On the morning of 9 September 2016, a large crowd gathered at the convention centre of Hay Riad, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods of the Moroccan capital Rabat. All those who mattered in the migration world were there: Moroccan high-ranking civil servants, European diplomats, representatives from international, Moroccan, and migrant non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and of course, officers of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The occasion was a conference marking the third anniversary of Morocco’s new migration policy. Launched by King Mohammed VI in 2013, the policy reform aspired to put human rights and integration at the centre of Morocco’s border management strategy. In November 2013, Moroccan authorities announced a campaign to regularise undocumented foreigners. In December 2014, the government adopted a National Strategy for Immigration and Asylum (SNIA, in the French acronym), which aimed at providing Morocco with the legal and institutional infrastructure to integrate migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (Reference 209Benjelloun, Alioua and FerriéBenjelloun 2017b).

Officially, the new migration policy marked a turning point in the history of migration politics in Morocco, and in the Western Mediterranean more broadly. The announcement made by Mohammed VI in 2013 followed a decade of dire treatment of black migrant people in the country. Violence at the border had caused public outcry from the part of local and international civil society organisations and raised concerns within the National Council for Human Rights (CNDH, in the French acronym). The new migration policy promised to mark a break with this dark past, paving the way for a ‘humane’ approach to migration regulation (Reference Gross-WyrtzenGross-Wyrtzen 2020b). The announcement of such a reform had been publicly welcomed by the international community. The SNIA, in fact, perfectly suited the border control interests of the European Union (EU) and its member states, which had long tried to obtain a more significant cooperation among ‘transit’ countries in the control of the Western Mediterranean migratory route connecting Western and Central Africa to Western Europe. Already in 2015, the EU had manifested its support by granting Morocco a €10 million aid budget aimed at facilitating the implementation of the new migration policy (EU Delegation in Rabat 2016). Other donors had followed suit (see Chapter 1). At the time of the conference, the United Nations (UN) system in Morocco was lobbying donors to fund a $13 million joint initiative in the field of migration and asylum (Kingdom of Morocco and United Nations in Morocco 2016; Nations Unies Maroc 2016). By 2016, aid-funded projects sponsoring the integration of ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ were proliferating around the country, as the entire aid industry embarked on the mission of supporting Morocco in becoming a model of integration in North Africa (Reference TyszlerTyszler 2019).

The morning of the event, I arrived at the convention centre with two other participants and headed to the registration desk. The atmosphere was very cheerful, and security extremely relaxed. When the ceremony started, various high-ranking Moroccan civil servants from the (then) Ministry in charge of Moroccans Residing Abroad and of Migration Affairs (MCMREAM),Footnote ¹ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Ministry of Interior came forward to illustrate Morocco’s achievements in the previous three years, its commitment to being an international pioneer in the implementation of a ‘humane’ approach to the regulation of migration, and the challenges that persisted along the way. “We should not forget that Morocco is a developing country, a poor country”, one of the speakers mentioned, to emphasise the magnitude of the effort that Morocco was engaging in. Invited to talk on the stage, both the head of the IOM mission, Ana Fonseca, and the then representative of the UNHCR, Jean-Paul Cavalieri, profusely congratulated Moroccan authorities for their pioneering commitment in reforming the country’s migration policy, encouraging them to persist.

The optimistic atmosphere at the convention centre in Hay Riad reflected the hopes of the international community vis-à-vis the transition that Morocco had embarked upon. But this cheerful image had its blind spots. On several occasions during the ceremony, sceptical participants raised their eyebrows at the sugar-coated image of the country’s integration policies depicted by the speakers. It was no secret that, despite the publicised commitment to engage in the ‘humane’ treatment of foreigners, the implementation of several substantial integration and legislative measures promised by the Moroccan state was languishing. The treatment of migrants at the border was still dire, with the police regularly raiding migrant camps close to the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, and displacing dwellers to the interior cities of the country. Critical civil society organisations had interpreted the contradictory behaviour of Moroccan authorities as the symptom of an “undecided” migration policy – humanitarian on paper, militarised in practice (FIDH and GADEM 2015). Representatives of IOs, however, maintained a more cautious discourse. In interviews published on 16 September 2016 by the Moroccan newspaper TelQuel, both Ana Fonseca, at the IOM, and Jean-Paul Cavalieri, at the UNHCR, declined to comment on a question about violence against migrants. Ana Fonseca specified that she was unable to comment because she had “no information on forced displacements and violence at the border.” She then added that “every country has its own way to treat irregular migration but it is important to respect human rights” (TelQuel 2016, translation by author).

The sugar-coated picture portrayed by the ceremony definitely faded on 4 October 2016, when the National Platform for Migrants’ Protection (PNPM, in the French acronym) published a press release denouncing the fact that Moroccan authorities had unleashed a new wave of violence against migrants attempting to cross the border with the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. According to the PNPM, on 10 September 2016 around 100 migrant people, including 20 minors, had been arrested, several had been injured, and many displaced to the South of the country. Despite not being an isolated episode, this arrest campaign was particularly sinister and paradoxical, because it had taken place the day after the ceremony for the Third Anniversary of Morocco’s new, ‘humane’ migration policy. “This event […] casts a dark shadow on the outcome of the new Moroccan migration policy” the PNPM stated. “The National Platform for Migrants’ Rights […] denounces this securitarian violence, that tramples human dignity in the name of the protection of the borders of the European Union” (PNPM 2016, translation by author).

Bordering the World through Aid

Over the past forty years, countries in the Global North have increasingly restricted their migration policies to reduce the arrival of migrants, mainly from less well-off countries in the South. The appetite of Northern states to deter, capture, and remove undesired foreigners from their territory has determined a proliferation of migration control instruments. These now include tools ranging from restrictive migration laws to border fences and immigration removal centres (Reference FitzGeraldFitzGerald 2019). The sophistication of containment has coincided with the expansion of the border beyond its geographically fixed location. Countries in the North have thus tried to externaliseFootnote ² and outsource their borders to states in the South by invoking principles of shared responsibility over the control of migration flows (Reference PastorePastore 2019). They have thus engaged in multilateral and bilateral negotiations to push countries of so-called origin and transit to police the mobility of their own citizens, and of non-nationals suspected to head towards wealthier destinations (Reference El QadimEl Qadim 2015; Reference Khrouz and LanzaKhrouz 2016b). The expansion of the border has also coincided with the outsourcing of migration control measures to non-state actors, including corporations, NGOs, IOs, and even private citizens (Reference Lahav, Guiraudon, Andreas and SnyderLahav and Guiraudon 2000). In migration control, as in anti-terrorism policies (Reference AbbasAbbas 2019; Reference Heath-Kelly and StrauszHeath-Kelly and Strausz 2019), the co-optation of non-traditional security actors has allowed surveillance to infiltrate sectors such as healthcare, education, and development cooperation, expanding the reach of the border not only away from the physical edges of the state but also away from the national security apparatus (see Reference Cassidy, Paasi, Prokkola, Saarinen and ZimmerbauerCassidy 2018; Reference Strasser and TibetStrasser and Tibet 2020). Development aidFootnote ³ has thus become a central tool in the migration control strategy pursued by European countries, Australia (Reference WatkinsWatkins 2017b), and the United States (Reference WilliamsWilliams 2019). Donors, IOs, and NGOs have also become prominent actors in the regulation of international mobility due to their capacity to operate transnationally and implement development and humanitarian projects on the ‘management’ and ‘prevention’ of migration along migration routes (Reference Geiger and PécoudGeiger and Pécoud 2010).

