Fez as a locus of migration processes on the move: integration and mutation of citizenship

ABSTRACT

This article aims to define the main facets and challenges of undocumented migrants on the move in Fez city (Morocco) and their impact on neighbourhoods and on society at large. It seeks to measure the integration of sub-Saharan migrants in the host community through the metrics of their participation in economic and social activities in urban space and discusses the main hurdles impeding their integration. The data show that there is, on the one hand, a quite low degree of acceptance by the local population, which in general tolerates their presence although signs of discrimination and prejudice in certain neighbourhoods are observed. On the other hand, the sample shows that some sort of partial integration occurs through forms of micro-entrepreneurial activities and use of city services. Further, the article proposes the idea of rethinking the concept of citizenship in order to understand the new flows of migration. It shows that the concept of citizenship needs to be re-considered beyond the formal and legal dimension, in order to include informal dimensions for a more realistic rendering of the interaction between migrants and the city. Unlike Isin (2017. “Performative Citizenship.” In The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, edited by Ayelet Shachar, Rainer Bauböck, Irene Bloemraad, and Maarten Vink, 500–523. Oxford: Oxford University Press) and others who focus mainly on acts of citizenship as political, the article reveals that migrants perform their own acts of citizenship through social interaction, in line with Ong's (2007) theory of mutations of citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Sub-Saharan migration
• Fez
• integration
• informal citizenship
• city

Acknowledgements

We would like to warmly thank Fatima Sadiqi, Oussama Moussaoui (Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fez), Paola Solcà, Niccolò Cuppini (SUPSI), and Casey Poe (Tennessee University) for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this research. We are also grateful to anonymous reviewers from this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Source: https://www.populationdata.net/pays/maroc/ (accessed on Sep. 19, 2020).

2 See this report: https://www.hcp.ma/La-situation-de-la-population-active-en-chomage-en-2019_a2461.html (accessed on May 15, 2020).

3 Some migrants were purposefully expulsed from these cities to Casablanca and Béni-Mellal in central Morocco. Likewise Morocco has succeeded in extraditing an important number of undocumented migrants to their home land countries.

4 See this discussion between the Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane and the Tunisian historian Maha Abdelhamid on the theme of racism in the Maghreb: https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2019/05/12/en-afrique-du-nord-il-y-a-des-codes-sociaux-qui-excluent-les-noirs_5461175_3212.html (accessed on Aug. 11, 2019).

5 The urban citizenship standpoint started to be discussed more vigorously in the end of the 20th Century, when it was clear that the nation-state was not anymore adequate to collocate the concept of citizenship (Sassen 2002, 2005).

6 Today with the Coronavirus outbreak in March 2020, the situation of migrants has changed upside down. As a result of border closure and of curfews, they are facing a tougher time across the country and in all of Africa. See this relevant article: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-52645702 (accessed on May 17, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Swiss SERI grant Seed Money n. SM-2018-15 (through HES-SO Leading House) bilateral project “The city of Fès as a locus to investigate migration processes on the move”.