Under normal political conditions within modern capitalism migration fulfils a function of socio-economic regulation within local societies. Mobility develops as one of a number of social responses of particular populations as part of complex livelihood strategies. But migration and mobility are not open to everyone. The relationship of particular populations to national and international space is complex. Official approaches to migration in Morocco tend to consider the impacts of migration as ‘statistical aggregates’, abstract and detached from the local context and history of the group. The resulting vision of migration is usually either overly negative, associated with the misery it produces, such as rural exodus associated with growing urban poverty, or overly positive, focusing on international migration and remittances. This paper attempts to put migration in context, in the lives of the groups affected by the territorial reconfiguration and social reproduction provoked by migration. This more grounded anthropological approach enables us to see migration in relation to the weight of historical context and the mechanisms of social change which provoke migration and to which it contributes.
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Agoumy et al. (2009) studied this question.