How does migration control work beyond the spectacle of border violence? This book analyses aid as an instrument of migration containment, and the involvement of non-state actors, such as NGOs and IOs, in the expansion of the border in contexts of so-called migrant transit. I do this by examining the rise of ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ as a category of beneficiaries within the development and humanitarian industry in Morocco, a country that has long been at the centre of joint European and African efforts to secure borders in the Western Mediterranean. I argue that aid marks the rise of a substantially different mode of migration containment, one where power works beyond fast violence, and its disciplinary potential is augmented precisely by its elusiveness. Contrary to more conventional security instruments such as fences or deportation, aid thus does not filter border containment power in a neat or spectacular way, by physically preventing the movement of migrants or by inflicting injury. Rather, aid enables more subtle forms of marginalisation that construct ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ as a problem to be dealt with and promote forms of exclusionary integration into Moroccan society. Because aid does not work through violence and coercion, the kind of border control it supports is not “immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility” (Reference NixonNixon 2011, 2). This elusiveness makes it more difficult to apprehend how development and humanitarian projects expand the border regime: no one can clearly retrace the contours of control or identify its perpetrators. Aid workers enact strategies which allow them not to see the work that they do as containment, or to justify their co-optation into the security apparatus. Domination always seems to solidify but not quite, as it could easily camouflage as something else – the case could always be made that identifying such practices as domination relies on misplaced intentionality or misinterpretation of the context. Since control looks a lot like care, or it is enacted through complex architectures of implementation, it can elude resistance and slip through. The border becomes evanescent: nobody can say where it is, how it operates, and who is actually enforcing it.

To say that aid expands the reach of the border, however, does not mean that containment works along predictable patterns. An analysis of the implementation of aid-funded projects reveals that our assumptions about the ‘powerful’ and the ‘powerless’ in migration control do not always hold. Scholars and civil society organisations have often maintained that states in the Global North can relatively easily induce countries in the South to collaborate on migration control, fundamentally by using aid as a bargaining chip to ‘buy’ their cooperation (Arci 2018; Concord 2018; Reference KorvensyrjäKorvensyrjä 2017).Footnote ⁴ A similar argument is made for IOs and NGOs, and, in particular, the IOM, who are thought to have a high margin of manoeuvre in the contexts of ‘origin’ and ‘transit’ where they operate (Reference CaillaultCaillault 2012; Reference FineFine 2018; Reference PécoudPécoud 2018). But in this book, I argue that viewing Global Northern actors as infallible is essentialist. Morocco, in fact, constitutes a formidable example of a setting where national and local authorities selectively support the implementation of aid-funded projects depending on how these fit the domestic political agenda. The involvement of a ‘transit’ country in migration control cooperation does not automatically denote submission and passivity (Reference MaâMaâ 2020b): the state can capitalise on the activity of NGOs and IOs to implement certain parts of its migration policy – for example, by directly and indirectly entrusting donor-funded actors with the provision of social assistance to poor foreigners. But the autonomy of Morocco as a border control actor appears in a clearer light through the analysis of state-led obstruction of aid-funded projects. In the borderlands especially, Moroccan authorities closely monitor humanitarian activities, coming to the point of expelling those actors that speak out about border violence (see Reference NormanNorman 2016).

Talking about Morocco as an ‘Immigration Nation’ as I do in the book title is, of course, ironic. That Morocco has long been at the centre of border securitisation efforts in the Western Mediterranean does not mean that immigration in the country is demographically significant. Much to the contrary, the number of foreigners living in Morocco is actually very low and has considerably decreased after the country gained independence from colonial rule in 1956. In 2014, foreign residents in Morocco officially constituted only 0.25 per cent of the total population of 33 million people (Haut Commissariat au Plan 2017b), with estimates of the number of ‘irregular migrants’ ranging between 10,000 and 40,000 individuals (European Commission 2016; Médecins du Monde and Caritas 2016). Politically, however, Morocco became conceptualised by the EU and its member states as an ‘Immigration Nation’ sometime between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when European state and non-state actors started regarding the collaboration of non-European countries as essential to reduce the arrival of migrants from less well-off countries in the South. The European drive for migration control and Morocco’s capacity to use migration as a foreign policy tool produced an unprecedented escalation of political attention towards people qualified as ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ living in Morocco. Far from being a natural category, the expression ‘sub-Saharan’ is imbued with colonial and racist prejudice. After the end of colonisation, in fact, this term replaced the expression “Afrique Noire” (Black Africa) to refer to formerly colonised countries – thus subtly coding racial considerations into a geographic category (Reference TyszlerTyszler 2019). In practice, ‘sub-Saharan migrant’ has now become a label utilised by Moroccan and European policymakers, aid workers, journalists, and private citizens to systematically construct black people as actual or ‘potential’ migrants suspected to be transiting through Morocco to irregularly cross the border to Europe (Reference El QadimEl Qadim 2015; Reference KhrouzKhrouz 2016a). The securitisation of the Euro–African border and the policing of people qualified as ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ materialised through the rise of fences surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the approval of restrictive immigration laws both in European countries and in Morocco, and the establishment of aid policies specifically aimed at supporting border control cooperation (Reference ColemanColeman 2009; Reference El QadimEl Qadim 2015). Morocco thus became one of the first countries where the EU and its member states fuelled the emergence of a migration industry by using development as an instrument of containment – an approach that was later replicated in countries further away from European borders (Reference GabrielliGabrielli 2016).

Scholars and journalists tend to use the term ‘migration industry’ to refer to a very broad group of actors involved both in the control and in the facilitation of migration, in licit as well as in illicit activities (Reference AnderssonAndersson 2014; Reference Gammeltoft-Hansen and SørensenGammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2013). What is common to organisations as different as faith-based charities and smuggling networks, the literature argues, is that they share “an interest in migration or earn their livelihood by organising migration movements” (Reference Castles, de Haas and MillerCastles et al. 2014, 235). In this book, however, I use the expressionFootnote ⁵ in a slightly different way, to refer to the actors involved in the implementation of European aid policy on the ground in countries of ‘transit’. Aid, rather than profit, defines the boundaries of the industry, determining who belongs to it and who does not, establishing accountability structures and flows of contestation, co-optation, and aspired belonging. The boundaries of the industry are not stable nor irreversible; organisations like the IOM or the UNHCR, or predominantly donor-funded local and INGOs, certainly form part of it. Smaller, critical organisations generally orbit around the industry but can sometimes become aid-recipients (see Chapter 3).

