Should Moroccans Residing Abroad (MRE) be Considered as Tourists?

"Adopting a double standard towards Moroccans of the world is illogical," said Moncef El Toub, a deputy from the Istiqlal group of unity and egalitarianism, before asking: "Why, when we talk about Moroccans of the world, do we say that they contribute to the inflow of foreign currency, while when it comes to tourism, we ask to exclude them?" The parliamentarian insists: "Moroccans of the world are the number one tourists. Don’t they spend? Don’t they travel within Morocco? Don’t they stay in hotels? Moroccans of the world are a priority, and it is legitimate to include them in tourism figures, as they are an integral part of it."

In her intervention preceding her colleague’s, Deputy Salwa El Bardaï from the parliamentary group of the Party of Justice and Development (PJD) argued that the inclusion of MREs in the total number of tourists arriving in the kingdom "distorts the figures in a non-objective way." "The Ministry of Tourism congratulates itself on every occasion for having attracted 15 million tourists. Certainly, this is an important figure, but we must ask where the problem lies," she said. And she questioned the Minister of Tourism: "In your official statements, you always count Moroccans of the world among the tourists who have visited Morocco, which has brought the number of arrivals to 13 million at the end of last August. But when you presented the statistics for 2019, at the time when the PJD was leading the government, you had not included them."

Another parliamentarian raised the issue of the soaring prices of air tickets for Moroccans of the world, stressing that "the fourth generation of migrants is no longer easily attracted to Morocco, and incentives must be offered to them before they are definitively lost." In response to these questions, the Minister of Tourism recalled that "for the past 25 years, the Moroccan community has represented about 45% of the total number of tourists visiting Morocco, and this is a common practice that we maintain." The official specified that in "France and Portugal, diasporas are also counted among the tourists, and in some countries, their number even exceeds that of foreign tourists."