Lorena Gazzotti has made a superb contribution to migration and border studies. Although Immigration Nation focuses expressly on Morocco and its border with Spain—and, by extension, the European Union—the work offers sharp comparative insight into broader trends concerning migration politics well beyond the Mediterranean. Borders display varying degrees of “thickness,” depending on their historical emergence and particular salience. In turn, people experience borders differently according to their status and proximity; one might encounter a border at quite a distance because of surveillance or anxieties, even though the actual line may be hundreds of miles away. Of course, despite borders being human constructs and artifices, they are also very real and profoundly impactful.

In Immigration Nation, Gazzotti teases out the ways in which the European Union’s use of foreign and development assistance accentuates Spain’s border with Morocco. Scholars have worked assiduously in recent decades to understand the externalization of international borders: the projection of borders into another, sovereign space to expand their purview and control into countries of “origin” and “transit.” Gazzotti’s unique contribution to this scholarship is the analysis of the complicated deployment of development aid and foreign assistance as a means of containment, well beyond the stark and violent display of fences, patrols, interdiction, and detention. In other words, development aid proffered by Europe and international agencies exercises a kind of vague and elusive soft power—a “slow border control” that complements and augments the violence of the physical border.

The work possesses so many crucial strengths, not least its careful attention to the actual experience of this development assistance. Gazzotti conducted extensive ethnographic research in Morocco’s “migration and aid industries”: the constellation of NGOs, IOs, INGOs, activists, attorneys, academics, and subcontractors in the capital Rabat, as well as other cities and rural areas in the country. Indeed, these industries also stretch outside Morocco into European, African, and North American spaces. Individuals and organizations within the migration industry certainly are motivated by genuine concern and sincere agendas, but they also respond to very real incentives and rents injected into the landscape. Moreover, Gazzotti does a wonderful job of maintaining human subjects’ protocols and ethics; she pseudonymizes individuals and organizations and is deeply cognizant of her own positionality as a “middle-class, white European woman at a… UK university” (p. 24) conducting research in Morocco. The book is informed with a humanness toward the subjects of her work and an attention to detail that reveals deep familiarity with Moroccan culture and society.

Additionally, Immigration Nation reflects a nuanced understanding of the powerful historicity of the subject: there is such a dynamism to Morocco’s experience with immigration vis-à-vis Europe. Indeed, the Spanish–Moroccan border itself is a recent invention; the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and control of the water passages to the Canary Islands and across the Strait of Gibraltar only emerged in the last few decades. In the 1960s, for example, the two presidios were sleepy backwaters. But as Spain experienced its post-Franco political transition and especially its entry into the EU in 1986, it became keener on rebordering itself as part of Europe. Modern high-tech fencing around the presidios was not installed until the late 1990s. And although these broad trends are decadal, things have changed over the course of a very few years. For example, the 2013 legislation approved by King Mohammed VI to reform Morocco’s immigration policy marked an abrupt departure from what had been operative during the previous decade. Gazzotti details the trajectory and external framing of Morocco by Europe and external analysts—from a country of emigration to being a “transit” country to its new status as an “immigration nation,” the title of the book.

Chapter 2, “How Morocco Became an ’Immigration Nation,’” is especially superb in treating the racialized discourses associated with “sub-Saharan,” “Black,” African,” and “irregular” migration. Europeans (and Moroccans, too) increasingly speak of immigration in Morocco in racialized terms, referring to the “new” population of “Black” migrants allegedly coming from West and Central Africa. Such discourse ignores the fact that European migrants to Morocco outnumber Africans in the official census.

Gazzotti details the cast of characters—the organizations and agencies in civil society that respond to and act on funding opportunities—to provide a full account of the drama. She argues that foreign assistance ultimately facilitates not only a wider externalization of Europe’s borders but also a deeper marginalization of immigrants. This is seemingly paradoxical because immigrants are receiving attention and care by the “migration industry.” Yet the book amply demonstrates that the support for migrants actually exacerbates their disregard. There is an added irony, too, in that assistance and care are provided in such a way that the providers themselves do not see their own complicity in marginalizing migrants. Gazzotti approvingly quotes gender theorist Sara Ahmed’s observation: “Power works by making it hard to challenge how power works” (p. 1). Immigrants within the country are disciplined by the migration industry into behaviors that will, the migration industry hopes, provide them with the aid they desperately need but that also undermines their integration into labor markets or the wider society. By being tagged as needing support, they are identified, stigmatized, and controlled. Immigration Nation also plumbs the perniciously symbiotic interplay between border violence around the presidios and the “humanitarian” response provided by aid and development workers. The “slow violence” (p. 12) at the border against migrants prompts the need for a benevolent reaction to that violence: the state commits violence and then supports efforts to help the victims of that violence. The result is a perpetual motion machine of power, as violent policies create the need for benevolent policies that facilitate further malevolence.

Similarly, Gazzotti describes how the state participates in the Assistance to Voluntary Return and Reintegration program administered by the International Migration Organization (IOM), which itself offers layers of irony and tragedy. In this program, migrants sign up voluntarily to be deported back to their country of origin, even as their capacity for choice and volition is deeply compromised. Morocco, for its part, also participates “voluntarily.” Morocco cooperates with the IOM, and the program is not imposed on the country per se, yet the monarchy receives aid and assistance to encourage its participation.

Immigration Nation is an excellent contribution to recent scholarship. It joins other superb analyses of migration politics in Morocco, such as Andersson’s Illegality, Inc. (2014), Norman’s Reluctant Reception (2020), and Iskander’s Creative State (2010). Such works similarly have relevance well beyond the Moroccan context. For its part, Gazzotti’s book provides a rich trove of insights and ongoing questions that will occupy scholars for quite some time.