Studying the working of border power through aid can sometimes feel like chasing a ghost. The aid apparatus in Morocco, in fact, does not even explicitly express itself in terms of border control. As the opening ethnographic vignette shows, donors, NGOs, and IOs rather frame their intervention in terms of ‘integration’. One of the ways the migration industry supported Morocco’s integration strategy was through the funding of projects facilitating the access of migrants to the labour market. As I will explain in Chapter 5, these projects often failed: given the high rates of unemployment and informality characterising the Moroccan labour market, West and Central African people attending training workshops rarely ended up securing stable employment afterwards. One of the organisations that promoted labour integration projects was the one that contracted Samuel, a Congolese community-based worker whom I interviewed during my fieldwork. After years of financial struggles with small business initiatives and a dearth of job opportunities, Samuel ended up seeking employment within the aid industry itself. As a community-based worker, Samuel was crucial to the activity of his organisation as he was doing most of the outreach work necessary to secure access to precarious migrant communities. His job was extremely demanding: Samuel would receive calls at any hour of the day (including during our interview) from parents needing help enrolling children in school, from women about to give birth and needing to be transported to the hospital, or from people who had been arrested by Moroccan police. Despite the centrality of his role, however, Samuel did not have a job contract for the work he was performing. Rather, he had a ‘volunteer contract’, which came with a meagre indemnisation of 1500 dirham/month (€137/month).Footnote ⁶ This was less than the Moroccan minimum wage (2,698.83 MAD/month in 2019/2020) (CNSS 2019) and considerably less than the salary of the organisation’s regular employees (see also Reference Abena Banyomo and TherrienAbena Banyomo 2019). Sabrine, a European aid worker employed by the same organisation later explained that community-based workers were not employed full-time. According to Sabrine, contracting these people as volunteers was a solution that allowed migrants such as Samuel to continue their professional activities, while at the same time assisting the organisation to maintain a presence in the area. As a matter of fact, however, being a community-based worker had been Samuel’s only source of employment: he had been pushed towards the aid industry by the dearth of alternative job opportunities, and he did not have another job on the side.

The case of Samuel exemplifies the forms of non-explicitly coercive control through which the aid industry contains migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking people. The organisation that Samuel works for is formally committed to the project of transforming Morocco into a country of integration – it bids for labour integration initiatives, sponsors training workshops, and talks the talk of integration. This official commitment, however, was challenged by the deliberate devaluation of Samuel’s work. This devaluation is justified by Sabrine with arguments that have been long used to motivate the underpayment of workers in the global factory – there are no obligations, Samuel is always free to have another job, volunteering is a way for him to be active and involved. The underpayment of community-based workers is certainly less severe a form of control than other forms of hard border security that contain migrants’ presence inside and outside of Morocco. But the financial and contractual downplaying of Samuel’s contribution clearly produces a form of marginalisation: Samuel remains impoverished, and he is not integrated into society as a decently paid worker, but rather as a compensated ‘volunteer’. In this power game, Samuel becomes a subordinate player that the migration industry feels entitled to extract value from (Reference AnderssonAndersson 2014). ‘Integration’ thus becomes an empty signifier: the same organisation that ostensibly tries to facilitate the access of migrants to the labour market easily dismisses, and marginalises, migrant labour.

By taking aid as a vantage point to reflect on the transformation and diffusion of migration control, I complicate our understanding of how power works within the border regime. I build on Foucault’s analytic of power to develop a framework that explains the coexistence of fast techniques of bordering with emerging instruments of indirect and elusive rule. Foucauldian tools allow us to apprehend the “friability” of the border – the elusiveness, unexpected alliances, and resistances characterising it (Reference TazzioliTazzioli 2014, 9). Discussing the ambiguity of power inevitably leads to complicate our understanding of ‘benevolence’, ‘malevolence’, and co-optation into borderwork. I bring in Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of the “quasi-event” (Povinelli 2011, 5) to provide an alternative vocabulary to examine the factors driving the expansion of the border regime. I emphasise that the elusiveness of aid makes containment less visible and thus more difficult to resist for the actors orbiting around the aid industry. I compound these different threads of analysis into a discussion about power relations in the governance of the border. This book thus de-essentialises the workings of border power by discarding four myths common in both scholarly and journalistic prose. Donors are not all-powerful: they rarely manage to get partner countries’ full cooperation in migration control, let alone to perfectly transpose their border outsourcing aspirations on the ground (Reference El QadimEl Qadim 2015; Reference Geha and TalhoukGeha and Talhouk 2018). IOs and NGOs are not almighty: their movements are often critically constrained and policed by domestic authorities (Reference GazzottiGazzotti 2019), their projects crafted in such a way as to not hurt the sensibilities of local governments, and their very existence is constantly threatened by donors’ shifting strategies (Reference BartelsBartels 2017). But we should not see these organisations as abject either: NGOs and IOs, in fact, also operate as autonomous actors that devise strategies to ensure their own institutional survival and the achievement of their own political mission. This might lead them to take choices that align (or not) with those of donors or of local authorities (Reference BouillyBouilly 2010; Reference CuttittaCuttitta 2020; Reference TyszlerTyszler 2019). Finally, domestic actors hardly match the image of compliant subcontractors. They pose limits to the presence of external actors on their territory by selectively cooperating into or obstructing aid-funded projects, depending on their own political agenda (Reference WunderlichWunderlich 2010). The outcome of migration-related aid projects is thus shaped by the autonomous strategies of actors on the receiving end of border externalisation policies, and by contingencies that make migration control elusive, and unexpected at times.

Bordering beyond Coercion

In a famous passage of The History of Sexuality, Foucault observed a historical shift in the workings of sovereign power, understood as the right “to decide life and death” (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1990, 135). Whereas until the seventeenth century the sovereign used to exercise his prerogative in a deductive fashion, “by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing,” from that moment onwards sovereignty assumed a new form, one that did not only work through death and destruction, but also through productive mechanisms. Foucault defines this new regulatory technology as “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1990, 136). In other words, the power “to take life or let live” gave way to “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1990, 138). Violent forms of sovereignty were therefore obfuscated by two types of power: one focusing on the body (“an anatomo-politics of the body”) as a site for the deployment of disciplinary tactics of subjugation; and one focusing on the population as a whole (“bio-politics”). Both discipline and biopolitics “characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through” (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1990, 139).

The most famous and powerful example that Foucault provided of this historical transformation is the transition in the penal treatment of crimes, which opens the first chapter of Discipline and Punish. The philosophy and practice surrounding penality shifted from a public spectacle of torture to “punishment of a less immediately physical kind,” where the condemned is contained through techniques that are less obvious because they no longer rely on visible bodily injury (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1979a, 8). The rise of the prison, and of confinement as a generalised technique of punishment, is symptomatic of the repositioning of the body within this new politics of penal power, which no longer tends towards the destruction of the condemned but to its subjugation. Here, punishment relies on a “studied manipulation of the individual,” that is socialised into internalising the implicit and explicit rules regulating their social world, so that authority can function without anyone constantly enforcing it (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1979a, 128–29). Killing and dying thus become actions that do not just happen in ways that are “catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime,” but most often in forms that are rather “ordinary, chronic, and cruddy” (Povinelli 2011, 3). Nixon has conceptualised the discrete working of subjugation power as “slow violence,” or “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Reference NixonNixon 2011, 2). Other scholars have named this form of chronic dispossession as “abandonment,” or a technique of governance premised on the purposefully inconsistent presence of the state in the everyday life of communities labelled as disposable, dismissible, out of sight (Reference BiehlBiehl 2005; Reference Gross-WyrtzenGross-Wyrtzen 2020b; Reference WillisWillis 2018).

This, of course, does not mean that spectacular, cruel manifestations of power have disappeared. Indeed, “necropolitics,” or the working of power through death, occupies a distinct place in contemporary societies. Slavery, colonial terror, and contemporary practices of warfare and mass murder all provide evidence that the historical shift in the practice of sovereignty has not produced a unique and homogenously applied model of regulation of the body and the population, but rather that “modernity is at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty, and thus also of the biopolitical” (Reference MbembeMbembe 2019, 67). Indeed, discipline and biopolitics did not perfectly replace sovereignty in organising the relations of power in society. Elements of both systems coexist, as violence resurges alongside the enactment of techniques of government that foster life (Reference FoucaultFoucault 2007), and is regularly deployed against those labelled as undeserving (Reference AhmedAhmed 2017).

