Morocco: Migration and Transnational Identity

This program examines the factors driving internal and international migration particularly in Morocco and elsewhere in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Students consider how human mobility is shaped by religion, security, youth culture, desertification, poverty, and other pressing issues and how mobility engenders transnational art and multilayered identities.

The program is based in Rabat, Morocco's academic, political, and cultural center. In Rabat, students receive thematic lectures and intensive language instruction in Modern Standard Arabic that includes 15 hours of Moroccan dialect. Learn more about the program’s coursework.

Excursions to northern and rural areas of Morocco, as well as to Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, illuminate many different aspects of migration. Learn more about these excursions.

Students learn from Moroccan and European academics and policymakers, NGO and human rights activists, artists, and experts in the area of migration as it relates to law, international relations, and development. Lecturers are drawn from institutions such as:

The Research Group on Migration and Culture, University Mohammed V in Rabat
Fondation Orient- Occident
Advisory Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad
The Association of Friends and Families of Victims of Clandestine Migration
National Council for Human Rights
Moroccan Association of Human Rights
Institut des Etudes Africaines, University Mohammed V in Rabat
Association de Développement Local de Chefchaouen

Throughout the semester, students are deeply immersed in Moroccan society and culture. Homestays give students exposure to different Moroccan perspectives and daily life.

Asif Majid (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) studied on the SIT Morocco Migration program in fall 2011. He recently published a book entitled This Moroccan Life that was informed by his research and experiences on the program. Learn more.

People in Transit
Students on the Migration and Transnational Identity program examine how Morocco’s diverse human mobility has shaped, and continues to shape, the country's class and economic structures, ethnic and racial relations, and the overall tapestry of Moroccan culture and society.

Morocco has long been at the crossroads of human civilizations. Over thousands of years, successive civilizations have emigrated and settled in Morocco including the Phoenicians, Vandals, Byzantines, Carthaginians, Romans, and eventually Arab tribes who moved from Arabia. Moments of intense mobility can be traced back to Moroccans' migration to Andalusia, the waves of Andalusian Muslim and Jewish refugees who fled Europe in the wake of the Spanish reconquista and inquisition, and the migratory flux to Morocco from a number of European countries during the colonial expansion.

Since its independence in 1956, Morocco has been a major source of unskilled, and more recently skilled, labor for expanding European economies. Today, Europe is home to more than two million first-, second-, and third-generation Moroccans. More recently, Morocco has moved from being a mere "labor frontier" country for Europe to becoming a popular country of transit for sub-Saharan African migrants and is rapidly becoming a receiving country of immigrants, as well.

Browse this program's Independent Study Projects/Undergraduate Research