Growing up, the “migrant crisis” that had dominated news cycles, political campaigns and popular culture was an image of refugees traversing oceans, arriving to European shores, or crossing the southern border of the U.S. Lost in a discourse that so often robs displaced populations of their humanity, dignity and protections under international law, there is a different empirical reality. Three-quarters of the world’s refugees are hosted by nations in the Global South; 80% of the world’s refugee population is hosted by nations that represent 19% of the world’s income combined. When attempting to conduct background research on my summer prospectus, I was continuously surprised by the lack of scholarship dedicated to studying South-South migration. After all, migration management in the Global South is made exponentially more complicated through hastily drawn colonial borders, resource-poor economies, and ongoing territorial and political conflicts.

I began my Grand Strategy summer research in Marrakech, Morocco. In the Jemaa el-Fnaa Square, I spent nearly each day of my trip walking through a never-ending marketplace, the Medina’s thousand-year-old history on full display. In French — a remnant of Morocco’s lengthy period under colonial occupation — a seller would boast his collection of Amazigh ceramics. Elsewhere in the Medina, in slightly different French accents, a Senegalese restaurant served fresh mafé viande and yassa poulet to tourists and locals alike. Its owners, greeting visitors warmly in five different languages, had arrived in Morocco from Dakar in the early 2000s. From time to time, they said they’ve experienced difficulties gaining employment or faced remarks about their immigrant background — they say, “But most people here are good people; we are all African here in the end.” As I learned, they are among the estimated hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan African migrants living in Morocco, primarily in Rabat and Marrakech. Though they had initially arrived in Morocco via clandestine entry, they later became legal residents of the country through King Mohammed VI’s National Strategy on Integration and Asylum.

Since 2014, the Moroccan government has led integration campaigns attempting to register irregular or undocumented migrants in the country. In sharp contrast to neighboring Maghreb states, Morocco has adopted a pro-immigration approach to naturalizing a growing number of sub-Saharan migrants from Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Throughout the course of my research, I observed migration patterns mirroring those of European states — in which labor-intensive, lower-paying jobs are outsourced to incoming migrants. At the mid-afternoon call to prayer at the Moulay El Yazid Mosque, I watched Muslims of nearly every background enter the prayer room together. For many sub-Saharan migrants, life in Morocco comes with its own set of challenges. But as most of the people I encountered told me, it is where they have found community, acceptance, shared faith, language, and stable employment. It is home.

My research would have been incomplete without examining the role Europe has continued to play in Moroccan history, foreign policy, and migration governance. The European Union has increasingly incentivized North African states to integrate their own migrant flows, while simultaneously positioning them as “gatekeepers” to European shores. Along Morocco’s western and northern shorelines, I learned that migrants were often detained or halted from exiting Moroccan borders illicitly; the Moroccan Royal Armed Forces have stopped close to 90,000 migrants annually. As I learned from Caminando Fronteras, thousands of sub-Saharan migrants had previously died between Morocco and the Canary Islands. In turn, the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) has committed €234 million in funding to support migration governance in Morocco. Perhaps due both to the Moroccan government’s pro-integration approach to South-South migration and a European-funded outsourcing of migration management, Morocco is not merely a transit point into Europe — many migrants have chosen to begin a new life there instead.

At the end of my research trip, I returned to Ottawa, Canada, to begin my internship with the Canadian Border Services Agency’s Irregular Migration and National Security Desk. At its national headquarters, I began to understand migration through a new lens. I spent the latter half of the summer conducting open-source research and gained new insights into how irregular migration patterns impact border management and national security in Western states. But my time in Morocco remained with me, reaffirming the need to place greater emphasis on South-South migration governance and the importance of migration-focused research on the post-colonial Global South. The majority of the world’s poorest, newly independent, and underdeveloped states do not have the robust migration management infrastructure that the Canadian Border Services Agency does — and those are the states that require it the most. Together, my summer experiences underscored the importance of understanding migration beyond simplistic South-North narratives and bridging the gap in scholarly research on the South-South corridors.

Morocco, in many ways, is an anomaly. I was born in Pakistan, a state from which over 500,000 undocumented Afghan refugees have been deported back to Taliban-controlled territory since last year. Against allegations of widespread abuse and coercion, Pakistani authorities cite perceived security risks, economic strain, and the political challenge of maintaining large refugee populations. For me, the Moroccan contrast underscored the varied approaches to migration and asylum within the Global South, highlighting diverging regional contexts. While Morocco has pursued a relatively progressive stance on integration, other nations grapple with their own sets of challenges and constraints, reflecting the broader struggle to balance humanitarian responsibilities with national economic interests and national identity.

Both in the Global South and beyond, border sovereignty is important to the strength and security of a state. It is simultaneously imperative to remember the everyday, human costs of irregular migration for the more than 100 million people forcibly displaced from their homes globally. South-North migration remains a pertinent policy and humanitarian concern and one that deserves our attention. However, migration governance requires a historicized understanding of post-colonial borderlines beyond Europe and North America, conflicts birthed from imperial legacies, and the ways it strains the dignity and livelihoods of the people caught within them.