Wylie on Alexander-Nathani, 'Burning at Europe's Borders: An Ethnography on the African Migrant Experience in Morocco'

Isabella Alexander-Nathani. Burning at Europe's Borders: An Ethnography on the African Migrant Experience in Morocco. Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. xxxvi + 247 pp. $24.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-007464-7. 

Reviewed by Diana Wylie (Boston University)
Published on H-Africa (November, 2022)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut (Independent Scholar)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=58140

Living in Limbo

“I will make it to Europe, or I will die trying,” say many African migrants as they look north across the Mediterranean toward tantalizing lands where they yearn to build prosperous lives in peace (p. 208). Desperate not to be returned to countries they are fleeing, many burn their identity documents. This act has led Moroccans to call their own undocumented emigrants harragas, or people who have burned their papers; hence the title of this impassioned and disturbing book. Its author, anthropologist and activist Isabella Alexander-Nathani, lays bare the human dimension: What exactly happens to sub-Saharan migrants, especially now when Europe is externalizing its borders by paying North African countries like Morocco to prevent them from reaching its shores?

Through Alexander-Nathani we meet mainly boys and young men fleeing countries like Senegal, Mali, Sudan, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In Morocco they forge “brotherhoods” according to their place of origin while waiting in forest encampments for their chance to cross the border clandestinely: they try to scale razor wire fences around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, they hide in cages under cars on ferries, they board unreliable small boats and rafts. Saving their meager earnings as occasional laborers in Morocco, they pay an extremely expensive passage: the boats, which may take several days to cross the sea, can cost 2,500 euros a passenger. Their possessions are few because they are frequently robbed of their belongings and cash, including by the Moroccan police. Without many legal rights in Morocco, which for most is only a “bridge” to their dream destination in Europe, they are vulnerable to random acts of violence—including beatings and occasionally murder—which they cannot or will not report for fear of being bused to the Algerian or southern borders, from where they would have to walk a thousand kilometers or more back to their encampments, so they can try again.

Many migrants have started their journey with the backing of a community at home that has gathered together the seed money for this hazardous trip. The home folks may even stage a “sending ceremony” to honor the departing person, who knows “you cannot return without at least the money to repay them” (p. 150). When Europe blocks their entry, they are stuck in limbo, unable to go home without repaying those community debts or at least sending remittances. “There is no other way home” than by making it to Europe, even though the journey can take a couple of decades as the authorities block their efforts time and time again (p. xxvi). During this protracted stay in limbo, people rely on photographs to maintain contact with loved ones and also to depict a success they may never achieve. These staged pictures—a young migrant poses in a café wearing street-chic fashion—maintain the illusion in the sending communities that “everyone abroad lives well” (p. 153). In the limboland where the migrant actually lives, there is no present, only the past and an idealized future.

Alexander-Nathani stresses the callous reception given these migrants. Racism in Morocco is growing, she writes, reflecting the testimony of many of her subjects and also her own experience of, for example, being denied service in a café because she was with a migrant. Some local journals have indeed warned against the growing sub-Saharan presence with headlines like “Le Péril Noir.” The official Moroccan response can seem like abandonment: the government provides no camps and has set up only briefly and occasionally (2014, 2017) a formal legalization procedure.

This callous regard has both popular and official roots. Morocco already has a high unemployment rate: 22 percent of Moroccan young men have no jobs, and yet the migrants are sometimes hired more readily because they are seen to be harder-working and ready to accept lower pay, a fine recipe for popular antipathy. On the official front, the European Union gives Morocco large sums of money to fight against “immigration clandestine,” with 500 million euros promised between 2022 and 2029.[1] Morocco helps to run Europe’s external borders by spending this money to track, intercept, and receive undocumented migrants expelled from Europe. The Moroccan government may send them to the Algerian border, though more recently it has begun busing migrants to cities in the interior of Morocco, where it provides no services.

Racism plays a huge role, Alexander-Nathani writes, unacknowledged by most official actors in this sorry tale. While European authorities rarely mention race, the figures tell their own story: Europe recently accepted 72 percent of Middle Eastern applicants for asylum, compared with less than 8 percent of Africans (p. 196). These proportions, alongside the tales of abuse, lead Alexander-Nathani to conclude that “the criminalization of blackness” has “on a global scale … made it virtually impossible for [black migrants] to plead their cases of vulnerability.” In contravention of international human rights law since 1948, migrants can be expelled from Spain without having their asylum applications reviewed. She intends her book to alert relevant international organizations that “skin color is determining the application of international law” (pp. 196-197).

Alexander-Nathani’s insights derive from an unusually long period of doctoral fieldwork and a broad spatial reach: for roughly three years (in 2010, 2013-15, 2016-18) she worked first in countries sending migrants (the DRC, Sierra Leone, Mali), then mainly in Morocco, with limited sojourns in Libya and Algeria. More remarkable than this duration and reach, though, is the sheer grit she displayed in researching the migrant “crisis,” a term she rejects because she thinks the word creates fear in receiving communities. She patiently overcame the migrants’ and smuggling rings’ suspicion, and endured the hostility of Moroccan policemen. She writes that she accompanied the migrants on their hazardous voyages: sleeping in their forest encampments, walking with them in the desert, being packed into smugglers’ trucks, surviving shortages of food and water. She was briefly detained in Algeria for conducting research while on a tourist visa.

