Moroccan expats return as economy grows

Employment ministers from 43 European and Mediterranean countries are meeting this week in Marrakech to talk about boosting jobs across a region increasingly tied together by the forces of globalisation.

Last month, growth projected at 5.8 per cent next year helped prompt the European Union to offer Morocco greater access to the EU market and emboldened Morocco’s finance ministry to propose a 2009 budget that trims income tax, raises government worker salaries and increases spending on health care and education.

Morocco still struggles with unemployment that the government estimates at 14 per cent in the cities. But while many young Moroccans seek their future abroad, a few are looking back at their country and seeing opportunity, reversing decades of endemic brain drain.

Morocco lost many emigrants in the 1960s and early 1970s, when guest-worker programmes in European countries allowed Moroccans to settle there easily. As European immigration policies have tightened, Moroccans have continued to flee their country – on student visas, tourist visas or on flimsy boats crossing the Strait of Gibraltar by night. Today some three million Moroccans and their descendants live abroad, mostly in western Europe.

“Now the tide is turning,” said Taji Eddine el Houssaini, an economics professor at Mohammed V University in Morocco’s capital, Rabat. “Moroccans abroad are deciding to come back. And these people bring their money and experience.”

“Young people are even beginning to go abroad with the intention of returning,” said Mohammed Mghari, a demographer at Morocco’s Centre for Demographic Research and Study. The trend is so recent that no firm data yet exist.Mr Amrani, the pilot, spotted the chance to make use of knowledge of the airline industry he has gained during nine years with American Airlines.

Morocco’s largely agricultural economy has been bolstered by the rising price of phosphates, of which it is the world’s top exporter, remittances and investment from Moroccans abroad and a booming tourism industry, said Mr Houssaini, the economics professor.

Morocco has so far weathered the global economic crisis but is bracing for a downturn in tourism, now one of the country’s key industries, said Faouzia Zaaboul, a senior finance ministry official.

In 2006 the government introduced a microcredit scheme aimed at university graduates that will be broadened to graduates of technical schools under the proposed 2009 budget. But so far only around 1,200 people have taken loans.

The National