In late August of 1989, a Spanish immigration officer observed the crush of Moroccans returning to Europe by ferry from Tangier at the end of their summer vacations. Morocco is becoming to Spain what Mexico is to the United States, he complained (qtd. in Riding 1989). For decades, Moroccan migrants had pushed on through to Europe’s wealthier countries, but as Spain’s economy started to expand, Moroccans began to stay and fill the growing demand for cheap labor. They took the same kinds of menial jobs in Spain’s fields, factories, restaurants, and homes that they had worked in for more than a generation in France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. These jobs were strikingly similar to the low wage jobs, an ocean away, which Mexicans crossed into the United States to fill. Morocco added Spain to the list of countries to which it could export its unemployed youth and also, when possible, the men that made up the political opposition that mounted occasional but serious threats to Morocco’s fragile monarchy. Meanwhile, Mexico continued to let millions of its unemployed and underemployed seep north past its border, just as it had for over twenty years, its autocratic one-party government quietly grateful for the economic relief as the country lurched from crisis to crisis.
