Within hours of the first pictures of tens of thousands of migrants swimming the short distance from Morocco to the Spanish north African enclave of Ceuta hitting social media on 30 July, 22 European Union leaders, the Trump administration and Israel had piled on to criticise Madrid.
The outbreak of hysteria and recrimination was a case study in 21st-century politics, driven by real-time images in a media echo chamber where populists set the agenda on migration, propagating fear, prejudice and demagogic proposals. Above all, the kneejerk reactions undermined trust between European allies and dealt a setback to EU efforts to jointly manage migration, counter people-smuggling and resist the weaponisation of migrants by non-EU countries.
That Donald Trump and JD Vance should seize the opportunity to accuse socialist Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez of inviting the mass influx by allowing more than 1 million irregular migrants already working in Spain to apply for legal status is hardly surprising, given the US administration’s own relentless drive to detain and expel illegal immigrants.
On the other hand, European leaders who signed a letter to the European Commision, criticising Spain and demanding an emergency meeting of interior ministers, should ask themselves how their behaviour helps the EU implement a coherent response to migratory pressures. Many are open to charges of hypocrisy, since Germany and Italy have, between them, regularised hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrant workers at the request of employers who need their labour as the home workforce dwindles.
There was also a monstrous foreign policy double standard in the initial EU response.
When Poland and Lithuania faced a sudden influx of irregular migrants from Belarus in 2021, the EU rallied behind its eastern members and imposed sanctions on Minsk’s authoritarian regime, which stood accused of weaponising displaced people from the Middle East. The previous year, the EU sent its Frontex border agency to help Greece repel a surge of migrants from Turkey at the countries’ shared border in Thrace, which had apparently been encouraged by Ankara to put pressure on the EU.
Yet this time, EU governments quickly fell into a divisive blame game, terrified by images that recalled the loss of control over borders in south-eastern Europe in 2015, when more than 1 million mostly Syrian refugees entered the bloc. Amid the internal finger-pointing, neither the EU leaders nor the European Commission dared question the role of Morocco, whose border guards apparently stood aside as more than 72,000 Moroccans, mostly young men, risked their lives swimming to Ceuta after seeing viral social media claims that “Spain is open”.
The incident occurred on Morocco’s annual Throne Day when King Mohammed VI, who does not recognise Spanish sovereignty over the territories of Ceuta and Melilla, just happened to be visiting the nearby northern city of Tétouan, once part of the Spanish protectorate. Some commentators have called the stampede to Ceuta a “Blue March”, in reference to the mass Green March that the king’s father, Hassan II, launched in 1975 in an attempt to claim the vast territory of Western Sahara, then a Spanish colony.
“In Morocco, nothing happens by chance,” says Anna Terrón Cusí, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and a former Spanish secretary of state for immigration. Even if the stampede to Ceuta started spontaneously with social media posts, she believes “this was a multi-actor, multi-factor event. It was more a geopolitical than a migration crisis.”
Intra-European party politics played a big role. It was not surprising that the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, should lead the assault on Sánchez. She heads up the hard-right Brothers of Italy movement and faces a domestic challenge in elections next year from a new, even further-right party, led by a retired general.
Some Spanish and UK anti-immigration politicians rushed to Ceuta to take selfies, one from Reform UK doing a standup interview on the beach to cash in on the purported alien “invasion”.
It was more bizarre that Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen, who heads a centre-left government, should co-initiate with Meloni the letter to Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, and say that the EU should consider suspending Spain from the Schengen area of open-border travel.
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A facade of European solidarity was restored after EU interior ministers held a hastily arranged videoconference. By that time, almost all the migrants had left Ceuta and returned to Morocco after realising that they had no chance of reaching Europe. The “invasion” had deflated. In fact, irregular migrant arrivals in Spain fell sharply last year, while across the EU they’re down for the second successive year, and far below the 2015 crisis peak. But the damage was done.
Italy and Spain are now engaging in tit-for-tat passport and nationality controls on each other’s travellers, and Russian president Vladimir Putin, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and King Mohammed himself will have noted how easily Europe panics and turns on its own members at the first sight of migrants on its beaches.
Whether out of misinformation or malice, some EU ministers distorted the nature of the Spanish amnesty for undocumented migrants, labelling it a “pull factor” for mass migration. Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, claimed they were being granted Spanish and therefore European citizenship, rather than simply being given a chance to apply for temporary work visas.
Europe faces what in game theory is called the “prisoners’ dilemma”, and in social sciences a “collective action problem” . EU countries have a shared interest in preserving the Schengen zone of free movement, with open internal borders vital to the smooth operation of the economy, well-managed external borders to deter irregular migrants and combat people smugglers, and legal migration routes to permit an inflow of workers needed by businesses as the European population ages and shrinks.
Yet they keep undermining cooperation due to a seemingly irresistible short-term political interest in anti-migration grandstanding.
