Grace: What do you think about Sub-Saharan African refugees/migrants in Morocco?
Interviewee: Uhm, what do I think about it? I like it.
Grace: Yes, so I have been doing so much research about this subject looking at the forces that are pushing these individuals to leave their home places, looking at how the EU is funneling money into Morocco in order to give sub-Saharan migrants citizenship, and then the economic opportunity that sub-Saharans have while they are in Morocco, and how they face biases here. For example a sub-Saharan migrant might have the same work or educational background as a Moroccan worker, but not have any employment opportunities based on bias.
Interviewee: Yea, we don’t like when we face that in France, but we do it to other people.
Grace: Yes! And the third part of the journey, is Europe is paying for Morocco to keep these. Individuals here, but it is interesting because Moroccans want to go to Europe and dos not like when Europe does excluding migration policies but we see North Africa and Morocco doing the same thing to sub-Saharan migrants.
Interviewee: Yees I think a lot of the sub-Saharans that are here, they don’t want to stay here to begin with, it is like a passage to Europe. But they ended up staying. I think some of them it is because they found what they are looking for here, others do not travel because it is expensive.
Grace: Yes, so what do you think about the Moroccan government. Doing. These naturalization campaigns, giving all of these migrants citizenship?
Interviewee: Well, Morocco is trying to reconcile these relationships with Africa just like you said, so that kind of makes sense. But not everybody likes it. Because we already have our own problems, we are not a happy country. And now all of a sudden they are here and it feels like we are fixing other peoples problems. Also there are a lot of rumors about the king doing something to help people in Africa, something to help people somewhere in France. And people are like, why is he doing something to help people outside of Morocco? We need help here.
Grace: Yes it is difficult because he is doing it not only to please sub-Saharan Africa and rebuild economic ties and rejoin the EU, he is also doing it in order to please Europe.
Interviewee: Yes, so it is a win win. But when it comes to the society, how it views it, it is kind of like, what are these people doing here? Especially the ones that don’t have jobs, the homeless people, like we already have our homeless people, we don’t need more homeless people. And also what I’ve heard from my own entourage, not now but before maybe like when I was in high school, what people would say is that like we don’t have the same virtues, we don’t have the same values. They are less covered, their women are not covered, they should be covered, talk less loudly.
Grace: It is funny because it is the same everywhere. In the United States or Europe you have Muslim people migrating there and people will respond to a woman wearing a hijab by saying, they need to acclimate to our society, why are they bringing their culture here?”