No exit

Attitudes to immigration change but pockets of hostility remain, while Europe tries to outsource its border controls.

Morocco is my new home; this is where I want to live”. Ever since Ali left Senegal to move to Rabat, where he works as a street peddler, he has had to face humiliation and insults on a daily basis. “A man was walking past me and he muttered something, then he sneered at me and threw the coffee he was drinking all over me. They refer to us blacks as ‘niggers’ because they view us as a lower form of human being, but my only reaction to these insults is to be patient and smile, which are the only weapons one can use if one is to live happily”, he said in an interview published on YouTube.

In recent years, Morocco has become a land where migrants settle down permanently as well as a transition country. This is because European borders are closed and anyone trying to reach Europe via Ceuta or Melilla is sent back. Morocco has started a campaign to regularise migrants, backed by the European Union. Almost 18,000 people have obtained documents that entitle them to work, rent a home and send their kids to school. As is the case of Aissatou, a young woman from Ghana, who journeyed on foot for a month with her five children before reaching Oujda in northeast Morocco, where she started building a future. Today, after four years, her sons are finally back in school. 

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