RASHED AWAD ALKETBI
The Spanish enclave of Ceuta has been at the forefront of the European scene for 10 days, after as many as 50,000 people crossed into it from Morocco in a single day at the end of July.
According to Spanish officials' own count, this is a massive influx for a city with a population of 85,000. This crisis has gone well beyond Spain to the agreements that have governed Mediterranean movement for a decade.
What began as a rumour on social media, fuelled by confusion over a court ruling concerning the prompt repatriation of migrants, within hours hardened into a human wave: young men wading through the surf at dawn, climbing the breakwaters and flooding past a border force built for lesser numbers.
Madrid sent in the armed forces. At least 72 people died, and the toll has continued to rise. Within days, almost all were back in Morocco, in what Moroccan rights organisations called “mass pushbacks” and Madrid levelled “voluntary”.
The political interpretation, which was based on precedent, emerged more quickly than the humanitarian one. In May 2021, roughly 8,000 people entered Ceuta over two days, while Rabat was furious that Madrid had admitted the leader of the Polisario Front for medical treatment.
Within months, Spain had dropped its historic support for a referendum in Western Sahara and endorsed Morocco's autonomy plan instead. That lesson was already in place, regardless of what transpired last week.
Morocco has never publicly acknowledged using migration as an instrument of pressure, and this time blamed criminal networks, as did Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
It is impossible to read any of this in isolation from a pattern that took years to develop. Since 2021, Brussels has described the movement of people towards the Polish frontier as "hybrid warfare" and the "instrumentalisation of migrants", and sanctioned Minsk for it, while Warsaw's walls, sensors and emergency laws have reduced attempted crossings by about 96%.
In March, Türkiye marked the 10th anniversary of the agreement that closed the Aegean route, a lever that Ankara has never shied away from mentioning.
The traffic flows both ways. With a package of 7.4 billion euros for Egypt, 1.1 billion euros for Tunisia and 1 billion euros for Lebanon — a portion of which funds coast guards whose strategies Brussels prefers not to scrutinise. Europe buys silence at the source.
Washington has been more forthright, signing deportation agreements with 27 governments and protecting them with tariffs, visa restrictions and aid conditions. Costa Rica's president referred to his nation as helping "the economically powerful brother of the North".
What is readily lost in this exchange of pressure and payment is that people are the currency. The United Nations estimated that 117.8 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of the previous year, which accounts for one in every 70 living people.
The majority of those who crossed were young Moroccans, with Sudanese and Yemenis among them, who had fled wars. They didn’t serve as tools for any foreign strategy.
After that came the more illuminating turn. Twenty-two of the EU's 27 governments signed a letter faulting Spain for the condition of the bloc's border, and Italy closed its air and sea borders with Spain and proposed suspending Madrid from Schengen.
When Belarus applied the same pressure to Poland in 2021, Europe responded with sanctions and support. It is worthwhile to consider the distinction.
What is certain is that the border, long treated as an administrative line managed by technical means, has become a tool of negotiation, and that any state able to open or close one at will holds a card it can play without firing a shot.
Unless migration returns to the domain of law and shared responsibility rather than being a currency of pressure, the bill will continue to be settled where it always has been — on the people crossing.
*The writer is an Assistant Researcher at TRENDS Research & Advisory