North Africa's Great Migration

...Industrial expansion in Italy and Spain has produced labor shortages, for the first time in modern history, in nations that had long experienced underemployment...

...It is bound more closely to Western Europe, especially to the Common Market, than any other Islamic country except Turkey and Algeria...

...A case in point: the payment of salaries promised to government employees...

...Western Germany employs one million, including 250,000 Italians, over 130,000 Greeks, almost 130,000 Spaniards, and about 60,000 Turks...

...Among the latter, the more easily adaptable Kabyles, who are Berbers and not Arabs, represent an important group, the more skilled elite of the Algerian labor force...

...In recent months, King Hassan has made a number of policy declarations concerning his programs to provide schools and jobs for the undereducated and underemployed...

...Switzerland now employs, for instance, three-quarters of a million foreign workers, mainly from Italy or Spain...

...They do not include over a million and a half European or Jewish "repatriates" from North Africa who have also been at least partially absorbed in the French labor force...

...In its development programs the Moroccan government stresses the liberal, voluntary nature of the demands administrators and experts make of its people...

...Internal political tensions, moreover, threaten the precarious balance of Morocco's plans to modernize itself...

...Through a series of treaties with France, Belgium and West Germany, in particular, Morocco serves as a vast Mediterranean reservoir of manpower for the Common Market's expanding industries...

...However misleading, these statistics do reveal that Algeria has lost to France in recent years close to one and a half million of its more literate or skilled citizens, whether "black-foot" Europeans, Jews, or Moslems...

...Politically and economically Morocco has now become, like Tunisia and Iran, an unequivocally "Western" Islamic nation...

...Only drifters or those unable to acquire new skills can be expected to return...

...Experience reveals, however, that emigrants who acquire skills generally remain where they acquire them, if only because their training was part of the process of individual assimilation in a new culture, often involving marriage...

...The Moroccan government piously hopes that many of them will thus be trained in useful skills and later return to man its new industries...

...At one time, its provinces or dependent kingdoms included most of Spain and Portugal...

...In Casablanca, Morocco's major industrial center, skilled workers are at a premium...

...In most cases they prefer to emigrate to France, Belgium, or Germany unless they can find local employment with foreign firms where they feel more certain of receiving promised wages and, in due time, obtaining raises and advancement...

...In its present crisis, Morocco is doomed to lose, first and foremost, its underpaid and pitifully meager capital of skilled or semiskilled workers, including a majority of those who can already speak some French or Spanish—languages in which an emigrant can acquire skills more easily than in his native tongue...

...King Hassan has stated, however, that while this program of expansion was followed successfully in 1961 and 1962, it failed in 1963...

...Unfortunately, most of these measures have been merely expressions of faith or hope, though desperate attempts are now being made in Rabat to implement them through drastic reductions in unnecessary government spending...

...As for Western Europe's problems in assimilating a labor force of close to one million North African Arabs—this is another kettle of fish, which we hope to discuss here shortly...

...When Air Maroc took over the airport from Air France two years ago, all personnel were fired, then rehired on trial, with the understanding that salaries would be paid only after three months of satisfactory work...

...In such formerly prosperous market towns, the population is increasing while the number of jobs available in bazaar work decreases, since no new industries have replaced the outmoded...

...The importance of this constant drain on Morocco's meager resources of skilled labor was well brought out in a recent series of articles in Le Monde on "Europe's Stokers"—the masses of workers imported from Mediterranean countries that have flocked in recent years to the industrial centers of Switzerland, the Common Market countries, and, to some extent, Scandinavia...

...As in Iran, the success of such plans depends greatly on the kind of political stability that only the monarchy can now ensure...

...Edouard Roditi reports regularly from Europe and North Africa...

...All of these statistics, however, are in many ways incomplete or misleading...

...France alone now employs one and a half million foreign workers, mainly from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and former French overseas territories...

...At the same time, the Moroccan government has been meeting a series of political and economic crises by improvising measures to restore at least minimum confidence in the nation's future...

...This particular electrician had been working 18 months for Air Maroc without salary, partly because the local director, an Algerian, had absconded with the airport's funds during the Moroccan-Algerian "war...

...Some reforms are so obviously needed that one hesitates at first to believe that no serious attempts had been made to effect them earlier...

...Throughout the south, especially in hill-towns like Ouarzazate, beyond Marrakech, a traveler might well be shocked by the poverty and enforced idleness to be seen wherever traditional handicrafts have survived, under the impact of massproduced imports, only as a kind of luxury tourist trade...

...The French statistics include, for instance, some 500,000 North African Arab workers, without specifying their nationality...

...In Tangier I learned of an even more shocking case of maladministration...

...As long as manual skills enjoy no prestige or social status all programs to educate the masses in modern skills are doomed to partial failure, since those who acquire these skills will often prefer working abroad...

...In addition, Morocco lacks Iran's vast oil income to finance its campaigns to free the nation of illiteracy, disease, poverty, and underemployment...

...During the past few months, experts from the International Bank and other UN agencies have been studying Morocco's problems with an eye to formulating a long-term plan for financing its development...

...most of them lack even the schooling necessary to spend part of their day reading...

...It also stands among the region's most anti-Communist, least neutralist nations...

...Under the new agreements whereby Morocco supplies labor to Belgium, West Germany, and France, we may expect to see within the next two years another 200,000 Moroccan workers emigrate to Western Europe...

...The drain on Morocco has not yet reached such dramatic proportions, but is already gaming momentum...

...it is no longer supplying enough unskilled workers to these countries which must rely more and more on Greece, Turkey, and the North African Arab nations...

...Some friends of mine were having their home rewired weekends by an electrician employed by the government-owned Air Maroc company...

...Partly as a consequence of this closer orientation toward Western Europe, Morocco faces serious problems of transition from its almost medieval socio-economic structure under the French Protectorate to a more modern structure...

...But even those who somehow manage to obtain schooling or happen to be gifted with energy and initiative are scarcely offered any serious encouragement...

...But King Hassan II has yet to show the same firmness and vision that [he Shah has shown...

...This drain on Morocco can now be estimated at over a quarter of a million emigrants, all told...

...But it is at the same time exposed to a constant flow of confusing siren songs from Algeria, which is increasingly Castroist, and from Nasser's Egypt, which seeks to impose its peculiarly protean brand of Socialism upon the entire Arab world...

...In the Arab world a worker, however skilled, is rarely respected by the employers and bureaucrats on whom he depends and who still tend to let their fingernails grow to grotesque length as clear evidence that they are not manual workers...

...In Rabat I met a young civil servant who had been trained on a scholarship in France as an administrator, at considerable government expense...

...Thousands of lean, hungry-looking young men can be seen wasting the best years of their lives in sheer idleness...

...Italy is already attempting to draw its skilled workers back from Switzerland, West Germany, and France...

...After losing these, it expanded its sphere of influence for a while toward the South, through Mauritania to Dakar and Timbuctu...

...Officially, Morocco plans to create 90,000 new jobs per year—a total of 75 million new work days...

...He had not been paid for three months and had resigned from his post to accept a job as a personnel administrator in a Belgian coal mine...

...Spain, however, has begun to draw on its own reserves of "poor-white" Spanish labor in northern Morocco, where the old Spanish sections of such cities as Tangier, Tetuan, and Larrache are rapidly shrinking...