Europe is braced for more explosive debate over immigration and open borders after an estimated 49,000 migrants crossed into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco in the past 24 hours via land and sea.
Italy’s most senior politicians have called for Spain to be kicked out of Europe’s Schengen zone, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on X that she was “prepared to take action – including extraordinary measures – to defend our borders and ensure citizens’ safety”. Spain’s Interior Ministry blamed human trafficking networks for encouraging the latest crossings, saying criminal organisations had exploited a recent Supreme Court ruling to lure more migrants, particularly young people, into attempting the journey.
Spain’s Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that migrants intercepted at sea while attempting to reach Ceuta or Melilla cannot be summarily returned under the enclaves’ special border-rejection regime. “It has been a slow trickle since the Supreme Court’s ruling, but today has been an explosion,” a Guardia Civil spokesperson said on Reuters.
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The tiny Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla sit on the northern shores of Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. Together they form the European Union’s only land borders with Africa. “It’s not yet clear what prompted this surge in illegal crossings from Morocco, or how hard the authorities there tried to prevent it,” said the BBC. But at one point, a Spanish official said the border was in total collapse.
Just a week ago, Jessika Roswall, a centre-right European commissioner, “painted an idyllic image of the Schengen area, praising the ‘seamless journeys’ made possible by ‘decades of European cooperation’”, said Eddy Wax on Euractiv. But “that Brussels fantasy has now been smashed apart”. Italy has “always been quick to clamour for EU solidarity when faced with inflows of migrants at its own borders” but Meloni “has particular form” for exploiting the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s woes while “boosting his far-right adversaries”.
She “challenged him at the last EU leaders’ summit over his move to regularise hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants” and last night, Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, “alleged the policy itself was a pull factor”. That drew “a stern rebuke” from Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, said Joe Stanley-Smith on Politico but the policy “has proven hugely contentious, both domestically and at a European level”.
“A young person leaving, sometimes with their parents’ consent, is a guarantee that they will send money back to their family,” sociologist Ali Zoubeidi said in Le Monde. “The Spanish government’s announcement [in April] of the regularisation of 500,000 undocumented migrants may also have encouraged young people to try to reach Ceuta.”
The situation “may also have been exacerbated by an event that suggests Rabat could have deliberately loosened controls at Ceuta’s border”, said Le Monde. Sánchez’s recent visit to Morocco’s regional rival Algeria, reportedly upset those in Rabat. For Abdullah Abaakil, deputy secretary of the Moroccan Unified Socialist Party, there is no doubt it played a role: “The Moroccan authorities clearly let them through,” he said. “There is a suspicious trend of using migration and the despair of young people to embarrass the Spanish government and to send a message when they are dissatisfied.”
What next?
Spain and Morocco have agreed to return all migrants to Morocco and Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said the two countries would intensify joint efforts to combat irregular migration, describing cooperation with Morocco as “exemplary”.
Though Italy has called for closing the open-border Schengen agreement with Spain, the countries “do not share a land border, so Italy would likely need to get other European countries on board to be able to enforce this”, said the BBC.
But the crisis has intensified calls for further action on immigration from the bloc. Manfred Weber, president of the European Parliament’s largest political grouping – the centre-right European People’s Party – called for tougher action. “This proves one thing: the Migration Pact and return regulation must be enforced today, not tomorrow,” he said on X.
