The Moroccan diaspora in northern Europe is intimately connected to the history of coal mining. Recruited as expendable labor to close down an industry on its last legs, Moroccan men forged ties of solidarity across ethnic and religious lines, participated in transformative labor politics, and laid the groundwork for a multi-generational community which would survive—in radically transformed fashion—the closure of the mines. This paper explores the emergent infrastructures of employment (including diplomatic accords, legal statutes, recruitment personnel, transportation logistics, medical services, language/cultural training, and housing construction) dialogically assembled by state officials, mining federations, and Moroccan workers, and their unexpected consequences for both recruiters and the recruited. Contrasting the cases of France and Belgium, the paper highlights the implicit ethnographic knowledge brought to bear in the management of the “Moroccan worker” as an object of hope, but also of anxiety and intervention. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in the ruins of these former mining communities, the paper concludes with an examination of how these prior socio-political formations have become an object of nostalgia for both states and younger Moroccans who each see in them a moment of relative intra- and trans-national “integration” in contrast with a present of neo-nationalism and exclusion.