The shift from sovereign to disciplinary/biopolitical power did not mark the disappearance of coercive methods of rule either. Coercion remains central to the regulation of a population, but is carried out in a subtler, more discrete fashion. Because discipline works to conquer and transform the subject through a series of habits and regulations, subjugation is achieved through the internalisation of such rules. The obedient subject, that acts according to the rules it has internalised, might not feel as if they were being directed by some form of external authority. Rather, they might be under the impression of operating freely, out of their own choice (Reference TaylorTaylor 2017). Foucault clarified the role of power subjectivation when he developed his theory of governmentality. In Security, Territory, Population Foucault devotes remarkable attention to the notion of ‘conduct’, which he loosely understands as conducting others (“conduire”), conducting oneself (“se conduire”) (or let oneself be conducted), or behaving “as an effect of a form of conduct (une conduite)”(Reference FoucaultFoucault 2007, 193, italics in original). The action of conducting is not necessarily free of the exercise of force. However, governing remains fundamentally different from dominating because power is not exercised directly, but indirectly, through “a ‘conduct of conducts’ and a management of possibilities” (Reference FoucaultFoucault, 2007, in Reference LemkeLemke 2016, 18). The integration of aid into the workings of international politics is an example in such power transition, as it signals a change in the way wealthy countries try to exercise hegemony on other parts of the world. Whereas colonial power was characterised by the repressive and violent submission of colonised territories, development operates biopolitically insofar as it is premised on fostering forces rather than violently repressing them (Reference BriggBrigg 2002). Development thus becomes a way for donors to deploy power beyond coercion – by directing people’s actions through their freedom, and through a professed commitment to the improvement of the life of both individuals and their communities (Reference DuffieldDuffield 2007).

The border is a field of power where control materialises in both spectacular and mundane forms. Undeniably, migration containment is intimately characterised by violence (Reference Minca and Vaughan-WilliamsMinca and Vaughan-Williams 2012), to the point that the traditional Foucauldian biopolitical lens struggles to account for the kind of open, primordial forms of abuse that are unleashed against migrants in the borderlands. Building on an analysis of pushbacks and failures to rescue migrant boats in distress in the Mediterranean, Vaughan-Williams concludes that “letting die” does not adequately reflect the active role that European authorities play in exposing migrants to death. EU member states do not only obliviously let them at the mercy of a hostile physical and political environment. By stripping border crossers of the right to be rescued, EU authorities actively transform migrants into people that can be left to die because they do not deserve sanctuary (Reference WilliamsVaughan-Williams 2015, 65). Coercive techniques of containment, however, coexist with subtler, non-militarised instruments regulating the movement of people. In her work on the US–Mexico border, Jill Williams defines information campaigns aiming at curbing irregular migration as the “softer side” (Reference WilliamsWilliams 2019, 1) of border governance. She contrasts them with “hard power,” militarised techniques of bordering because they infiltrate migrants’ mobility capacity from a different spatial and targeting strategy. Fences or deportation try to apprehend migrants in public sites through techniques aimed at physically distancing them from the border, constraining and injuring their bodies. Soft-power bordering strategies, instead, operate in intimate, non-conventional security spaces, targeting not so much the bodies of migrants, but rather their emotional selves by appealing to feelings of fear and empathy (Reference WilliamsWilliams 2019, 1). States can immobilise migrants by preventing them from moving, but at the same time preventing them from really settling (Reference Picozza and NicholasPicozza 2017; Reference TazzioliTazzioli 2018, Reference 239Tazzioli2019). Waiting is probably the clearest example of how border control operates through slow violence. Keeping people waiting (for resettlement, for their visa application to be processed, for the border to open again) is not visibly harmful, but it effectively consumes people both physically and socially – because it undermines their healthcare and accelerates their financial and social marginalisation (Reference HyndmanHyndman 2019). In her work on containment in inner Moroccan urban centres, Gross-Wyrtzen argues that the multiple processes of racialised dispossession activated by border control effectively maintain West and Central African migrants in a condition of protracted waiting – unable to accumulate enough resources to cross the border to Europe and unable to return. This form of destitute waiting is less legible than building fences, but equally effective as a containment device (Reference Gross-WyrtzenGross-Wyrtzen 2020b; see also Reference CoddingtonCoddington 2019). Waiting and unsettlement produce a form of governmentality that is as pervasive as it is discontinuous and inconsistent – migrants are either tightly, physically and administratively controlled or they are left to their own devices, made legible or unlegible by a state that alternates strategies of seeing, not seeing (Reference 239TazzioliAradau and Tazzioli 2019, 201), or not wanting “to be seen seeing” (Reference Gross-WyrtzenGross-Wyrtzen 2020b, 894–95).

The coexistence of spectacular and mundane mechanisms of migration control is strategic to the expansion of the border. In a seminal piece, Nicholas De Genova argues that the state perpetuates the containment of undesirable foreigners by staging a “border spectacle” at its territorial frontiers. Such a scene casts the attention of national and international audiences on the spectacular exclusion of migrants at clearly identifiable crossing points. The routinary consumption of such images by the public elevates some of the most mediatised representations to the role of quintessential portrayals of ‘illegality’. Producing and reproducing the “Border Spectacle,” De Genova says, naturalises illegality as a given condition: the ‘clandestines’ are demonised as inherently deviant because of their decision to transgress migration laws. In so doing, the state overshadows the reliance of its economy and social system on cheap, deportable labour, and the central role played by migration law in driving – rather than countering – the irregular movement of people. Staging a spectacle of migrant exclusion at crossing points solidifies a form of public consciousness that identifies “the Border” with the territorial edges of the state, and “bordering” with visible, clear-cutting forms of containment, deployed against people profiled as undeserving and expendable (Reference De GenovaDe Genova 2013).

