"Symbolic im-mobility'', "semantic dis-placements" and the politics of unauthorised migration representation in Moroccan and Algerian mainstream media

Notwithstanding the pervading mobility-cherishing globalisation rhetoric, all kinds of borders characterise the 21st century world, hence the need to dis-place critical attention from ‘mobility’ to ‘immobility’ narratives. Since the establishment of the Schengen regime, hundreds of thousands of people from both ends of the African continent have undertaken perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea in a bid to enter a borderless European Union. Although the word ‘journey’ implies movement, when examined from the perspective of (North) African unauthorised migrations, it entails moments of stasis, inertia and consequent forms of dis-placement. Based on this premise, this chapter examines contemporary representations of the phenomenon of unauthorised migration in Moroccan and Algerian media between 2015 and 2019. It pays particular attention to the ways in which the discursive strategies and narrative constructions used by public authorities and media agencies contribute in further ‘ immobilising’ or ‘confining’ unauthorised migrants or ‘harraga’- as they are referred to in the Maghrebi dialects- within specific frames of reference and (dis) articulating their complex individual migratory experiences. The first section elaborates the argument that although Morocco and Algeria have cooperated with the EU to varying degree on migration management, they have nonetheless contributed-through their border policies, practices and discourses- to the reinforcement of the (North) African-EU ‘immobility regime’. Drawing on Kevin Smet’s concept of ‘symbolic immobility’ which he defines as “the experience of being confined in particular symbolic mediated representations’’(2019:5) and Arjun Appadurai’s conception of ‘metonymic freezing’ (2008) or ‘representational essentialism’, this chapter foregrounds and analyses migrant immobility tropes and the discursive ‘traps’ to which both Sub-Saharan and Maghrebi unauthorised migrants tend to fall prey in the hegemonic narratives produced by Moroccan and Algerian mainstream media institutions. By adopting a Critical Narrative reading- resulting from a combination of Critical Discourse and Narrative Analysis tools- the second section offers a rather comprehensive, though non-exhaustive, examination of a multimodal corpus of news narratives in both French and Arabic, encompassing a wide array of internet-based texts and National TV news footages around unauthorised migration in government-owned media outlets in Morocco and Algeria. In so doing, it attempts to excavate on the one hand, these two Maghrebi countries’ (mis) uses and ‘abuses’ of derogatory terminology and deconstruct thereby their politics of ‘labelling’ the migrant. On the other hand, it looks into the different strategies that they use to ‘scapegoat’ the latter through ‘pathology’ and ‘pollution’-related imagery so as to ‘dis-place’ attention away from their own violent border practices and, by extension, conceal their ‘crisis’ of migration management and migrant hospitality. Thus, this chapter demonstrates that by symbolically ‘immobilising’ and semantically dis-placing unauthorised migrants, Moroccan and Algerian hegemonic media discourses tend to reduce them into frightening labels, ‘floating’ numbers, scapegoated bodies and figures in/of ‘crisis’. The chapter concludes with a critical reflection on the extent to which these two Maghrebi countries’ politics of migrant representation tend to reproduce the historical tropes and the racialised stereotypes used by their former European colonisers, enacting thereby an act of double ‘symbolic violence’.