RABAT, Morocco — After years of pressure to reform its migration policy, Morocco announced last September a new migration and asylum system that would adhere to international standards, examine cases individually and offer legal status to some undocumented migrants — thousands of whom lined up in Rabat to file their application last month. But a recent Human Rights Watch report claims that despite some improvement, Moroccan security forces still “commonly beat, otherwise abuse and sometimes steal” from sub-Saharan migrants. A couple of weeks ago, nine sub-Saharans, including one woman, drowned while trying to swim to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Migrants claimed police fired into the sea where other migrants were swimming, as Moroccan and Spanish security forces tried to ward them off from Ceuta.
But in the capital Rabat, miles from the Moroccan border between the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla — the gateway to the European Union — some migrants are in transit to Europe. They remain in the administrative center because they wish to settle in Morocco; they have kept up with government efforts to “regularize” migrants and applied for legal status to live and work in Morocco. They took this decision despite the circumstances under which they left their homeland and the institutional neglect of their reluctant hosts.
