Morocco is a chokepoint along migrant trails connecting Africa to Europe. According to the Migration Policy Institute, some 700,000 sub-Saharan migrants currently reside in Morocco, stalled on their journey into the EU. What is life like for these migrants, and what histories inform Morocco’s migration policies? On this week’s episode of AFROFILES, we sit down with Dr. Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, a postdoctoral associate with the Council on African Studies and a faculty fellow in the Center for Race Indigeneity and Transnational Migration at Yale. She has published numerous articles on borders, race, and migration in the Eur-African borderlands, and is currently working on her first book project entitled Bordering Blackness: The Production of Race in the Morocco-EU Immigration Regime.

Music from RYYZN, Andrés Cantú, and José Barrios.