Regularisation Policy and ‘Migration Projects’: The Case of Sub-Saharan Migrants in Morocco

Abstract

In September 2013, Morocco established a new migration policy based on a report produced by the National Human Rights Council (NHRC), which resulted in the regularization of some 25,000 irregular migrants, most of them from Sub-Saharan Africa and Syria. Based on 31 interviews conducted in 2015 with Sub-Saharan migrants living in Rabat (Morocco) at the time of the regularisation campaign, this paper employs the theoretical notion of migration projects to analyze whether regularisation acted as an incentive for Sub-Saharan migrants to modify their migration projects and consider Morocco as a desirable destination country. The paper concludes that the regularization initiatives did not have significant effects on the migratory projects of Sub-Saharan migrants. While migrants faced many obstacles and problems when trying to regularize their status, the regularization campaign failed to develop a comprehensive approach to address them.