'Moroccans are desperate: Years of political crackdown and lack of economic opportunities'

François Picard is pleased to welcome Aida Alami, New York Times World contributor. Drawing on her own field reporting at the Moroccan border, Alami challenges attempts to explain the mass crossing to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta primarily through a theory of deliberate state orchestration. While acknowledging both Morocco's history of leveraging migration in its relations with Spain and the possibility that security forces made tactical decisions on the day, Alami insists on distinguishing evidence from inference.

Her reporting instead points towards an interaction between online misinformation, overwhelmed security forces and a population already primed to migrate by political repression and limited economic opportunity.

More significantly, Alami shifts the analytical frame from the intentions of the Moroccan state to the motivations of the migrants themselves. In her account, speculation over whether Morocco "manufactured" the crisis can obscure a more consequential political fact: large numbers of Moroccans were sufficiently disillusioned with conditions at home that rumours of an open border could rapidly mobilise them.

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The border crisis therefore becomes not only a question of Moroccan-Spanish diplomacy or migration management, but also an expression of deeper frustration within Moroccan society.