Abstract
Introduction
One afternoon a few summers ago, I was sitting with Maria, a Portuguese girl, in her house in the medina of the Moroccan capital Rabat. Suddenly, her flatmate Rocío, a Spanish journalist, broke into the house, nervous and frantic. ‘They have jumped, the migrants have jumped!’ That day, a group of migrants from West and Central Africa had jumped the fence dividing Morocco from the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Rocío was visibly annoyed. She had planned to take a long weekend off, but now she was stuck in Rabat, an article on the event due to her editor the following day. She sat down at her desk, took her phone and started making calls, trying to get hold of someone who could give her first-hand information about what had happened at the border.
Neither Maria nor Rocío were living a life compliant with domestic law requirements. The Moroccan Migration Act (Law 02-03) requires foreigners living in Morocco long term to apply for and obtain a residency permit. However, like many other Europeans in the country, Maria and Rocío did not have residency papers: they were simply going back and forth from Morocco to Europe every 90 days, to renew the entry stamp on their passport. Their working and living situations were not above suspicion either: both were working despite their administrative situation not allowing them to do so (with Maria being employed without a regular contract), and the house they were living in was rented informally.
What is striking about this scene is how it captures the different regimes of mobility and illegality that have cemented in contemporary Morocco: on the one hand, black migrant people from West and Central Africa, the protagonists of a border spectacle at the top of government agendas on both sides of the Mediterranean; on the other hand, white European migrants, living lives which are not really in compliance with the law either. Contrary to the ‘clandestines’ that were central to Rocío’s work, however, the two girls were living a quiet state of irregularity to which everyone seemed indifferent if not oblivious – neither them, nor the Moroccan state, and European policy-makers even less so.
In this article, I question the role that race plays in the making and unmaking of illegality in a context marked by border securitization. Critical migration scholars have called for a denaturalization of ‘illegality’, pointing to the role that migration policies and laws play in transforming migrants into criminal figures (De Genova, 2004; Menj;a,l & Kanstroom, 2014; Willen, 2007). Indeed, ‘illegality’ operates as an exclusionary category not only because it is constructed by law, but also because it is activated by racialized forms of prejudice which structure societies according to hierarchies of dangerousness, visibility and deservedness. Race thus channels border control only on
Scholars, however, have tended to examine the entanglement between race and illegality by focusing mostly on the experience of black and brown people, especially those coming from poor countries in the Global South (see Bachelet, 2018; de Noronha, 2019; Tyszler, 2019b). Very little attention has been paid to how white people with Global North passports deal with (and infringe) border control. This gap is problematic: gaining a deeper understanding of the racialization of border control requires us to analyse
In this article, I argue that illegality is a label which is racially altered and expanded by border bureaucrats, who use it to differentially police the presence of migrant bodies pre-emptively visualized as legal or illegal. I show that whereas border control leverages blackness to
I prove this point by studying how practices of border containment unequally affect migrant groups differently connected to structures of racial privilege and prejudice in Morocco. Empirically, I draw on field notes and reports compiled by organizations working in the field that I gathered between 2013 and 2019, and on 16 semi-structured interviews with migrants from Europe (6), West and Central Africa (6), North America (3) and one participant from an English-speaking country in the Global North (1) who did not wish to be identified any further. 1 All interviews have been anonymized, and certain details have been altered as appropriate to ensure the anonymity of research participants.
The argument is divided into five sections. I first situate the article within existing literature on illegality and outline the theoretical debates that inform my study. I then provide a succinct account of Moroccan legislation vis-a-vis irregular migration and contextualize recent legal developments within a broader context of border externalization. The following two empirical sections compare the policing of black and white ‘illegality’ in Morocco. In the conclusion, I discuss the significance of my findings for existing academic debates on border control policies.