Benevolence, Malevolence, and the “Quasi-Events” of Border Control

Migration studies and critical humanitarian literature have tended to depict the work of non-state actors as either aligning with (Reference CuttittaCuttitta 2016; Reference Scheel and RatfischScheel and Ratfisch 2014; Reference ValluyValluy 2007c) or resisting border control imperatives (Reference Alioua and BensaâdAlioua 2009; Reference StierlStierl 2015). NGOs and IOs align to migration containment objectives by subcontracting specific border control functions, like the prevention of irregular migration (Reference RodriguezRodriguez 2019) or the facilitation of return (Chappart 2015; Reference MaâMaâ 2019). They also expand the border by performing practices of care and assistance to migrant and displaced people that integrate elements of control. This second form of border outsourcing is intimately linked to what Polly Pallister-Wilkins labels as “humanitarian borderwork,” the delivery of emergency relief aimed at protecting life in contexts where containment endangers migrant existence often to the point of death (Reference Pallister-Wilkins, Günay and WitjesPallister-Wilkins 2016). Indeed, humanitarianism is characterised by an intimate tension between practices of care – a will to “do good,” to rescue a suffering humanity during instances of crises (Reference TicktinTicktin 2014, 274) – and attitudes of control – the tendency to see humanity also as a source of threat that requires monitoring and containment for it to be saved (Reference Feldman and TicktinFeldman and Ticktin 2010). In the specific field of border control, this tension between care and control materialises in heterogenous ways. Programmes assisting displaced people can integrate elements of border policing – it is the case, for example, of humanitarian organisations that tightly control the movement of people in and out of refugee camps (Reference TurnerTurner 2018). In other cases, control might be an unintended consequence of border humanitarian activities. The struggle of humanitarians to help might end up reinforcing the racialised logics underpinning border control – for example, when organisations frame migrants as “victims,” or when they support vulnerability frameworks that only conceive the “suffering body” as a legitimate recipient of assistance (Reference TicktinTicktin 2011). At times, the moral philosophy underpinning charity work, and the longer, situated histories of empire that marked the global establishment of religious missions facilitate the anchoring of control in humanitarian borderwork. In her work on migration control in Morocco, Tyszler highlights how Catholic organisations, whose presence in the country is tied to the history of Spanish and French colonialism, can turn into providers of humanitarian assistance to migrants stranded in various areas of Morocco. The provision of assistance inspired by Catholic morals, however, can push them to endorse certain border control norms which align with their ethics, or to introduce further disciplinary norms aimed at policing migrant bodies (Reference TyszlerTyszler 2020). The involvement of non-state actors in the border project should not be essentialised as motivated solely by financial gain: some organisations might be pushed by a moral stance – as a continuation of their missionary duty (Reference MaâMaâ 2020b), or as a way to enact solidarity principles (even though this can happen in often racialised and non-reflexive ways) (Reference AgustínAgustín 2007).

Describing the border security world as fractured between ‘benevolent’ and ‘malevolent’ practices, however, does not go far enough in explaining the expansion and contraction of the border regime (Reference El Qadim, İşleyen and Ansems de VriesEl Qadim et al. 2020), or of security apparatus more broadly (see also Reference GazzottiGazzotti 2018). Indeed, Agier himself discounts the idea of humanitarianism as so intimately linked to military interventions by means of a “manipulating intentionality,” even though the two are undeniably tied by a “functional solidarity” (Reference AgierAgier 2011, 5) (Chapter 7). But if intentionality cannot be considered the primary reason leading non-traditional security actors to support migration control, how do we explain the seemingly endless expansion of the containment apparatus? Answering this question implies understanding that the transition from coercive to elusive modes of societal regulation marked the expansion of ruling mechanisms that can hardly be apprehended as manifestations of power. Discipline, in fact, “is not a triumphant power, which because of its own excess can pride itself on its own omnipotence; it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy” (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1979a, 170). Since we are accustomed to conceptualising power as a deductive force, we are less able to recognise domination when it does not occur through fast violence or explicit coercion (Reference TaylorTaylor 2017). Like in other fields of ‘soft security’ (Reference Busher, Choudhury, Thomas and HarrisBusher et al. 2017; Reference O’NeillO’Neill 2015), we struggle to see containment in aid-funded migration projects not only because power does not expressly work in a negative fashion, but also because it is not enacted by the usual suspects that we generally associate with border control, like the members of the security apparatus.

The proliferation of migration control methods and their diffusion away from the state have determined the enlistment of the most disparate non-security actors into border containment. These now include aid workers employed by NGOs and IOs, donors’ employees, but also religious figures (Reference WatkinsWatkins 2020), youth workers (Reference RodriguezRodriguez 2015), and mothers of irregular border crossers who died at sea (Reference BouillyBouilly 2010). Contrary to what we expect of security forces, we tend to automatically perceive non-traditional security professionals as non-threatening. When the control is delegated to individuals that we perceive as carers, “we believe that these individuals are helping us, caring for us, educating us or healing us – as, to some extent, they may be – and thus we submit to them voluntarily and do not see this submission as an effect of power” (Reference TaylorTaylor 2017, 54). When non-traditional security agents are drawn into border control, the most unlikely social spaces – youth centres, schools, or cinemas – become the frontline of a containment policy that has become all the more elusive; it is implemented by actors that are not really security agents, and through methods that are not really security instruments.

Due to their ordinary appearance, Povinelli labels quieter, mundane forms of suffering as “quasi-events”: in comparison with faster forms of power and violence, they are “never anything huge” (Povinelli 2011, 144), but are rather chronic forms of misery and domination that exist “between this state of neither great crisis nor final redemption” (Povinelli 2011, 4). The ordinariness of quasi-events adds to their lethality because they tend to go unnoticed – “it is hard to say when they occurred let alone what caused them” (Povinelli 2011, 144). Although the presence of power is also marked by the formation of resistance (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1990, 95), resistance struggles to rise and endure when the contours of domination and suffering are not neat. Whereas fast violence seems “to demand, as if authored from outside human agency, an ethical response” (Povinelli 2011, 14), one struggles to feel the same impulse to “take sides” (Povinelli 2011, 146) if there is not a blatant injustice to feel strongly about, a perpetrator that can clearly be held accountable, or an easily identifiable cause to someone’s misery.

The kind of border control that I discuss in this book can be understood as a series of “quasi-events”. Aid does not systematically filter border containment power in a way that is neat, eye-catching, or clearly painful. The refusal of IOM and UNHCR representatives to comment on border violence is not an action that directly harms anyone. Samuel does not sustain physical injury for being contracted as a volunteer rather than as a proper employee. But aid-funded projects do not need to physically injure migrant people to be rooted in and conducive to containment. The lack of honest criticism from a large portion of the UN community in Morocco perpetuates an international image of the state as respectful of (migrants’) rights in a moment when the country’s human right record is clearly deteriorating (Chapter 7). The distance from the field and embodied privilege enjoyed by the heads of the IOM and UNHCR allow them to make such statements without experiencing their consequences. Being underpaid as a ‘volunteer’ impoverishes Samuel, thus impairing his social mobility and capacity to live a dignified life. The caring angle and complex geopolitical entanglement that characterise the operations of development and humanitarian actors always lead to mitigating discourses – there is always a but or a however. Frontline bureaucrats, in general, tend to adopt rationalising strategies to cope with the impossible requests that their functions oblige them to reconcile (Reference ZackaZacka 2017; see also Reference AhmedAhmed 2012). Atypical security bureaucrats particularly tend to enact sense-making strategies in order not to see the work that they do as control (Reference Busher, Choudhury, Thomas and HarrisBusher et al. 2017). They might rationalise their co-optation into security policies as legitimate by describing their work either as ‘business as usual’, or by framing it within a greater mission to achieve social justice(Ahmed 2012). For a care actor, receiving aid money disbursed through an anti-terrorism or border control budget line is legitimate if the activities funded are the same that were funded before, or if the money enables the funding of welfare programmes that would be otherwise impossible to offer (Reference Bastani and GazzottiBastani and Gazzotti in press). By enacting such strategies, frontline border workers further undo the “perceptual” (Povinelli 2011b, 14) dimension of border control: it just takes a sentence, a polite shrug, and containment fades into the background, too subtle to sustain concerns, too present to completely appease them.

Who Governs the Border?

