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\n Photo by Adri Salido\/Getty Image<\/p>\n
\n Photo by Adri Salido\/Getty Image<\/p>\n
It remains unclear why over 50,000 Moroccans were able to cross into the fortified Spanish exclave of Ceuta last Thursday (30 July). The European right immediately blamed Pedro S\u00e1nchez, Spain\u2019s left-wing prime minister. Manfred Weber, the leader of the European People\u2019s Party (EPP), the centre-right group in the European Parliament, declared that the incident was \u201cthe direct consequence of the pull factor of massive regularisation\u201d \u2013 a reference to a decision by the S\u00e1nchez government earlier this year to allow some undocumented immigrants to apply to regularise their status. S\u00e1nchez himself said the surge into Ceuta was the result of confusion about a recent Spanish supreme court decision restricting the government\u2019s ability to deport those who arrived in Ceuta and Melilla (the other Spanish exclave in north Africa) by sea.<\/p>\n
Others blamed the Moroccan government and said that such a sudden surge into Ceuta could not have happened without its help. Some reports even suggested that Moroccan authorities had actually encouraged people to cross into Ceuta, which was acquired by Portugal in 1415 and can be thought of as the place where European colonialism began. A few weeks ago, S\u00e1nchez visited Algeria \u2013 with which Morocco has a competitive and fractious relationship \u2013 and promised a closer relationship and discussed importing more Algerian gas. A similar surge into Ceuta occurred in 2021 after Spain provided medical assistance to a leader of the Western Sahara independence movement, which Morocco opposes. In short, Morocco was \u201cweaponising\u201d migration \u2013 something that the European Union has also accused Belarus and Turkey of doing.<\/p>\n
Whatever the explanation, the number of Moroccans who made it to Ceuta was relatively small. In that sense, the situation is not at all comparable to the refugee crisis in 2015, when over a million asylum seekers arrived in Germany. (If it\u2019s comparable to anything from that crisis, it is the situation at Keleti railway station in Budapest in September 2015, when several thousand people gathered, trying to get to Germany.) In any case, most of those who made it into Ceuta seem now to have gone back \u2013 apparently they either had no intention of getting into the EU or quickly realised that they would not be able to. To the extent that there was a crisis, it is already over.<\/p>\n
Predictably, however, the far right in both Europe and the United States immediately spoke of an \u201cinvasion\u201d not just of Spain but of Europe as a whole, which had lost control of its borders and was now being overwhelmed. The incident in Ceuta quickly merged in far-right minds with the terrorist attack on the Berlin Pride parade the previous weekend as part of a general sense of threat from Muslim men \u2013 Spain\u2019s left-wing government had opened its borders and was allowing tens of thousands of potential terrorists into Europe.<\/p>\n
Subscribe to the New Statesman this summer – 2 months for only \u00a32 <\/p>\n The reason why an incident like this could be turned into a European crisis at all is Schengen, which is usually referred to as the EU\u2019s border-free zone but is actually a zone without border checks<\/a>, something slightly distinct. (This should not be confused with the principle of freedom of movement within the EU, which is something quite different again \u2013 not least because it only applies to citizens of member states.) This means that, at least in theory, once a migrant is in one Schengen country, they can travel on to any other country in the Schengen area, which includes most of the EU (and also some countries outside the EU). If countries like Morocco are \u201cweaponising\u201d migration against the EU, it is Schengen \u2013 and Europeans\u2019 fear of a repeat of the refugee crisis of 2015 \u2013 that enables them to do so.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net\/2021\/09\/TNS_master_logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
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