Illegality, racialized law enforcement and the production of differential border regimes
In a seminal book, De Genova has called for the denaturalization of migrant ‘illegality’. Rather than being a pre-given status, ‘illegality’ is a condition constructed by law, which works to illegalize an established flux of mobility (De Genova, 2004; see also Menj;a,y & Kanstroom, 2014). Impressing the mark of illegality over an individual affects more than their juridical status. ‘Illegality’, in fact, is also ‘a sociopolitical condition’, and an element that ‘generates particular modes of being-in-the-world’ (Willen, 2007, p. 11). Illegalization thus produces a form of precarious, vulnerable living by pushing aliens to the margins of society, preventing them from accessing decent employment, welfare, safe access to public space, or living a life free of the encounter with border enforcement (De Genova, 2004; de Noronha, 2019; Sigona, 2012). In Morocco, the intensification of border control since the late 1990s has not only been marked by the increase of arrest and deportation campaigns, but also by the escalation of anti-black attitudes and discrimination towards foreigners singled out as ‘Sub-Saharan clandestine migrants’. Both researchers and civil society organizations have widely reported episodes of people being refused access to public transport, cabs, hammams (public baths), or even house rentals by virtue of their social ‘undesirability’ (Bachelet, 2018; Gross-Wyrtzen, 2020).
Illegality as a process does not evenly apply to all foreigners. In constructing the ‘irregular migrant’ as a deviant figure, border control leverages pre-existing racial prejudice defining who constitutes ‘the other’ within a certain national community, and which categories of foreigners need to be publicly portrayed as ‘undesirable’ (de Noronha, 2019; Garelli & Tazzioli, 2017). Colonialism, slavery, as well as the so-called wars ‘on Drugs’ and ‘on Terror’ all constitute racialized regimes of power whose legacies and presence contribute, alongside border control, to the marginalization of non-white communities singled out as undeserving (see M. Alexander, 2012; De Genova, 2017). The visualization of certain individuals as ‘black’ or ‘white’ is not stable, but intimately connected to the class status that the social groups they belong to occupy in defined historical periods. Italians, that now occupy a top tier position in terms of privilege of movement, were represented as dark-skinned, ignorant and deviant figures by US bureaucrats and in US popular culture during the time of Italian mass emigration at the turn of the twentieth century (Guglielmo, 2003; Jacobson, 1999). The interrelation between race and class also alters the boundaries of racial privilege and prejudice. In Morocco, a sharp discursive line is drawn between ‘irregular Sub-Saharan migrants’ (a label used to conceptualize black people from Western and Central Africa that migrate to North Africa and try to irregularly cross the border to Europe) and ‘the students’ (Western and Central African students moving to Morocco to study in higher education institutions, often in the framework of bilateral agreements) (I. Alexander, 2019). Students are not the obvious targets of harsh instruments of border policing, to the point that ‘pretending to be a student’ can be a tactic adopted by those targeted by migration control to increase their chances to navigate the border city free of the threat of encounter with the authority (Andersson, 2014). This does not of course mean that violence and racism are not deployed against those that are visualized as ‘students’: they are, but there is always a
The representation of black and brown people as quintessentially ‘illegal’ is fostered by what De Genova calls the ‘border spectacle’, or the reproduction of images or discourses that transform ‘illegality’ into an ahistorical and naturalized condition (De Genova, 2013). Rocío, whose story I started this article with, was herself enmeshed in the business of feeding a border spectacle that naturalizes illegality as a ‘Sub-Saharan’ experience, and that displaces attention away from her own irregular, albeit unnewsworthy, administrative situation. As border control fundamentally builds on an act of racial profiling, it is very unevenly experienced by people that are not singled out as suspicious – because they have the ‘right’ passport, or because they display markers that associate them with the ‘right’ class and racial background (Ahmed, 1999). Quite telling of the uneven consequences of border control is the fact that the scholarly debate about the entanglement between whiteness and migration has developed as a completely different academic conversation, that is only tangentially concerned with the reverberations of migration control into people’s everyday life.