Understanding border power as slippery and non-traditional security bureaucrats as patchy migration control actors, confronts us with a question that has been central in migration and border debates: who governs the border? The discussion about the apparent omnipresence and multidirectionality of power (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1990) in migration politics is particularly heated because it is enmeshed with questions about external pressures, the afterlives of coloniality, and the agency of so-called ‘subaltern’ states. Scholars have long tended to see the workings of border control in non-European countries predominantly as the result of the externalisation of European migration containment (Reference BelguendouzBelguendouz 2005; Reference Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias and PicklesCasas-Cortes et al. 2014; Reference WatkinsWatkins 2017a). According to this body of scholarship, the EU and its member states would be able to export and ‘impose’ the implementation of restrictive border control measures in the territories of countries labelled of migrant ‘origin’ and ‘transit’, which often includes former European colonies. Compliance with European requests would be obtained through incentives – like the offer of preferential trade agreements, development aid, or dedicated visa quotas for nationals of partner countries – or more coercive forms of conditionality (Reference ColemanColeman 2009; Reference KorvensyrjäKorvensyrjä 2017). This approach, however, has now been widely recognised as essentialist, because it ignores the agency of countries in the Global South. Partially inspired by post-colonial theory, more recent work has shifted towards a position which acknowledges that countries of ‘origin’ and ‘transit’ can oppose fierce resistance to European externalisation attempts, discontinuously engaging in border control cooperation and steering it according to their own political priorities. Resistance to EU pressures is common where the adoption of restrictive border control measures would come at unsustainable financial and political costs – like alienating a country’s diaspora or electorate (Reference MouthaanMouthaan 2019), undermining the management of domestic security concerns (Reference Zardo and LoschiZardo and Loschi 2020), hampering other foreign policy aspirations, or placing a disproportionate amount of responsibilities over border control on Southern actors (Reference El QadimEl Qadim 2015).

Both approaches, however, tend to adopt a one-sided understanding of reality, which does not acknowledge the broader complexity of migration control cooperation (Reference MaâMaâ 2020b). In a recent piece on the new Moroccan migration policy, Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen and I build on Ann Laura Stoler’s work on colonial presences to acknowledge that the capacity of action of countries in the Global South also coexists with long-lasting, yet unevenly durable, forms of coloniality that have shaped Moroccan history. The securitisation of borders in the Western Mediterranean cannot therefore be read “as either imperialism in a new guise or as a definitive break from the colonial past” (Reference Gross-Wyrtzen and GazzottiGross-Wyrtzen and Gazzotti 2020, 5). The externalised border is rather a space in tension where different, unevenly durable forms of colonial domination overlap, influencing the current migration landscape and clashing with contemporary forms of resistance to migration control. It is undeniable that colonial infrastructures and present European pressures heavily condition the field of migration policy in the South. However, it is also true that cooperating with the EU on border control cooperation is not necessarily a marker of submission to neo-colonial imperatives for countries on the receiving end of externalisation policies (Reference MaâMaâ 2020b, 2). Countries of ‘origin’ and ‘transit’ can decide to proactively engage in border control cooperation if that increases their international legitimacy (Reference Benjelloun, Alioua and FerriéBenjelloun 2017a; Reference NatterNatter 2014; Reference PaolettiPaoletti 2011), or if that allows them to accumulate other financial or diplomatic resources. Tsourapas labels “refugee rentier states” those states that leverage the presence of displaced communities on their territory as a bargaining chip to gain power and revenues from state and non-state actors (Reference TsourapasTsourapas 2019b, 464).

Aid perfectly captures how border control is not only about externalisation nor about Southern agency, but rather a bit of both: it emerges out of a will of Northern countries to externalise their borders, but its implementation is distributed and contested, and its workings are rarely the ones intended by donors. In recent work on migration policymaking in Morocco, Turkey, and Egypt, Kelsey Norman highlights that North African and Middle Eastern countries can allow aid-funded IOs and NGOs to deliver services to migrant and refugee people on their territory as part of a political strategy of “strategic indifference.” By outsourcing the implementation of integration measures to non-state, externally-funded actors, states gain international legitimacy for their participation in border control cooperation by investing minimal public resources (Reference NormanNorman 2019; see also Reference Geha and TalhoukGeha and Talhouk 2018). Taking the case of Senegal and Mauritania, Frowd argues instead that cooperation in EU-sponsored projects can constitute a form of state-building for countries of ‘transit’ and ‘origin’. European-funded projects, in fact, can allow these countries to strengthen state outreach, and better assert their sovereign prerogative over their own borders and nationals (Reference FrowdFrowd 2018; see also Reference DiniDini 2017).Footnote ⁷ The cooperation of countries of ‘origin’ and ‘transit’ into donor-funded projects does not therefore automatically denote passivity, as aid-recipient countries can proactively direct aid to fulfil their own political strategies.

The reason why much of the existing literature tends to see border control as spectacular, countries of “origin” and “transit” as easily compliant, and donors as all-powerful, is that scholars have mostly privileged the analysis of the aspirational dimension of aid as a border containment instrument, substantially basing research on the analysis of official documents outlining the policy as it exists on paper. This is problematic because the kind of containment filtered by aid-funded projects can be too little “event focused, time bound, and body bound” (Reference NixonNixon 2011, 3) to actually appear between the lines of project factsheets or even of an evaluation document. But more obviously, the politics of communication that donors, NGOs, IOs, and aid-recipient countries adopt to talk about migration control cooperation is either reticent, or crafted in such vague terms that it sounds purposefully critic-proof (Reference Geiger and PécoudGeiger and Pécoud 2010, 6).

To address this problem, my methodological approach builds on a body of scholarship more attentive to the practice of containment, that analyses “actually existing” border policy through a focus on its implementation (Reference BartelsBartels 2017; Reference DiniDini 2017; Reference FrowdFrowd 2018; Reference InfantinoInfantino 2016). Implementation is the dimension where a policy is delivered and executed on the ground (Reference LipskyLipsky 1980). Focusing on migration control as it exists in practice rather than in the ideal allows us to deconstruct the image of the border as a set of grandiose and neat operations, an almost almighty, tenacious entity that flawlessly manages to immobilise people along migration routes (Reference Burridge, Gill, Kocher and MartinBurridge et al. 2017). The border is much more fragile than it seems: during implementation, in fact, the policy scripts conceived by policymakers have to come to terms with the political tensions, organisational factors, and everyday life dynamics marking the world of the street, which policymakers are not always able to predict at the policy-design stage (Reference ZackaZacka 2017). This is particularly true when policymaking takes place at the transnational level, in contexts that are far removed from the reality that policy instruments seek to govern. Policy outcomes therefore cannot be easily predicted, as power does not work along foreseeable and pre-determined pathways (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1990). The implementation turn in border studies has foregrounded a view of migration control more attentive to the everyday, situated, and contingent practices characterising the work of security agents. Power does not flow neatly from top to bottom: border policy is made of a myriad mid-level spaces of cooperation, negotiation, domination, and resistance (Reference EllermannEllermann 2009). The inherent multi-layered character of border control transforms mid- and street-level bureaucrats into power brokers, who are able to open bargaining spaces far away from the mainstream sites of the political (Reference El QadimEl Qadim 2014). Concerns that have very little to do with border control can play a substantial role in the way border bureaucrats apprehend their roles: the imperative to deliver results in a timely way, and to repurpose resources according to political and economic considerations affect the way decisions over visa, asylum, and financial help applications are made (Reference SatzewichSatzewich 2015; Reference SlackSlack 2019). The study of implementation thus foregrounds a picture of containment where borders are “never simply ‘present’, nor fully established, nor obviously accessible” (Reference Parker and Vaughan-WilliamsParker and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 728): they are mutable entities, dynamic in nature, always in becoming (Reference Burridge, Gill, Kocher and MartinBurridge et al. 2017).

