Marrakech – More than one in ten residents of the Brussels-Capital Region was born with Moroccan nationality in 2025, Brussels Minister-President Boris Dilliès confirmed Monday evening. He delivered the figure as guest of honor at the annual gathering of Belgian association “Les Amis du Maroc” in the Belgian capital.
“This figure tells our common history,” Dilliès told attendees. He attributed the demographic weight to a bilateral labor migration agreement signed over 60 years ago, one that “profoundly shaped contemporary Belgium and Brussels in particular.”
That agreement, inked on August 17, 1964, made Morocco the first North African country to strike a guest worker deal with Belgium. Thousands of Moroccan men – mostly single – arrived to fill industrial labor shortages in mining, steel, and manufacturing.
The recruitment program was discontinued in 1974 amid the global recession and Belgium’s accelerating deindustrialization, but the community continued to grow through family reunification and natural population increase. By 2012, nearly 500,000 Moroccans had settled in Belgium, with almost half acquiring Belgian citizenship.
The numbers have only grown since. Based on Statbel’s 2020 origin statistics, secondary sources report that 556,365 people of Moroccan origin lived in Belgium on January 1, 2020, representing 4.8% of the national population and 8.8% of those under 18.
Since 2021, Belgo-Moroccans have constituted the largest community of foreign origin in the country. By 2022, Belgians of Moroccan descent accounted for roughly 13% of Brussels’ population alone.
The event brought together ministers, diplomats, elected officials, and figures from academia and civil society from both countries. Its focus: the role of the Moroccan community in economic, cultural, and human exchanges between the two kingdoms.
Dilliès framed the Morocco-Belgium relationship as one that defies institutional metrics. “There are relationships that cannot be reduced to statistics, conventions, or even institutional agreements.
The relationship between Belgium and Morocco is one of those,” he told the audience. What makes it distinctive, he added, is that it “is written in human relations, in neighborhoods, schools, and businesses” – a “very concrete reality.”
The minister-president also pointed to the partnership between the Brussels-Capital Region and Morocco’s Rabat-Salé-Kénitra region, active since 2001, and the oldest development cooperation arrangement Brussels maintains with any foreign partner.
It covers health, sport, environment, culture, and inclusion. Economic exchanges between Brussels and Morocco, he noted, are on a “particularly positive” trajectory, with a growing number of projects, investments, and joint ventures.
Morocco’s Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, Mohamed Ameur, placed the bilateral dynamic in a diplomatic frame. He referenced the joint declaration signed last October by both countries’ foreign ministers, calling it far more than a set of objectives on paper.
“This text reaffirmed absolute confidence and a shared determination to go even further, hand in hand, to meet the challenges of our time and elevate our bilateral relations to an unprecedented level,” Ameur told the gathering.
The ambassador also credited “Les Amis du Maroc” with filling a structural gap by giving “a voice and a face to civil society,” bringing together entrepreneurs, artists, researchers, and citizens who “make the Morocco-Belgium friendship a lived daily reality.”
Association president Geoffroy Generet described the organization as a space for dialogue and rapprochement. “In an international context often marked by tensions, misunderstandings, and identity-based retreats, it is more than ever necessary to promote bridges rather than walls, dialogue rather than mistrust, and cooperation rather than opposition,” he declared.
Belgium’s Minister of Security and Interior, Bernard Quintin, was also in attendance. The evening featured a tribute to Baron Francis Delpérée, the association’s former president, whose contributions to Morocco-Belgium relations were acknowledged by those present.
Read also: Belgian Report: More Moroccan-Belgians Are Choosing to Return to Morocco
