britain dates back to at least the nineteenth century (Halliday 1992; Hayes 1905). In fact there is a long standing Moroccan-British relationship that goes back to the thirteenth century (Belmahi 2006; Rogers 1990), reflecting deeply rooted economic and diplomatic relations between the two countries. However, this migratory movement remains one of the most ‘invisible’ and least researched in Western Europe. Yet a walk down Golborne Road in London, commonly known as ‘little Morocco’, reveals Moroccan-owned cafés, restaurants, grocery stores, mosques, supplementary schools and community organisations; all testify the presence of a thriving Moroccan community. Paradoxically, however, this community remains officially and statistically invisible. An estimate of the size of the Moroccan community at present living in Britain is not available, although some unofficial sources suggest the figure of 65,000 to 70,000. The issue of the invisibility of certain migrant groups in Britain relates to the empirical overlap between ethnicity and race, exemplified by the identity question posed by the British Office of National Statistics in the 1991 and 2001 censuses, which collapses ethnic, racial and national identities (Goulbourne 2001).