A Note on Methods and Ethics

This book is the product of eleven months of fieldwork conducted between March 2016 and August 2019, and of years of engagement with some of the people whose stories are featured in these pages. Semi-structured interviews constitute the main source of data for my analysis. I conducted 126 semi-structured interviews with donor representatives, officers of IOs and NGOs, Moroccan civil servants, people from West and Central Africa who had participated into aid-funded projects as ‘beneficiaries’, African and European diplomats, academics, and development consultants. Interviewees were selected based on their involvement in or knowledge of the implementation of aid-funded projects in the field of migration in Morocco from 2000 to 2018. Depending on the person, interviews were conducted in French, Spanish, English, or Italian. Nine of these interviews were conducted with Maria Hagan, who joined me on fieldwork in July 2019 to collect data for her own research project. Around half of the interviews were recorded. For the others, I rely on notes that I took during and after the conversation. I integrated interview data with the analysis of primary documents compiled by development and humanitarian organisations, as well as newspaper articles, reports, and official communiqués drafted by human rights organisations and by Moroccan authorities. During my time in Morocco, I also conducted participant observation of events organised by NGOs and IOs – mainly conferences, round-table discussions, and project launches, as well as training sessions organised in the framework of two different development projects. When I conducted participant observation, I was introduced – or I introduced myself – to all the participants of the workshop (migrant people, aid workers, and consultants) as a researcher in the field of migration. During and in between periods of fieldwork, I kept up to date with real-time developments in the field through various media platforms.

Geographically, I followed the migration industry around the country. For most of my fieldwork, I was based in Rabat, where donors, IOs, and many NGOs had their headquarters – which, at times, constituted the only offices in the country. I conducted regular field trips in other areas of project implementation, such as Oujda, Tangier, Tétouan, Nador, and Casablanca. I also conducted field visits to places that have been drawn into the violent map of internal displacement in the period after the announcement of the new Moroccan migration policy. These include Fes, Meknes, Beni Mellal, Tiznit, and Agadir (see Map 1). Unlike border cities and large coastal centres, these places only sporadically receive the interests of aid-funded NGOs and IOs, although migrants find themselves stranded in these areas. I conducted many other interviews via Skype and WhatsApp to reach development and humanitarian practitioners who were no longer operating in Morocco. To protect my respondents, I have anonymised all interviews and informal conversations, and have altered some details in ways that do not impact the analysis. For ease of reading, the names of respondents, as well as the names of some of the NGOs they worked for, have been pseudonymised. For clarity, pseudonymised NGOs are marked as starred (*) throughout the text.

Map 1 Map of fieldwork sites.

Created by Philip Stickler.

My identity and my privilege (as a middle-class, white European woman studying at a prestigious UK university) followed me on fieldwork. Though allowing for only a modest living in the United Kingdom, my PhD salary allowed me to live comfortably in Morocco, where I was living and socialising in the same spaces as well-off Moroccans and the ‘expatriate’ community – which, in Rabat, is largely formed by aid workers (Reference BoudarssaBoudarssa 2017). Informal and serendipitous encounters made me appear more familiar to some of my potential interlocutors, providing me with a chance to establish some trust that any study of (aid) bureaucracy requires in order to go beyond institutional rhetoric (see Reference PascucciPascucci 2018). Although my privileged respondents and I shared the same upper-middle-class networks and urban spaces, most West and Central African people navigating the aid industry as civil society leaders or project beneficiaries that I met during fieldwork did not, because their social and economic background was much more disadvantaged. This of course did not mean that this second category of informants and I never crossed paths: I bumped into many of them at conferences organised by IOs in upscale venues (see Chapter 3), or on the premises of NGOs. These encounters, however, cannot be read in a colour-blind fashion. In aid spaces funded by European donors and populated by white aid workers, my whiteness made people presume I was yet another aid worker. When entering the drop-in centres of certain NGOs, people queuing to speak to the NGO officers would ask me whether I was the new social assistant, whether I had worked for this or that other NGO, or simply “who I was in the project,” assuming that all the lighter-skinned people in the room were Moroccans or Europeans employed by that particular charity. I always made sure to draw a neat distinction between myself and the employees of aid organisations when I introduced myself to someone in the field.

As I will explain in Chapter 3, embarking on a research project on border control in Morocco means entering a field that is overcrowded and extra politicised. ‘Migration’ has become a sort of extractive sector in Morocco, where states, non-state actors, and even researchers extract monetary and social value from the plights of migrant people targeted by border control. Although my research focused on the structures of border power rather than on people subjected to it, I was acutely aware that my work was also inextricably tied to the extractivism characterising the industry (Reference AnderssonAndersson 2014; Reference Sukarieh and TannockSukarieh and Tannock 2019). When I started my research, I became very quickly aware that many of my potential interviewees experienced research fatigue, because they had already granted interviews to too many researchers, journalists, and development consultants (Reference OmataOmata 2019). This was particularly true for West and Central African migrants and civil society leaders who were navigating the aid industry as beneficiaries, or as unpaid or underpaid workers (see Reference TyszlerTyszler 2019). To mitigate existing power imbalances, I questioned the necessity of each interview, made all possible attempts to minimise the discomfort in terms of time commitment and transportation costs, and tried to ‘give back’ whenever I could.

I embarked on the thesis that this book is based on without any direct experience of working in international development cooperation. This changed when, in 2018, I briefly became part of the migration industry myself. Once the writing of the first draft of my thesis had been almost completed, I was hired for a short research consultancy by the IOM. The legal boundaries defining my consultancy prevent me from using any of the information I accessed during my short professional relation with the IOM for the purpose of my research. This experience, however, allowed me to read some of my research data in a much clearer light, and gave me deeper insights into the world of frontline borderwork.

As Gentile ironically puts it in his reflections on empirical research, “sometimes, the realities of fieldwork are at odds with the quiet setting described in textbooks – one in which interviewees are largely cooperative, authorities permissive and the data trustworthy” (Reference GentileGentile 2013, 426). Whether male or female, Moroccan or foreigner, researchers do not go unnoticed in Morocco. In the borderlands especially, my movements appeared to raise attention. In Oujda, I received a series of calls from a man who declined to state his identity – he simply said “Moi, je suis quelqu’un” (I am someone) – but who knew where I had been the day before and the names of the people I had spoken to the previous afternoon. In Nador, I had the clear impression I was being followed by a man in his forties dressed in a brown leather jacket and wearing sunglasses, which, as a friend and colleague put it to me once during a conversation, seems to be the uniform of plainclothes Moroccan policemen. NGOs in Oujda and Nador were also less comfortable with meeting me than their counterparts in other parts of the country. My informants there sometimes prevented me from seeing them in their offices, preferring to keep the contact informal, while other times they asked me who they should say I was, in case the police asked. The ‘spectre’ of police surveillance, sometimes presumed, sometimes real, was something that lingered in the daily lives of most people surrounding me. During my entire fieldwork, interviewees repeatedly asked me whether I had been under surveillance. Some of them asked with curiosity, others to alert me to be careful, and others yet because they had experienced it themselves.

