Contained and abandoned in the “humane” border: Black migrants’ immobility and survival in Moroccan urban space

Abstract

This article examines the effects of Morocco’s new, “humane” migration policy that claimed to center human rights and integration over securitized border enforcement. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper demonstrates how the new migration policy expanded rather than dismantled the border regime, respatializing it from the edges of Moroccan territory into cities in the interior. Border respatialization was accomplished through abandonment, theorized not as an absence of government but a technique of governance that targets the racialized poor. Focusing on the experiences of migrants living in two urban spaces—an informal migrant settlement and a working-class neighborhood—this paper illustrates how abandonment limits black migrants’ ability to move and transgress the border, and how these effects have site-specific, as well as racial and gendered dimensions. This analysis underscores how humanitarian migration policy may have changed the modality of border violence, but not its substance.

Keywords

Abandonment race migration Morocco humanitarianism slow violence

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ahmed

(2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge.

Aït Ben Lmadani

, R Benlabbah, Z Chattouet al. (2016) La Politique D’Immigration. Un Jalon de la Politique Africaine du Maroc: Cas de la Regularisation Des Migrants Subsahariens. Rabat: Association Marocaine d’Etudes et de Recherches sur les Migrations (AMERM).

Alioua

Ferrié

J-N

Reifeld

(2017) La Nouvelle Politique Migratoire Marocaine. Rabat: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.

Andersson

(2014) Illegality, Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Andrijasevic

Walters

(2010) The International Organization for Migration and the International Government of Borders. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(6): 977–999.

Belguendouz

(2003) Le Maroc Non-Africain, Gendarme de L’Europe. Rabat: Inter-Graph.

Benjelloun

(2017) Nouvelle Politique Migratoire et Opérations de Régularisation. In: Alioua

, et al. (eds) La Nouvelle Politique Migratoire Marocaine. Rabat: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, pp. 35-122.

Bhandar

(2018) Organized State abandonment: The meaning of Grenfell. Sociological Review Blog. Available at: www.thesociologicalreview.com/blog/organised-state-abandonment-the-meaning-of-grenfell.html (accessed 1 April 2018).

Bialasiewicz

(2012) Off-shoring and out-sourcing the borders of Europe: Libya and EU border work in the Mediterranean. Geopolitics 17(4): 843–866.

10.

Biehl

(2005) Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

11.

Bogaert

(2018) Globalized Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

12.

Butler

(1993) Endangered/endangering: Schematic racism and white paranoia. In: Gooding-Williams

(ed.) Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising. New York: Routledge, pp.15–22.

13.

Byrd

Goldstein

Melamed

, et al. (2018) Predatory value. Social Text 36(2): 1–18.

14.

Campbell

(2017) State illegibility in the containment of labour unrest on the Thai-Myanmar border. Critique of Anthropology 37(3): 317–332.

15.

Casas-Cortés

Cobarrubias

Pickles

(2012) Re-bordering the neighbourhood: Europe’s emerging geographies of non-accession integration. European Urban and Regional Studies 20(1): 37–58.

16.

Clarno

(2017) Neoliberal Apartheid. Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

17.

Coddington

(2019) The slow violence of life without cash: Borders, state restrictions, and exclusion in the U.K. and Australia. Geographical Review 109(4): 1–17.

18.

Coddington

Conlon

and Martin (2018) Destitution economies: Mapping relations of enforced precarity. Society and Space. Available at: https://www.societyandspace.org/forums/destitution-economies-mapping-relations-of-enforced-precarity

19.

Collyer

(2007) In-between places: Trans-Saharan transit migrants in Morocco and the fragmented journey to Europe. Antipode 39(4): 668–690.

20.

Cresswell

(2012) Mobilities II: Still. Progress in Human Geography 36(5): 645–653.

21.

Darling

(2017) Forced migration and the city: Irregularity, informality, and the politics of presence. Progress in Human Geography 41(2): 1–21.

