Border area Spain - Morocco

By bringing together two sets of qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017 with humanitarian organizations and migrant women on the two sides of the Eastern Moroccan-Spanish border, this article examines the ways in which women humanitarians exercise power over women's lives, bodies and mobility. Though humanitarianism in the border context has been researched at European and United States-Mexico borders, the specifically gendered implications of humanitarian governance at borders needs further investigation. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with a religious humanitarian organization on the Moroccan side of the border and with medical humanitarians and social workers on the Spanish side, we researched women humanitarians' interventions toward migrant women from West African, North African and Middle Eastern countries. Beyond the differences that characterize these religious and socio-medical humanitarian settings and the different migration regimes in which they are inscribed, we argue that the power exerted by women humanitarians reproduces a form of maternalism underpinned by gendered moral beliefs regarding women's bodies, mobility and family life. We foreground that such maternalism represents a cornerstone of women's humanitarian engagement across time and we identify continuities between colonial maternalism, contemporary forms of humanitarian care carried out by women and maternalist integration politics in Western postcolonial societies. Rooted in colonial maternalism, racialized beliefs justified women's (religious, medical, social) prominent role in intervening in the intimate spaces of women casted as radically Other. Our contemporary case studies demonstrate how the practices of women humanitarians impact on racialized migrant women's daily lives, intruding on their intimacy, imposing controls over their bodies and impacting on their possibilities for mobility. The article explores how the racialization of migrant women, articulated with moral ideas around women's reproductive health and mothering responsibilities, produce varied forms of disciplining and control on both sides of the border Moroccan-Spanish border.

In this article we analyze the independent migration of Moroccan children and youth to Southern Europe. The key issue is represented not just by the appearance of the minor as a new migratory actor, but by the process of institutional manipulation of images and narratives related to them. We argue that this process is new for its way of shaping the public narrative of the migrant in Europe. This contribution aims at demonstrating how the process of derogatory classification set up for these migrants is influencing the representations of childhood in Morocco. We argue that this process is coherent with the ‘outsourcing’ of the management of European borders. We claim that the transnational alliance in category (re)production hinders the social change and keeps lower class youth in their assigned social rank and space. In this sense, independent migration represents a breach of the confinement and an investment in an ‘elsewhere’ which contrasts  with the prescribed social stillness of the contexts of origin.

In the last ten years, clandestine traffic of Maghribi and sub-Saharan immigrants between Morocco and Spain has become one of the thorniest elements of relations between the two countries. Spain’s inability to repatriate sub-Saharan immigrants coupled with the ongoing tragedy of death by drowning in the Straits of Gibraltar has apparently served to catapult this issue into the spotlight. However, since the number of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa is small in
comparison with the number of immigrants arriving from other parts of the world, one may be led to think that the Spanish authorities are exaggerating the scale of the problem. In order to understand why this may be the case, this matter should be examined within the general framework of the traditionally tense relations between Spain and Morocco.