Rabat – Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita listed the impact of COVID-19 on migration.
The Moroccan FM delivered a speech during the intergovernmental conference for the African Regional Review on the implementation of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration.
Bourita’s speech addressed several challenges migrants experience, including COVID-19 impacts and consequences.
“While its economic and social consequences have increased the precariousness of migrant workers, it has also slowed down mobility in general,” Bourita argued.
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the world’s governments to take a set of preventive measures, including the closure of international borders.
“The closure of borders has dried up migration routes for a time, making crossings even more perilous,” he said.
Meanwhile, the impact of COVID-19 appears not to have stopped human trafficking networks from continuing their illegal operations.
According to the Moroccan FM, COVID-19 not only destroyed smuggling networks but also “other merchants of misery.”
Like Morocco, many other governments believe that COVID-19 made migration management more “complex.”
The crisis, however, allowed countries to take advantage of the benefits and efficiency the Marrakech Global Compact adopted in Marrakech can offer.
“The crisis has strongly emphasized the importance of regularizing the situation of migrants, and the need to guarantee their access to social security – and security at all,” he said.
Bourita also highlighted Morocco’s commitment to the Global Compact for Migration, listing a number of initiatives the North African country launched to improve conditions of migrants.
One of the initiatives was the National Immigration and Asylum Strategy that Morocco launched in 2013.
“With the launch of the approach, Morocco intended it to be both “responsible and supportive, in line with the approach it advocated for in the African Agenda for Migration in January 2018 and the Global Compact in December of the same year,” Bourita said.
The Moroccan FM also supported Africa’s strategy to tackle migration, saying that the continent positioned itself as a central actor in the implementation of the Global Compact.
The global compact for migration set up 23 objectives for better managing migration at global, regional, local, and national levels.
One of the compact’s goals is to mitigate the “adverse drivers and structural factors that hinder people from building and maintaining sustainable livelihoods in their countries of origin.”
The objectives also intend to reduce the risk and vulnerabilities migrants face at different stages of migration by respecting, protecting, and fulfilling their human rights and providing them with care and assistance.