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Scholarship on lifestyle migrations, residential tourism and ‘expatriation’ has rather focused on how global structures of colour and privilege reflect in both the production and representation of white mobility (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009; Croucher, 2012). Whiteness, in fact, constitutes a form of ‘capital’, insofar as it gives access to resources, spaces and opportunities that are generally accessible only to other white people, sometimes independently of an individual’s own existing assets. Far from being an element which systematically attracts the attention of security mechanisms, whiteness constitutes an asset of its own, that white migrants can mobilize to transform migration into a successful opportunity for social and economic mobility (Benson, 2015). Sara Ahmed talks about whiteness as an ‘orientation’, a disposition to apprehend things in a systemically racialized fashion which is historically and structurally given:
What comes into view, or what is within our horizon, is not a matter of what we find here or there, or even where we find ourselves, as we move here, or there. What is reachable is determined precisely by orientations we have already taken. Or we could say that orientations are about the directions we take that put some things and not others in our reach. (Ahmed, 2007, p. 152)
Apprehending whiteness as an ‘orientation’ therefore means understanding the world as a space colonially structured to be white, where ‘to be white’ is a given and not to be thought of. Whiteness therefore often goes unnoticed, unremarked, as it is a category that is ‘made invisible through privilege’ (Ahmed, 2007, p. 149). The fact that we do not notice whiteness, or that we consider certain categories – like the ‘illegal migrant’ – as inherently not-white is the product of an iterative habit of migration policy-makers of reshaping those categories around non-white bodies: legality and mobility are inherently perceived to be a white privilege, and non-legality is inherently perceived as non-white. As Ahmed continues, ‘after all, institutions provide collective or public spaces. When we describe institutions as “being” white (institutional whiteness), we are pointing to how institutional spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather, and cohere to form the edges of such spaces’ (Ahmed, 2007, p. 157). As white bodies have historically been conceived as the natural inhabitants of a certain institution, whiteness has become unexceptional, and, in a way, expected. In these contexts, blackness always comes as a surprise, as an out-of-place presence, as these institutions remain white also when inhabited by non-whites (Anderson, 2015). Black and brown communities are disproportionately more likely to be targeted by stop-and-search police practices, because their members are pre-emptively singled out as ‘suspicious’ – their non-whiteness is interpreted as a marker of criminal and deviant behaviour, as they ‘might’ always have done something wrong (Flacks, 2018). This happens because racism pushes decision-makers to interpret facts and evidence concerning black people ‘within a racially saturated field of visibility’ (Butler, 1993, p. 15), thus charging them with feelings of threat and fear towards people that are perennially constructed as ‘outsiders’, regardless of what they have
Illegality, law on the books and migration politics in Morocco
The legal text currently regulating immigration and emigration in Morocco is Law 02-03 relating to the entry and stay of foreigners. The law requires foreigners wanting to reside in Morocco to apply for: (1) a
Although the law
Future illegality, however, is not a condition that border bureaucrats can verify by examining one’s travel documents. Diplomatic concerns, declined along racial lines, thus inform the profiling efforts of state bureaucrats vis-a-vis who is likely to constitute an ‘actual’ or ‘potential’ irregular migrant. Given that the irregular immigration of non-Europeans has been the main source of concerns of European policy-makers, Maghrebi migration laws politically aim at containing three specific migrant groups: country nationals, nationals of other Maghrebi countries and nationals of West and Central African countries (Jiménez Álvarez, 2011, pp. 140–141). Moroccan authorities, however, have further restricted the public discourse on ‘illegality’ as the question of ‘Sub-Saharan irregular migration’, so as to eclipse the fact that Moroccans were also crossing irregularly (Natter, 2014, p. 22). European migrants were never really conceived as the political target of Law 02-03, because the policy primarily aims to police those who are suspected to be willing to irregularly cross the border to Europe (Khrouz, 2016). In Moroccan public discourse, referring to ‘irregular migration’ systematically evokes the figure of the black ‘Sub-Saharan’ clandestine migrant.
Describing irregularity, or immigration
Racial entanglements in the (un)making of illegality
The diplomatic entanglements and domestic redirections of Moroccan migration policy foster a political climate where ‘illegality’ is produced through racial profiling. The pressure of European security on Morocco’s migration policy transforms blackness into a marker of illegality, transferred from the North to the South through a presumption of ‘transit’ – a presumption that being black means being eager to move North irregularly, and thus being deserving of surveillance and policing, in spite of the laws on the books (Collyer et al., 2012; Khrouz, 2016). The racial prejudice produced by migration control overlaps with a pre-existing colour bias structuring Moroccan history. Morocco was deeply embedded in the trans-Saharan slave trade, which determined the forcible displacement of enslaved populations from the bilad-al-Sudan to Morocco from as early as the ninth century (Becker, 2002). The institution of slavery was never officially abolished as such (Ennaji, 1999), and its practice continued until the 1950s. However, a series of reforms introduced during the latter period of the Sherifian empire and during the French protectorate slowly led to the disappearance of slavery as an institution (El Hamel, 2012; Ennaji, 1999). The afterlife of slavery however still resurfaces and durably structures Moroccan society along racial prejudice – amongst others, in the form of tensions over land disputes in the Southern Oasis between ‘indigenous’ Moroccans and descendants of enslaved people (Becker, 2002; Gross-Wyrtzen, 2019); of references to slavery in everyday forms of discrimination expressed through racial slurs (Menin, 2016); of competition over low-paid jobs between poor Moroccans and West African migrants; or of mundane references to whiteness as a beauty ideal (I. Alexander, 2019).