This book does not, of course, deal with all the aid-funded projects that have been implemented in Morocco in relation to ‘sub-Saharan migration’. Due to my focus on the expansion of border security away from the state, I concentrated my attention on projects implemented by IOs and NGOs (either local or international). I thus exclude aid-funded initiatives directly implemented by more traditional security providers, such as the state and private companies, whose involvement in border control is more generously analysed in other works (Reference FrowdFrowd 2018; Reference Garelli and TazzioliGarelli and Tazzioli 2016; Reference RodierRodier 2012). Although this book is obviously concerned with the spectacular flourishing of the migration business in countries at the receiving end of externalisation policies, my focus here is not so much on the financial productivity that the fight against irregular migration triggers, but rather on the elusive forms of border power that it generates. I direct the reader to Ruben Andersson’s Illegality Inc. to find out about the absurdities and paradoxes that migration control generates (Reference AnderssonAndersson 2014). Finally, the research is focused on the aid actors regulating the presence of migrants in Morocco. As the reader will note, civil society actors lying outside the aid circuit and migrants themselves are not the specific focus of my analysis, but they come up here and there in the book as they overlap with, challenge, and question the working of the migration industry. I must specify, however, that the fact that migrants are mentioned only in their interactions and tensions with NGOs and IOs does not mean that I consider them to be powerless or dependent upon development and humanitarian organisations. Migration scholars have widely discussed the acts of contestation through which migrants cope with and organise against the forms of domination enacted by state and non-state actors mandated with migration containment (Reference Moulin and NyersMoulin and Nyers 2007; Reference Scheel and RatfischScheel and Ratfisch 2014). My interest here is circumscribed to the circumstances in which these two worlds – the world of the exiled and the world of aid – collide, and to which governing rationalities emerge from this collision.

Outline of the Book

This book explores how aid filters border control on the ground in Morocco. To do so, I follow aid policy as it expands beyond the traditional sites of state security, permeating mundane societal sectors that are not habitually the locus of migration containment. The empirical chapters will explore how aid contributes to the production of ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ as a population group of concern by following the workings of aid through six societal fields: public discourse, civil society relations, welfare, labour, voluntary return, and humanitarian assistance.

Chapter 1 provides the contextual background for the rest of the monograph. It retraces patterns of immigration into Morocco and discusses how processes of bordering securitised the presence and movement of people profiled as ‘sub-Saharan migrants’. I reconstruct the tightening of borders in the Western Mediterranean, highlighting the efforts undertaken by European countries to prevent the irregular movement of people and the border externalisation process which accompanied such a project. I discuss the involvement of Moroccan authorities in the bordering and militarisation of the Western Mediterranean, outlining the main developments that occurred in the domestic migration policy strategy. The end of the chapter provides an overview of the actors involved in the aid industry.

Chapter 2 explores how aid constructs Morocco into an ‘Immigration Nation’, by fostering a hegemonic imaginary of immigration in the country as a predominantly ‘black’, ‘African’, and ‘irregular’ experience. This performance is subsumed by discourses and practices de-historicising immigration in Morocco and normalising the idea of ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ as the main group of foreigners living in the country. This escalates the political attention over Western and Central African migration to levels which are not supported by demographic data. I identify two critical junctures that allowed the migration industry to consolidate narratives of ‘transit’ and ‘settlement’ migration throughout the country, trivialising projects targeting ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ along the major stopovers of migrant routes in Morocco.

Chapter 3 examines how aid creates conflicts and entrenches existing racialised inequalities within the civil society sector. I show that funding injections shake Moroccan civil society by producing three kinds of organisational subjectivities. The first group are the newcomers, which decide to accept donors’ funding, while enacting sense-making strategies to justify their work as not explicitly in support of border security policies. The second group are the radicals: organisations which consider aid money as an instrument of border externalisation, and therefore decide to reject it or distance themselves from it. The last group of civil society organisations are those remaining on the doorstep. Mainly migrant-led organisations, these actors aspire to be part of the aid industry but are unable to bid for aid-funded projects and are confined to play a subordinate role in the migration market. Funding injections therefore alter relations between civil society organisations by favouring phenomena of co-optation, conflict and subordination. This leads to the emergence of conflict among civil society actors, who do not manage to take a unified stance in favour or against the border regime.

Chapter 4 examines how the entanglement between care and control transforms aid into a tool that filters marginalisation without directly excluding migrants from basic service provision. By looking at projects providing social assistance to migrants living in the big Moroccan urban centres, I argue that aid rather mediates the marginalisation of migrants through their inclusion in a parallel network of care. Developing in the interstices of a tight border and of an indifferent Moroccan state, this care is volatile: it rests on bureaucratised logics of filtering that normalise the abandonment of migrants. This care is also unaccountable: the actors providing assistance enact mechanisms which allow them not to see themselves as responsible for migrants’ grievances.

Chapter 5 shows that aid facilitates the creation of a political architecture of control that pushes refugee people into self-disciplining behaviours, in the hope to be seen by aid agencies as conforming to a certain style of refugeehood. Specifically, I look at projects favouring labour integration to show that migrant people can be attracted to or can decide to distance themselves from aid-funded projects for reasons that have nothing to do with the stated purpose of the initiative (in this case, favouring migrants’ integration into the labour market). Rather, the structural constraints characterising the life of migrant people in Morocco (lack of legal mobility avenues, lack of access to public services, lack of access to decent work) pushes project beneficiaries to read aid-funded projects as disciplinary tools through which aid agencies can observe their behaviours.

Chapter 6 examines the Assistance to Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) programme run by the IOM. I argue that the AVRR elusively expand the deportation capacity of countries of ‘transit’. I label the function played by aid as elusive because the AVRR is not coercively imposed by the IOM or European states on Moroccan authorities, countries of origin, or migrants. Moroccan authorities consider it a cheaper and more diplomatically acceptable alternative to deportations. Embassies of countries of origin see it as an economically advantageous way to outsource assistance to their citizens abroad in distress. Migrants themselves see it as a last resort opportunity – or so argue IOM officers.

Chapter 7 looks at humanitarian projects assisting migrants in the Moroccan borderlands. I argue that the fast violence pervading the border allows us to see the inclusionary-exclusionary stance of the aid apparatus in a clearer light. It shows that aid sustains the rise of a silent, threatened apparatus of emergency relief. Donor-funded projects providing humanitarian assistance to migrants enter a symbiotic relation with border violence. Although abuses against migrants perpetually trigger humanitarian intervention, NGOs and IOs engage in a form of “minimal biopolitics” (Reference RedfieldRedfield 2013), that mitigates migrants’ death without fully investing in life.

Immigration Nation takes aid as a prism to conceptualise the sophistication of migration control. It shows that donor-funded projects do not participate in the construction of the border regime by physically immobilising migrants along migratory routes. Rather, it enables a form of slow containment, that is as pervasive as it is difficult to apprehend. Highlighting how aid facilitates the expansion of the border regime in Morocco provides useful analytical insights that illuminate the workings of the migration industry in other countries of ‘transit’ in the broader Middle East and in Africa. Although countries like Turkey and Libya have long been in the spotlight of European policymakers, the Arab uprisings in 2011 and the onset of the “migration crisis” in 2015 have expanded the spatiality of aid-funded interventions aimed at remotely securing the borders of the EU and of its member states. As projects aiming at providing social assistance, labour integration, and voluntary return to migrants and refugees proliferate in countries like Mauritania, Niger, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Jordan, Immigration Nation provides a lens to decipher migration control beyond the spectacle of border violence.