Spain loses title as Moroccans' land of opportunity
Moroccans seeking economic opportunity used to flock to Spain, but with its economy tanking, Spain has less and less to offer them.
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“I’d only ever been a housewife,” Ms. Amrani says. “But with effort you can accomplish anything.”
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She is a bright, chipper woman who commands BAYSIM’s office from a desk in the main room. On the wall are large maps of France and Spain, where the company has many of its clients.
Back in Spain, things went downhill in 2008, when the housing bubble burst and the jobless rate started to climb. Immigrants have been among the hardest hit. Skilled and experienced, Benhima was relatively secure in his job, but in 2011 he quit.
At first he stayed in Spain, living on unemployment benefits that he eventually took as a lump sum to help launch a business in Madrid exporting building materials to North Africa. “Keeping a door open in Spain,” he explains. Then he looked toward Morocco.
“As you get older, and without a family, it’s harder to live outside your country,” he says. “And with the crisis, I saw that life in Spain was going to get worse.”
Early this year he resettled in Tangier, got married, and started working with Mrs. Amrani at BAYSIM.
Can Morocco handle returnees?
Morocco, however, has problems of its own. Its growth is expected to slow from 5 percent to about 3 percent this year. Last month it borrowed $300 million from the World Bank, the latest of several recent international loans, to fight unemployment.
For some in Tangier, those issues raise questions over Morocco’s ability to cope with more returnees should Spain’s crisis deepen.
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“Most of these people lack professional qualifications,” says Najib Sakkaki, a Tangier accountant and local representative of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights. “They don’t have capital – just basic experience in things like agriculture and construction.”
At Tangier’s Ramon y Cajal primary school, founded in colonial times by the Spanish government initially to serve expatriate families, director Francisco Ramirez is struggling with another complication: as Moroccan families have returned from Spain, waiting lists for the school have ballooned.
“These applications for the preschool level may be local,” he says, sweeping a hand over a waiting list displayed on his computer. “But all these others are from people who’ve come from abroad.”
One day Benhima’s 4-year-old niece, Nour, may face that predicament. For now, her parents have jobs at Madrid hotels.
Last month they sent Nour to visit her family at their apartment. One morning she was watching Spanish cartoons while around her the others began their day. Amrani left early for the office, Benhima’s sister Imane – visiting from studies in Britain - made breakfast, and Benhima got dressed for work.
He and his wife, Sana, are expecting their first child, and he dreams of opening a restaurant. He regards Spain with a mix of nostalgia and realism.
“I saw the problems in Spain,” he says. “Now I’m trying to start a new life in my mother country.”
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