M’hamed Karmouni, General Secretary of the Ministry of Employment and Social Development in Morocco, explains the strategy his country has just adopted on emigration, for its own nationals and also for foreigners who travel to Europe via Morocco.

MK: We would like their rights to be better protected abroad, but we also want to maintain our cultural and religious ties with them, to help them keep up both cultures, their own and that of the host country. This is all the more important insofar as many Moroccans, when they reach a certain age, want to return home. Furthermore, we want to encourage our citizens living abroad to invest their savings in Morocco; at the same time we are worried about the "brain drain", which is depriving us of part of our future elite.

MK: The questions raised by emigration and immigration will be resolved only by genuine co-operation between all the countries concerned. In the economic sphere, we would like European countries to invest more in the regions most affected by migration, to enable people to stay at home instead of emigrating; this would solve both problems: emigration and immigration.

MK: Geographically our country is the ideal crossing point from Africa to Europe. We have become a country of transit and that raises problems of accommodation, health and safety. We have developed a whole programme of measures to combat the traffickers who smuggle people over from Morocco, and I would like to remind you that two-thirds of the people who enter Europe illegally via Morocco are not Moroccan. Here again, we are in no position to combat these phenomena on our own. So we would appreciate being consulted on all decisions concerning immigration policies in Europe.

MK: We have already invested a lot to curb illegal immigration and transit, but we would like Europe to give us practical support in this field. We must remember that not only Morocco but the whole world is concerned by migration and the problems will not be solved until North/South imbalances have been ironed out, particularly through sustainable development.