Understanding Migration and Integration in the Global South: Morocco’s Migration and Integration Policy As a Case-Study

For the last three decades, scholars have been attentive to the growing presence of migrants in Morocco, though with an emphasis on the phenomenon as temporary and transitory. Research on migration flourished in along with the growing civil dynamics on the numerous challenges that migrants cope with in the country. Similarly, the various forms of social and cultural discriminatory practices towards migrants (predominantly from sub-Saharan Africa) alert us to the future of coexistence and diversity in the Moroccan context. While the political stand on the issue remained largely characterized by a management of migration and asylum as temporary and exceptional, scholars have particularly emphasized the changing patterns of migration to Morocco as a setting of long-term settlement. By 2013, the Moroccan state launched its first in history migration and asylum policy. Like many other settings in the Global South, Morocco was introduced to the governance of migration and diversity, as much as Moroccans were to the presence immigrants and refugees. While Morocco’s migration policy advocates ‘integration’ as its corner stone, its achievements and prospects remain unclear and bewildered, particularly in light of migrants’ (in)ability to culturally assert their presence in the public sphere.This paper seeks to review Morocco’s migration and integration policy, with an emphasis on the possible pathways for migrants’ cultural and social ‘integration’. Based on a critical review of the government reports published by between 2013 and 2024, we seek to underline the need to review the current policy so to consider cultural diversity as a main constituent of the country’s ‘integration’ policy. By the same token, this paper advocates the need for a Global-South-centered (academic and political) inquiry aiming at (re)defining ‘integration’, apart from existing frameworks, adapted to classical migration contexts of the Global North.