“Life on the Margin: From Denial to Invisibility”. Translated from the French by Florence Bury

Abstract

On the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, the cities and ports of Ceuta (facing Gibraltar) and Melilla (more to the East) belong to Spain and are therefore part of the European Union, which explains the attraction they exert on migrants who want to get into continental Europe without risking their lives in hazardous crossings of the Mediterranean. Historically sub-Saharan migrants who found a way to illegally enter these portions of Spanish territory could indeed hope for an eventual transfer to continental Spain. Today, with few exceptions, the chances of being thus transported to Europe are thin: Spain mostly sends back to Morocco the rare adventurers who can get into Ceuta or Melilla at ever greater risks of injury or drowning. This chapter is the result of a personal experience as a migrant in the Belyounech forest, where I was part of the ethnolinguistic diverse communities of migrants settled in the Belyounech forest between 2005 and 2010, and subsequently in France where personal and collective situations of wandering, confinement in detention centers, and suffocation continued to be part of my personal experience, while I closely followed and analyzed the developments of the migrant condition in Morocco. In this chapter I want to show how the war on migrants in the Moroccan migratory space (that European and Moroccan policies only view as a transit zone on the way to Europe) fosters chaos, and blocks the authorities from imagining a mobility policy. Ever since the laws governing the immigration and residency of foreigners started to multiply and further complicate the conditions for access to the European Union, the modalities of granting visas and the methods of identifying applicants have evolved accordingly, while the chances have diminished of slipping through the net of files on people who have entered or resided illegally in Europe (Mattelart, 2008). This is how human beings get stuck in a bottleneck at the gates of Europe.