Seven Months Later

Perhaps I'm too much of a Western American libertarian for my own good, but I find governments' need to keep track of the humans within its borders a little ridiculous.

Of course, when it comes to the state of Arizona, home of Western libertarian and former Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, other considerations have trumped the privacy that comes with responsible individualism. One wonders what Goldwater would have said about his state's new law.

Immigration concerns cause excessive government surveillance of its citizens and residents in all developed countries--restrictions and obstacles that are rightly criticized by developing countries and human rights workers.

Of course, like much of the rhetoric of human rights across that cultural, economic and religious divide, it smacks of hypocrisy. Morocco really isn't much different from Arizona, except that the kind of profiling encouraged by law is of a different tenor. The police are still encouraged to profile and follow foreign-looking folks, but the reasoning is quite different. Foreigners in Morocco must be protected by the police to provide a good climate for tourism, the lifeblood of this developing economy. Of course, police observation sometimes serves a different purpose. Should foreigners talk about their religion with Moroccans or cross some as yet hard-to-define line in their religiously-motivated care for Moroccans, they will be expelled from the country. But as long as they are just here to spend money, the police presence is for their benefit.

Some in Morocco suspect anyone who stays longer than a quick tourist visit is an evangelist or pedophile. As a teacher of English, naturally, I fall into that category.

For whatever reason the Moroccan government, like many governments around the world, wants to keep tabs on my me and my co-workers. So in October I submitted a large number of documents. At two other times in the past two months, I have had to submit the same documents in different forms with different stamps.

Fortunately, these long bureaucratic processes eventually have an end. So today, seven months after the submission of my original documentation and after dozens of expulsions of my fellow foreigners--some justified; others unjustified, I now have my carte de sejour testifying that I am now a legal resident of Morocco. I have a little card that shows that I have complied with the government's need to know about its resident foreigners.

Go me.