The construction of blackness as otherness was accompanied by other formal and informal processes of social engineering that further racialized the social segmentation of Moroccan society. As part of its strategy to ‘pacify’ dissident areas (
Racial prejudice and privilege towards foreigners in the Alaouite Kingdom overlap with the thorny question of Morocco’s own self-positioning in the global colour line. The country’s migration diplomacy is emblematic of a dual, at times conflicting strategy where an historical tendency to build connections and access to the European political space has most recently been complemented by an effort to capitalize on Morocco’s African identity and ties to its Western and Central African neighbours (Cherti & Collyer, 2015; El Qadim, 2015). As Gross Wyrtzen highlights, however, the channelling of border control on ‘Sub-Saharan migrants’ and the strategic displacement of attention away from Moroccan irregular migration has clearly served as a political expedient for Morocco to place itself ‘on the winning side of global capital and of the globalizing racial hierarchy’, and to ‘access “honorary whiteness” or at least, non-blackness’ (Gross-Wyrtzen, 2019, pp. 49–50).
Whiteness, or the unpoliced migrant body
In the introduction, I mentioned that both Maria and Rocío were living and working in Morocco without a regular residency permit. The absence of residency papers, however, did not seem to constitute a disadvantage to their professional lives, and they did not express any urgency to obtain them any time soon. Although the ease with which they sidestepped Moroccan migration law surprised me at first, during my fieldtrips I realized that many other people were eschewing the residency permit. Myriam, a German student, spent a year in the country for her research. When I asked her why she had not thought about applying for a residency permit given that she was due to stay in Morocco for almost a year, she answered that the procedure would have been too complicated (interview with Myriam, June 2019). Leila is a French professional who spent four consecutive years in Morocco as part of her higher education. She enrolled in and attended university without a residency permit, going back and forth to Europe every three months. She had been advised to do this by the Moroccan university itself, as the procedure to obtain a residency permit was too lengthy (interview with Leila, June 2019). Mirko, an Italian student, went further: he arrived in Rabat in September on an exchange programme, then booked his flight back for Christmas in mid-December, 91 days after his entry to the country. He realized the mistake a few days before taking the flight, but decided to leave things as they were and take the plane on the 91st day of his stay in Morocco. His slip almost went unnoticed at the airport:
[. . .] I arrived at the airport at the 91st day and to say the truth at the beginning nobody told me anything . . . so all the checks that you know as well at the airport of Rabat-Salé I went on, and on, and on, and at the last check the lady who checked my passport [she noticed that] I was at the 91st day but at that point it is not that . . . she drew my attention to it, but I pretended I had not realized before and it ended there.
So, it was not even the policemen that stamped [your passport at the border post] . . .
No no, everything went well until the last step . . . I do not know if you remember the 15 useless checks to pretend we are all safe [laughs], everything was OK until the last one . . . really at the customs . . . that super small office . . . she takes my passport and sees that I had entered Morocco early September [. . .] and she tells me ‘look, it has been 91 days’, she looked at me and she was a bit annoyed.
[. . .]
Did you fear something would happen to you at the airport?
I thought about it, but not even too much . . . I was wrong obviously, but I did not worry. (Interview with Mirko, June 2019)
Despite the fact that the media are completely dominated by the spectacle of ‘Sub-Saharan’ migration, the white, Global North interviewees from my sample did engage in irregular migration practices. However, the interaction of my interviewees with the border is an act that does not seem to be particularly newsworthy. Due to their privileged position, Leila, Myriam, Maria, Mirko and Rocío – and the institutions that revolve around them – can
White privilege is also an orientation insofar as the awareness of being above the law is a factor that translates breaking the rules into perceived low-risk behaviour. The disadvantages produced by an uncompliant administrative situation are so negligible that living irregularly is considered preferable to the hurdle of regularizing one’s situation. The student office told Leila not to bother with the residency permit, knowing that nothing would happen to her if she stayed on a travel document that would technically not allow her to study. Mirko deliberately decided to engage in actions that are clearly prohibited by law, even when the possibility to avoid them are at hand. Once he realized he had overstayed his 90 days, Mirko did not feel particularly at risk: he had the possibility to ‘fix’ his administrative position by rushing to Ceuta and getting another stamp on his passport, but considered studying as a more pressing priority.
