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Transnational Social Relationships of International Retirement Migrants in Morocco: A Typology

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Retirement Migration to the Global South

Abstract

Claudio Bolzman, Tineke Fokkema and Danique van Dalen explore the social relationships of Swiss, Dutch and Belgian international retirement migrants (IRMs) in Morocco—specifically, who they have contact with and the nature of the interactions (e.g., egalitarian/hierarchical, trustful/mistrustful, unidimensional/multidimensional). Their analysis of 18 biographical interviews shows that retirees who emigrated for similar reasons tend to have similar relationships. Based on this finding, they developed a typology structured by the migration motives and the corresponding relationship structures.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Migration of Swiss, Dutch and Belgian nationals is still rather modest though. In 2017 there were 1495 Swiss living in Morocco, 342 (one fifth) older than 65 (OFS, 2017). The only figures we could find on Dutch and Belgians living in Morocco are from 2010. In that year, there were 1018 Belgians and 300 Dutch officially living in Morocco (Khachani, 2011). The number of Europeans living in Morocco is probably underestimated by official figures. Many European residents do not necessarily declare their residence to their home country’s consulate or to the Moroccan authorities. In fact, foreigners have two types of administrative status: either they are officially residents and have a residence permit, which allows them access to local facilities such as opening a bank account in the local currency, or they are “tourists”, in other words they live in Morocco with a tourist visa, which only allows them to stay in the country for three months at a time. The visa is extendable once in theory but many more times in practice, and requires them to leave the country to renew it. Many European residents choose this second option and are invisible to official statistics (Terrazzoni, 2015).

  2. 2.

    The Swiss research team consisted of Claudio Bolzman and Ibrahima Guissé. The Dutch research team consisted of Tineke Fokkema and Danique van Dalen with the collaboration of a pool of students (transcription and coding).

  3. 3.

    We also interviewed Europeans who arrived at a younger age, but since we focus on IRMs they are not included in the chapter.

  4. 4.

    Francophone Belgians were not included because interviewers from the Dutch team do not speak fluent French.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Work, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland, Geneva, Switzerland

    Claudio Bolzman

  2. Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)-KNAW/University of Groningen, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Tineke Fokkema

  3. Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Tineke Fokkema

  4. Department of Political and Social Sciences, Institute of Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Danique van Dalen

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  1. Claudio Bolzman
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Correspondence to Tineke Fokkema .

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  1. Institute of Education, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany

    Cornelia Schweppe

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Bolzman, C., Fokkema, T., van Dalen, D. (2022). Transnational Social Relationships of International Retirement Migrants in Morocco: A Typology. In: Schweppe, C. (eds) Retirement Migration to the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6999-6_7

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