Life & Wisdom Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Ben Jelloun’s line carries the quiet urgency of someone who’s watched “migration” get flattened into a policy problem, a border spectacle, a culture-war punchline. He doesn’t romanticize movement or scold those who leave. He rewrites the moral center of the conversation: the scandal isn’t that people cross; it’s that they feel they must.

The intent is pragmatic on purpose. “Investment” and “create work” sound like development-speak, but in a poet’s mouth they’re also an ethical demand: dignity should be locally available, not imported at the price of rupture. The phrase “so people don’t have to leave” is the emotional payload. Leaving is framed as compulsion, not adventure - a last resort that drains communities of the young and ambitious while feeding a European narrative of “pressure” and “threat.”

The subtext also needles the hypocrisies of the North: if richer countries want fewer arrivals, the humane answer isn’t higher walls, it’s shared prosperity. Yet Ben Jelloun avoids blaming rhetoric. He names “countries like Morocco,” a tactful acknowledgment that responsibility is shared between domestic governance and global economic asymmetries. “Hope” matters here: not naive optimism, but a refusal to let the only imaginable future be departure.

Contextually, it sits inside decades of Maghrebi experience with labor migration to Europe, remittances that prop up families, and the psychic cost of exile - themes threaded through Francophone North African literature. Ben Jelloun distills that history into one clean proposition: the right to stay is as important as the right to move.