That white bodies ‘trail behind’ residency requirements does not mean that whiteness completely unmakes border control. In a communique released for the announcement of the first regularization campaign in 2013, the King exhorted European migrants to regularize their situation ‘for residency and for the activities that they conduct, in the same way as regular immigrants of other nationalities, like Sub-Saharan immigrants’ (Yabiladi.com, 2013, translation mine). Although all the interviewees agreed that living without a residency permit had not really made a difference to their lives, three of them mentioned instances where circumventing or breaching migration law had led to stressful consequences. Leila’s coming and going from Morocco to Europe, for example, was at some point noticed by the border police:
At the airport nobody ever told me anything, besides enquiring about why I had an Arab name . . . once I went on a trip to Tangier and I took the chance to go to Ceuta and renew the stamp on my passport and the [Moroccan] policeman told me it was not possible to get in [to Ceuta] and get out [to Morocco] like that [in the same day], so there he played a bit bad cop.
But then he let you out?
Of course . . . however, my flatmate once got stuck for a couple of days in Melilla, [. . .] they made her go back to Melilla and told her not to come back until the evening after. (Interview with Leila, June 2019)
Leila’s identity does not always neatly fit in the categories utilized by border bureaucrats to screen border crossers: her passport, her surname, her appearance make her look ‘European’, but her first name is singled out as contradicting her ‘Europeanness’. This makes the border officer waver about what to do about Leila’s case. It seems, however, that the racial and administrative markers that Leila displays are enough to subdue the decision-makers’ hesitation about the genuine character of her ‘European’ identity. At the border with Ceuta, the Moroccan policeman anticipates the intention of Leila to use the trip to the enclave to ‘fix’ her administrative position, and he tries to pressure her to do otherwise. In the case of her flatmate, the obstruction is more severe, and translates into a ban from re-entering the country for 24 hours. These sovereign gestures, however, end up being performative: both Leila and her flatmate are finally allowed to go back to the city where they live, where they resume their lives as they were before – living as tourists.
Overstaying the 90-day limit allowed to tourists is an infringement of migration law that can cause more serious consequences. Julia is a North American national who had been living, studying and then working in Morocco as a tourist for three years at the time of interview. A few months prior to our meeting, she realized that she had overstayed her 90 days by a week, so she rushed to Ceuta, but the border patrol prevented her from exiting the country. She went to the Foreigners’ Office in the city where she was living, accompanied by someone loosely connected with her employer and well connected with the local authorities. She explained her situation, and the office gave her a list of documents to bring the next day, together with proof of imminent travel out of Morocco. She did just that, the civil servant at the office checked it and told her to make sure she boarded the flight, and she did not encounter any problem upon exiting and coming back to Morocco via the airport (interview with Julia, June 2019).
Diane’s case testifies to a more stressful administrative incident. Diane is from an English-speaking country in the Global North, and had also been living in Morocco for three years at the time of interview. After one and a half years in Morocco, she obtained a residency permit for work. A few months before the expiry date of her residency permit, Diane moved to another firm, and her new employer did not provide her with the necessary documents to renew her papers in time. Diane travelled to Ceuta on the day her residency permit was due to expire, in order to get a new stamp on her passport and ‘become a tourist again’. Three months later, she travelled to Ceuta again, but the police did not allow her to cross the border, stating that she had overstayed her residency card by three months. Following the advice of another friend, she booked a return flight to get out of the country, and then went to the police station to sort out her administrative situation. The police asked her to sign a document written in Arabic (a language Diane does not speak) stating that a judgement would be made about her situation. After questioning her about why she had overstayed her residency permit, the police made her promise she would renew it as soon as she got back, and assured her they would call the border police to make sure she would be allowed to travel out of the country. Diane managed to travel out of the country, and then continued to live and work in Morocco as a tourist after that. At the time of the interview, she was actively trying to obtain another residency permit (interview with Diane, June 2019). Julia and Diane’s cases show that more blatant infringements of migration law are not ignored by Moroccan authorities. The police, however, seem to apply a certain degree of discretion, insofar as none of the measures foreseen by Law 02-03 (fines and detention) is invoked to punish them for their offence. Beside some stressful days and a few trips to the police station to sort out their situation, none of the people interviewed experienced abusive behaviours or had seen their capacity to reside and work in Morocco limited by border control. Diane and Julia, like the rest of the interviewees, simply went back to live and work in Morocco (as tourists) as before.