Given the extremity of what she witnessed and endured, it is not surprising that Alexander-Nathani’s writer’s voice is suffused with passion. “I will not stop until their stories have been heard,” she writes (p. xxxv). She dedicates her book to the refugees themselves and alludes in her acknowledgements to the “fight for social justice” (p. xv). She focuses on individual actors. The first page of her prologue begins not with an abstraction but with the story of thirteen-year-old Bambino, an orphan who left his younger siblings behind in Guinea with a distant cousin, to whom he hoped to remit money. As the chapters unfold, she weaves similar stories into her discussions of the theoretical literature on migration so that individual experiences are never lost in a welter of theory about, say, “liminality.”

Aware there is no easy solution to the “refugee crisis,” she writes, “One of the most difficult parts of my ethnographic work in Morocco has been knowing just how little I can do to help those who are so immediately and outrageously wronged” (p. 75). And so, it should come as no surprise that, since receiving her doctorate in anthropology from Emory University in 2016, she has turned toward documentary filmmaking. In 2020 she founded a nonprofit production studio, Small World Films, where she made a movie based on this research, entitled simply The Burning (2021). Both the film and her company are dedicated to the belief that “storytelling has the power to humanize complex political issues and create positive social change.”[2] The former goal is, of course, much easier to achieve than the latter.

The gravity of the refugee crisis is reflected in the growing number of researchers in standard academic disciplines and the arts who are working on this very subject in Morocco. The work of Abdelmajid Hannoum (history), George Bajalia (anthropology), Eric Calderwood (literature), Kelsey Norman (political science), Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen (geography), Lorena Gazzotti (development studies), and Amine Asselman and Randa Maroufi (artists) comes readily to mind.[3]

Few of the above commentators disagree that new “racisms” are growing in Morocco or that Morocco runs the risk of being called “Europe’s policeman.” Most differ from Alexander-Nathani, though, by laying out more systematically how the various state actors—European and North African—evolved their strategies for dealing with the migrants. It is not central to her ethnographic and activist purposes to explain when and why the Moroccan government has devised particular responses to the pressures exerted upon it by the European Union and by the migrants themselves. And yet, a critical understanding of the dilemma—a poor country receiving an influx of more poor people—would be aided by learning, for example, about the Moroccan king’s attempts to regularize immigration in 2014 and 2016: What spurred these efforts? Who benefited?

Highly pertinent questions start cascading when one tries to imagine “positive social change.” Precisely what resources does Morocco need to integrate these migrants into its economic and social life? Will Morocco, as some suggest, increasingly accept migrants as workers within local informal economies—braiding hair, selling Senegalese cloths, digging graves—as long as they cost the government nothing? Are some new arrivals already on the way to becoming considered Moroccan by their neighbors? Perhaps new Moroccan identities are being forged at this very moment within neighborhoods.

These queries do not distract from Alexander-Nathani’s achievement in arousing sorrow and indignation. The fact that her book provokes but does not answer the questions is a sign of the complexity of the problem, as well as the author’s choices. Engagingly written, Burning at Europe’s Borders provides compelling documentation that could serve as the foundation for a manifesto. Even the book’s “multi-tiered” organization expresses its core idea: the chapters circle around migrants’ stories rather than lay out a chronological analysis. This narrative choice, however, puts the fullest mention of EU policy at the book’s end, where she provides no detailed data showing how and when the EU expanded its “collaboration in border patrolling surveillance, and interception” (p. 212).

The proto-manifesto nature of this book leads, not surprisingly, to emotive use of language and to statements that are not always backed up by evidence. Loose language, even about the distant past, provokes doubt: What does it mean that Ibn Khaldun—born in Tunis, but not “Tunisian” because there was no nation-state in fourteenthcentury North Africa—“rewrote” misguided thinking about race (p. 56)? One problem commonly associated with anachronisms like nationality is that they suppose national identity is natural and clear, as if it has ever been possible to speak of “the Moroccan identity” as singular and devoid of conflict (p. 64). It has not.

Of more pressing importance are unsubstantiated contemporary assertions. For example, Médecins sans Frontières was not “stripped” of its right to work in Morocco in 2013, but left of its own accord (p. xxxiv). Blanket statements are made that admit no exceptions: Are “all” West African young men expected to migrate (p. 171); Is there a “complete” lack of economic opportunities in Sidi Moumen (p. 119)? Surely not. One final example of disquieting overreach: it isn’t enough to write that Spain has “purported” EU support for making Morocco the final destination of African migrants; isn’t proof needed?

Despite these debits, which are fallout from the author’s ardent dedication, this book provides an excellent introduction to the ongoing humanitarian crisis precisely because it articulates the human consequences so powerfully. Ideally, Burning at Europe's Borders will provoke readers to deeper investigation and action. What action? Alexander-Nathani concludes by arguing that “safe and legal pathways to citizenship” are needed, along with “timely and objective” reviews of asylum applications and “proper repatriation practices” (pp. 210-211). What would this mean? For greater practical utility, this book should be read in conjunction with some of the articles cited in the notes to this review. Then the passionate tone of the book would be supplemented with more analytical perspectives, ones taking into account the shifting pressures on all the parties involved in this contemporary tragedy.

Notes

[1]. “Migration. European Aid. Nador. Repatriation of Minors ... Insights from Khalid Zerouali,” Medias 24, September 18,2020, https://medias24.com/2022/09/18/migration-aide-europeenne-nador-rapatriement-des-mineurs-les-eclairages-de-khalid-zerouali/.

Citation: Diana Wylie. Review of Alexander-Nathani, Isabella, Burning at Europe's Borders: An Ethnography on the African Migrant Experience in Morocco. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. November, 2022.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58140