Tens of Thousands of Migrants Enter Ceuta from Morocco, Most Return

The takes

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  Adam Smith

  1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

  Mass Crossings at Ceuta and the Politics of Other People’s Misery

  The rush of tens of thousands into a small Spanish enclave reveals not only desperate seekers of work, but also governments treating human beings as bargaining chips and voters as an audience for theatrics.

  One does not easily picture sixty thousand people entering a town by swimming. Yet we are told that tens of thousands crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in little more than a day, with many braving the sea, and that scores, perhaps more than seventy, have been drowned. Most have now been escorted back by soldiers and police. A spectacle of this kind naturally invites language of invasion on the one side and of humanitarian crisis on the other. But before we choose our favourite epithet, the impartial spectator would ask a cooler question: whose fortunes were being pursued, and at whose expense, in this extraordinary transaction?

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  John Locke

  1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

  Ceuta Shows What Happens When Borders Forget They Are Held on Trust

  When tens of thousands risk the sea and dozens die between Morocco and Ceuta, the failure is not of walls but of the governments that forgot their power was fiduciary, not absolute.

  I begin from the sea. Bodies are pulled from it, at least fifty‑seven by one account, more than seventy by another; beside them float rubber rings and flippers that mark both the desperation and the poverty of those who used them. Tens of thousands, some say fifty thousand and others sixty, cross from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in scarcely more than a day. Most are then escorted back to the border by Spanish soldiers and police. Great states argue over sovereignty, security, and treaties; yet the first question is simpler: what became of the lives entrusted to their care?

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  Niccolò Machiavelli

  1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

  Morocco Opened the Gates, Spain Blinked

  When a neighbour turns migration into a weapon, the state that has not raised its dykes in fair weather will drown in the first flood.

  Sixty thousand people do not simply “pour” into a walled enclave by mistake. When tens of thousands swim or rush into Ceuta in a single day, and when this happens, as reported, “with the cooperation of the Moroccan state”, the first fact is not humanitarian but political: a neighbouring power has tested Spanish sovereignty with human bodies as battering rams. At least 57 and perhaps more than 70 lie dead in the water. This is the effectual truth. A state has used the misery of migrants as artillery against another state that preferred to think of its frontier as a moral question rather than a strategic one.

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