The white migrants with Global North passports interviewed as part of this research engage in irregular migration practices, either by practising activities that would not be allowed by their residency status, or by overstaying their travel documents. These irregularities, however, are not policed in such a way to make a significant difference to their everyday lives. Although overstaying the 90-day limit imposed on tourists can cause some administrative trouble, irregularity is such an uneventful experience that it is often preferred to the possibility of regularizing one’s administrative position.
Blackness, or the presumption of irregular mobility
As mentioned earlier, since the early 2000s Moroccan authorities have implemented their migration policy through a variety of informal practices of deterrence vis-a-vis ‘transit’ migrants. One such practice consisted of conducting massive and arbitrary arrests of migrant people in large Moroccan cities, especially in border areas. Detainees would be forced onto buses, and deported to the desert at the border with Algeria (Gross-Wyrtzen, 2019). After the announcement of the new migration policy in 2013, the police ceased deportations to the desert, and replaced them with forced displacements within the Moroccan territory, mainly from the north (Nador and, to a lesser extent, Tangier) to the cities in the south of the country. In summer 2018, however, arrest campaigns escalated in size, with Moroccan police arresting migrant people in Rabat and Casablanca as well. These arrest campaigns took place after a (modest) increase in migrants’ arrivals on Spanish shores, which pushed Spanish authorities to demand Moroccan authorities to increase border patrol at the northern borders. According to an estimate by the NGO GADEM, between July and September 2018 around 6500 people were displaced (GADEM, 2018).
Extensive arrest campaigns and internal displacements have been publicly framed as part of an anti-irregular migration rationale. Moroccan authorities publicly justify these displacements as operations to ‘fight against human-trafficking networks’ and to ‘move migrants towards cities where life conditions are better’ (Bentaleb, 2018), and Moroccan media summarized the events of the summer 2018 as operations targeting ‘irregular migrants’ (Lemaizi, 2018). The arrests, however, did not exclusively target people in an irregular administrative position (GADEM, 2018). People with regular residency papers were also caught in the crackdown. An Ivorian national interviewed by the NGO GADEM reported:
There were people with a residency permit [. . .] Then another one, an Ivorian, his wife and his children. He has a residency permit, he works in Tangier with his residency permit, they displaced him. When he arrived to the police station, he showed his residency permit and they told him ‘Ah, my dear, the residency permit, it does not mean anything’. (GADEM, 2018, p. 36)
In August 2018, the Moroccan police arrested Aissatou Barry, a Guinean woman regularly residing in Mesnana, a low income neighbourhood of Tangier. She declared to the Moroccan press that ‘at 6 in the morning, the caïd [local representative of the Ministry of Interior] of Mesnana arrived at my place. Without showing me any document, he arrested me, my children and the members of my family that were there with me.’ To her questions about why she and her children were being arrested, the caïd answered that ‘he received the order from the wali [governor] of Tangiers to expel all the Blacks of the neighbourhood’ (Lemaizi, 2018, translation mine).
Arbitrary arrest also targeted people recognized by the UNHCR as refugees or asylum-seekers, and therefore in possession of papers proving their right to international protection. Éric, a Malian refugee, told me in an interview that he had also been stopped by the police in Rabat and accused of being an undocumented migrant. He managed to show his papers to the police, who left him on the street while taking his papers away with them. Once he arrived at the police station to try and take his papers back, he was held in the police station and forced to get on a bus to the south of Morocco despite the intervention of a UNCHR lawyer. Shortly after starting the journey, the policemen on the bus received a call and ordered the people ‘avec les papiers de l’exil’ [with the exile papers] to get off. Éric and two asylum-seekers were allowed to go, while all the others were kept on the bus. Arrests of asylum-seekers do not seem to be anecdotal. During fieldwork in a big Moroccan urban centre in the summer of 2019, I visited one of the NGOs partnering with the UNHCR. Crossing the doorstep, I saw a notice attached to the door declaring ‘in case of arrest of refugees or asylum seekers, please call [number]’ (field notes, June 2019).
