The communications office of Spain’s foreign ministry recently published data on the number of Moroccans who obtain visas, including students, pulling more than 220,000 in 2018. These figures are very dubious, it can even be said that they belong to Fake News par excellence.
The diplomatic office says it grants a thousand visas a day to Moroccans, that is, five thousand each week, which translates into 167 visas given by each consulate of the six Spanish consulates in Morocco, Tangier, Tetouan, Nador, Rabat, Casablanca and Agadir.
Firstly, the Spanish embassy in Rabat organised a conference on university cooperation in February 2019 and acknowledged that there are around five thousand Moroccan students in Spain. Limiting us to the data for 2018, this means that 1,000 students out of the 6,000 who have obtained a visa did not move to Spain to continue their careers
On the other hand, six thousand visas indicate that the Spanish language is booming in Morocco, while reality indicates the opposite. Proof of this, the conference organised last February at the Cervantes Institute in Rabat sought to save the teaching of Spanish in Morocco because Moroccans increasingly do not want to learn the language of Cervantes.
In the face of Moroccan criticism of the behaviour of some Spanish diplomatic delegations in Morocco, it seems that the Diplomatic Office invented these data in order to deceive Moroccan public opinion. Unfortunately, this data belongs to Fake News. Spain is one of the countries complaining about the Fake News phenomenon, but it is incomprehensible in Morocco.