Moroccan Immigrant Weighs Return Home After Two Decades in Spain

Hasna Laadimat’s family was one of the first of Moroccan origin to arrive in Calahorra (La Rioja), Spain in the early 2000s. "Some women and men had come before, but I think we were the first girls," Hasna recounts, behind the counter of her store. "I remember with what affection we were treated at the San Andrés school, from the teachers to the classmates," she adds.

The Moroccan woman notes an evolution of immigration in recent years. "Today, people with a more or less stable situation in Morocco are immigrating in search of a better life and to take care of their families; when we arrived, we didn’t even have a house in Morocco in my family," she says, specifying that the situation is very different nowadays and that "the standard of living in Morocco is no longer the same."

Hasna spent a month in Morocco this summer. "The problem when you’re an immigrant is that you’re from nowhere, they don’t understand your way of acting there and you don’t understand theirs either, and here you’re always a foreigner, no matter how you’re treated," she explains. And she adds: "I used to get angry when my mother told me that one day we would return to Morocco, but now I don’t rule out that possibility."

Morocco’s performance at the World Cup in Qatar has changed her mind. "I thought Spain was my home, I arrived here as a child, but with the treatment I received after the successes of the Moroccan national team, I realized that we will always be foreigners... Football took a back seat, so now I think that maybe one day I will return to Morocco," she said.