The most paradoxical case that has come to my attention, however, has been that of Maurice, a young black man born and raised in North America. Living in a central neighbourhood of the capital Rabat as a tourist, Maurice was arrested by two policemen in plain clothes near to his house, while on his way to buy food from the shop down the road. Despite having shown his driving licence (which stated his place of origin), he was taken to the police station, fingerprinted, and repeatedly questioned about ‘his real origin’. He was then obliged to get on a bus with another 20 or so people, all black and from different African countries. Not informed about his destination, he was then left a few hours later in a city in southern Morocco. Luckily enough, the bus left Maurice and the other detainees at the bus station, where those who had money were able to take another bus back to Rabat.
During the interview debriefing, Maurice made a punchy reflection: ‘I sometimes wonder . . . do I have a police record here now? I mean, they took my fingerprints . . . but if I have one, which crime have they written down? Blackness?’ (interview with Maurice, June 2019). Indeed, the arrest wave caught people sharing only one common feature: their skin colour (GADEM, 2018). While white privilege and geopolitical indifference make white illegality go unnoticed, blackness is politically constructed as an inherent presumption of illegality. One’s actual administrative status or right to protection
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count little when state officers have received the order to ‘expel all the Blacks of the neighbourhood’ in order to comply with border control imperatives (Lemaizi, 2018). In the case of Maurice, the racial profiling rationale that undergirds the practice of border control prevails on the actual freedom of movement guaranteed by his Global North passport. Maurice’s blackness, in fact, unmakes his ‘North Americanness’ in the eyes of Moroccan border guards, who seem to apprehend his citizenship – and the rights and privileges associated to it – as
Being aware that their skin colour could attract the attention of police forces has pervasive implications for the everyday lives of people racialized as black. Léonel, a Cameroonian man that I interviewed with Maria Hagan in 2019, was forcefully displaced from Tangier to Agadir (Gazzotti & Hagan, 2020). The fear of being arrested, however, had led him to start self-policing his behaviour in public spaces in Tangier well before being caught in the arrest waves:
In Tangiers you mustn’t . . . walk in public too much. It’s a bit difficult to walk in public space. Because if you walk in the street and the police sees you – you’re done for. In Tangiers, migrants live hidden. Some people live in the forest – I lived in the forest with some friends of mine. [There were] a lot of us, you cannot even imagine. (Interview with Léonel, Agadir, July 2019)
Éric, who by the time of the interview had lived for eight years in Morocco, pointed out that the cumulative abuses that he and his community had experienced had consumed him:
I don’t give value to what I have anymore, since I have been in Morocco I take everything that happens to me like this. Of course this has an impact on my professional activities, and even on my willingness to go out [of my house]. I have friends that were taken in the raids, even the [UNHCR] lawyer was demoralized because he had to go and take the people [from the police station] every day.
The shift in behaviour that Léonel had felt compelled to adopt to keep himself safe(r) and the feeling of hopelessness voiced by Éric embody what Gross-Wyrtzen defines as the transformation of containment into ‘a way of life’, where migrants, ‘marked as racialized outsiders [. . .] move through the city as bordered subjects, pushed to the margins of urban life even as they occupy spaces in the heart of the city’ (Gross-Wyrtzen, 2020, p. 895). In a political context where the black body is systematically profiled as embodying the potential of irregular border crossing, the notion of illegality loses any anchoring to formal law (it is not tied to the absence of formal identification or of a regular residency or travel document) (Khrouz, 2016) and is then translated on the ground through spectacular practices that evade any sense of lawfulness. The awareness of carrying the border on them transforms everyday life into a bordered existence, where the fear of police abuse is omnipresent, access to services and public spaces is restricted or self-restricted, and sense of self-worth is altered. Illegality thus become a suffocating ‘mode of being-in-the-world’ (Willen, 2007, p. 11) – one where one’s horizons are arbitrarily restricted, and life could take sinister twists at any point in time.
Conclusion
This article has questioned the role of race in the production of migrants’ illegality in a context marked by pervasive border control. Through a comparison of the policing of migrants in Morocco of European, West and Central African and North American origin, I have argued that an analysis of the racialized nature of border control requires us to investigate the role that
Through an analysis of differential regimes of border policing, this article contributes to a body of work that explores ‘illegality’ as a politically, racially constructed category, and its embodied effects on foreigners’ everyday lives. In particular, I stressed the need to pay attention to both racial