22.

Davies

Isakjee

(2015) Geography, migration and abandonment in the Calais refugee camp. Political Geography 49: 93–95.

23.

Davies

Polese

(2015) Informality and survival in Ukraine’s nuclear landscape: Living with the risks of Chernobyl. Journal of Eurasian Studies 6(1): 34–45.

24.

Delaney

(2002) The space that race makes. The Professional Geographer 54(1): 6–14.

25.

Den Hertog

(2016) Funding the EU-Morocco ‘Mobility Partnership’: Of implementation and competences. European Journal of Migration and Law 18(3): 275–301.

26.

Derickson

(2016) Taking account of the ‘part of those that have no part.’ Urban Studies 54(1): 44–48.

27.

Dillon

(2018) Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

28.

El Masaiti

(2017) International Organization for Migration: Morocco’s Migration Policy ‘Pioneer in Region.’ Moroccoworldnews.com, 20 November. Available at: www.moroccoworldnews.com/2017/10/231649/iom-migration-morocco-refugees/ (accessed 15 April 2019).

29.

European Commission (2018) Western Mediterranean route: EU reinforced support to Morocco. Press Release, 14 December. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_6705

30.

Ferrer-Gallardo

van Houtum

(2014) The deadly EU border control. ACME 13(2): 295–304.

31.

Foucault

(2003) Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76. New York: Picador.

32.

GADEM (2018) Coûts et Blessures – Rapport sur les Opérations des Forces de l’Ordre Menées dans le Nord du Maroc entre Juillet et Septembre 2018. Rabat: Groupe Antiraciste D’accompagnement et de Défense des Étrangers et Migrants.

33.

Gammeltoft-Hansen

(2006) Outsourcing migration management: EU, power, and the external dimension of asylum and immigration policy. DIIS Working Paper 2006:1, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen.

34.

Gilmore

(2002) Race and globalization. In: Johnston

, et al. (eds) Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 261-274.

35.

Gilmore

(2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

36.

Gordon

(2008) Methodologies of imprisonment. PMLA 123(3): 651–658.

37.

Hagan

(2017) Algeria’s black fear. Africa is a Country, 23 August. Available at: https://africasacountry.com/2017/08/algerias-black-fear (accessed 16 April 2020).

38.

Hamood

(2008) EU-Libya cooperation on migration: A raw deal for refugees and migrants? Journal of Refugee Studies 21(1): 19–42.

39.

Harvey

(2001) Globalization and the ‘spatial fix. ’ Geographische Revue 2: 23–30.

40.

Harvey

(2005) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

41.

Hyndman

Giles

(2011) Waiting for What? The Feminization of Asylum in Protracted Situations. Gender, Place & Culture 18(3): 361–379.

42.

İşleyen

(2019) Turkey’s governance of irregular migration at European Union borders: Emerging geographies of care and control. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(5): 849–866.

43.

Kuperblum

(2018) 15.000 Demandés de Régularisation de Sans-Papiers Reexaminées avec Critères Assouplis. Telquel.ma. Available at: https://telquel.ma/2018/03/28/15-000-demandes-de-regularisation-de-sans-papiers-reexaminees-avec-des-criteres-assouplis_1587406/?utm_source=tq&utm_medium=normal_post (accessed 5 April 2019).

44.

Lahlou

(2015) Morocco’s experience of migration as a sending, transit and receiving country. IAI Working Paper, No. 15, IAI, Roma.

45.

Leshem

(2017) Spaces of abandonment: Genealogies, lives and critical horizons. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35(4): 620–636.

46.

Little

Vaughan-Williams

(2017) Stopping boats, saving lives, securing subjects: Humanitarian borders in Europe and Australia. European Journal of International Relations 23(3): 533–556.

47.

McKittrick

(2013) Plantation futures. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17(3): 1–15.

48.

