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.

Contemporary Urban Space Philosophy in China Using Lightweight Deep Learning Model-Under Ecological Ethics

“…The parameters of the image characteristic extraction model is adjusted by the errors. Compared with traditional image analysis technology, it is more comprehensive and reliable [ 31 ].…”

(Un)making illegality: Border control, racialized bodies and differential regimes of illegality in Morocco

“…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).…”

“….] 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.…”

Book Review: The Outside: Migration as Life in Morocco

“…The focus on the perspective and experience of people who live their lives in the shadow, in the waiting, in the incipient realization of migration makes The Outside a book that is quite unique in its genre. Elliot's work provides an amazing complementary reading to the extensive literature on the lives of people on the move (Gross-Wyrtzen 2020), on the human effects of border control (Jusionyte 2018), and on the transformations that migration produces in destination regions (Alexander et al 2020).The Outside is composed of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. The different chapters explore how the immanence of migration affects the everyday life of origin communities: how it paces the course of day, of the summer, of the year (Chapter 1); how it reshapes family relationships and gendered economies of value (Chapter 2 and 5); and how it creates forms of productive aspiration across unmarried women and their families (Chapter 4).…”

“…The focus on the perspective and experience of people who live their lives in the shadow, in the waiting, in the incipient realization of migration makes The Outside a book that is quite unique in its genre. Elliot's work provides an amazing complementary reading to the extensive literature on the lives of people on the move (Gross-Wyrtzen 2020), on the human effects of border control (Jusionyte 2018), and on the transformations that migration produces in destination regions (Alexander et al 2020).…”