Governing African Migration in Morocco: The Challenge of Positive Desecuritisation

Abstract

As part of its new African integration policy, implemented under the reign of Mohammed VI, Morocco has developed a new migration policy. Traditionally, the Moroccan approach to migration was focused on the management of the Moroccan diaspora. Today, despite the low percentage of African migrants compared to European migrants in Morocco, special attention is paid to the regularisation of migrants coming from the South. The Kingdom of Morocco has therefore become an African migratory crossroads, not only for transit migration but also for incoming migration. While the European Union is trying to externalise the control of its borders to Maghreb countries, Morocco is striving to spread a positive and desecuritising discourse on migration to differentiate itself from Europe. This desire for differentiation is not an easy path, as this article demonstrates. It is motivated by the Moroccan will to affirm the African dimension of its identity and no longer be considered as a purely Arab-Muslim country looking to the Mediterranean region. To this end, Morocco has committed itself, as a ‘champion of migration’ within the African Union, to the dissemination of its own migration model over the continent and to the defence of an African vision of migration centred on continental mobility, promoting migration as a path to development and combating preconceived ideas about migration as a security problem. Overall, Morocco’s foreign policy in Africa has further encouraged sub-Saharan migration, which in turn has had many positive effects. In addition to the cosmopolitanisation of several Moroccan cities, the new migration policy seems to illustrate a boost in public policies and a willingness to overcome European normative transfers through diplomatic negotiation.