MCMREAM (2014) Practical Guide to Facilitate Your Integration in Morocco. Rabat: Moroccan Ministry in Charge of Moroccans Living Abroad and Migrant Affairs (MCMREAM).

49.

Mbembe

(2003) Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1): 11–40.

50.

Melamed

(2015) Racial capitalism. Critical Ethnic Studies 1(1): 76–85.

51.

Melamed

Reddy C (2019) Using liberal rights to enforce racial capitalism. SSRC Race & Capitalism Series, 30 July. Available at: https://items.ssrc.org/race-capitalism/using-liberal-rights-to-enforce-racial-capitalism/ (accessed 16 April 2020).

52.

MSF (2013) Violence, Vulnerability and Migration: Trapped at the Gates of Europe. Barcelona: Medecins sans Frontières.

53.

Natter

(2014) The formation of Morocco’s policy towards irregular migration (2000–2007). International Migration 52(5): 15–28.

54.

Nixon

(2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

55.

Paasi

(2009) Bounded spaces in a ‘borderless world’: Border studies, power and the anatomy of territory. Journal of Power 2(2): 213–234.

56.

Pallister-Wilkins

(2018) Hotspots and the geographies of humanitarianism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1–18. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775818754884

57.

Parker

Vaughn-Williams

(eds) (2016) Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the ‘Lines in the Sand’ Agenda. London: Routledge.

58.

Petitjean

Gilmore RW (2018) Prisons and class warfare: An interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Available at: www.versobooks.com/blogs/3954-prisons-and-class-warfare-an-interview-with-ruth-wilson-gilmore (accessed 1 October 2019).

59.

Piños

(2009) Building fortress Europe? Schengen and the Cases of Ceuta and Melilla. Centre for International Borders Research Working Paper. Belfast.

60.

Povinelli

(2011) Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

61.

Rancière

(1999) Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

62.

Roy

(2005) Urban informality. Journal of the American Planning Association 71(2): 147–158.

63.

Sanyal

(2017) A no-camp policy: Interrogating informal settlements in Lebanon. Geoforum 84: 117–125.

64.

Schmid

(2016) A stable part of the EU border regime. Die Tageszeitung, 12 December. Available at: https://taz.de/Migration-policy-in-Morocco/!5418057/ (accessed 1 October 2019).

65.

Scott

(1998) Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

66.

Scott

(2009) The Art of Not Being Governed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

67.

Statewatch (2019) Aid, border security, and EU-Morocco cooperation on migration control. November. Available at: www.statewatch.org (accessed 16 April 2020).

68.

Sundberg

(2008) ‘ Trash-Talk’ and the production of quotidian geopolitical boundaries in the USA – Mexico borderlands. Social & Cultural Geography 9(8): 871–890.

69.

Tazzioli

(2017) Containment through mobility: Migrants’ spatial disobediences and the reshaping of control through the hotspot system. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44(16): 2764–2779.

70.

Tazzioli

Garelli

(2018) Containment beyond detention: The hotspot system and disrupted migration movements across. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Epub ahead of print 19 February 2018. DOI: 10.1177/0263775818759335.

71.

Topak

(2014) The biopolitical border in practice: Surveillance and death at the Greece–Turkey borderzones. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(5): 815–833.

72.

Wacquant

(2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

73.

Walters

(2010) Foucault and frontiers: Notes on the birth of the humanitarian border. In: Bröckling

Krasmann

Lemke

(eds) Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges. New York: Routledge, pp.138–164.

74.

Williams

Massaro

(2017) On exterior and interior detention regimes: Governing, bordering, and economy in transit migration across Mexico. In: Conlon

Heimstra

(eds) Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention. London: Routledge, pp. 87-104.

75.

Wismayer

(2017) Grenfell was no ordinary accident. CityLab, August. Available at: www.citylab.com/equity/2017/08/grenfell-was-no-ordinary-accident/536907/ (accessed 10 February 2018).