Abstract
Inka Stock, in Time, Migration and Forced Immobility: Sub-Saharan African Migrants in Morocco, has provided a valuable contribution to our understanding of the conditions under which sub-Saharan migrants reside in Morocco. What is important about her work (which is the result of more than 10 years of field research) is that it underscores that despite widely held assumptions about where sub-Saharan migrants are heading, more often than not, they settle in North Africa, rather than embark upon a journey to Europe. In Morocco, these migrants face precarious conditions because as residents who are not Moroccan citizens, they live on the margins of society, often residing in substandard housing and living without access to social or governmental services given to Moroccan citizens as rights.
In broad terms, Stock’s book argues that sub-Saharan migrants residing in Morocco experience life in suspended animation. They are substantially bereft of political and civil rights, often struggle to assert agency about their future and, in the midst of adversity, vacillate between disillusion and somewhat frustrated activism. There is much to praise about Stock’s analysis of time, the deprivation of migrant rights, and fundamental questions concerning the meaning of existence — three topics that are not always present in studies of migration. To start, one of the more novel aspects of her approach is her discussion of how time is elongated or suspended for migrants who do not know whether they are going to Europe, returning home, or residing long term in Morocco without rights. These people are in suspended animation, hoping for a better future but feeling a lack of agency as to whether they can transform their present or futures. The overriding theme within this book’s narrative is of migrants hoping for a better future but not knowing whether it will ever be realized or by whom.
Besides her analysis of time and its elongation, Stock engages in a trenchant analysis of both European Union (EU) and Moroccan policy regarding migration. While EU policy has been substantially successful in suppressing migration to Europe, Stock claims that this policy objective has been attained without taking responsibility for its consequences in Morocco. Simply put, those migrants who have been turned away from Europe have created new communities in Morocco. Few choose to return to their home countries, and those who remain in Morocco lack Moroccan citizenship and, thus, cannot access governmental services. More importantly, their children, if they are residing with these migrants, do not have access to education. Living on the margins of society, thus, becomes a perpetual condition that is unjust.
Living without Moroccan citizenship has material and psychological consequences. For males, most available work is either poorly compensated, episodic day laboring, or begging. For females, options are most often providing childcare or home-cleaning services or, for a minority, prostitution. In these ways, life’s daily precarity weighs on everyone. Everyone survives, but barely. These economic conditions can also lead to a severe case of anomie, precipitating a desultory or depressed perspective about the future.
What is interesting in Stock’s analysis is that even in these adverse circumstances, migrants band together in networks to survive. Migrants from Anglophone countries (notably, Nigeria and Ghana) have created communities based in Pentecostal Christianity wherein they provide mutual support. Migrants from Francophone countries seek succor in either the Catholic Church or Pentecostal communities. Many migrants participate in NGOs that provide relief to the migrant community. This tale is, thus, one of aspiration and desperation, of adversity and recovery.
What further makes Stock’s book an important contribution to the migration literature is that it is the result of more than 10 years of field research involving approximately 40 subjects that she interviewed and observed over a long period of time. Stock’s research reveals that sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco are making new lives and communities, sometimes remaining quiet and sometimes being activist, all the while reforming what it means to be Moroccan — and human.