Tens of Thousands of Migrants Enter Ceuta from Morocco, Most Return
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?
The migrants themselves sought, one must presume, not plunder but the ordinary fruits of the division of labour: steadier wages, safer streets, more regular justice. In my account of the pin factory in the Wealth of Nations, I remarked how the multiplication of tasks enlarges the annual produce of a society. The same progress that enriches a country also draws into it those who are excluded from such refinement at home. When the extent of the market suddenly widens by the arrival of tens of thousands of new hands, there is potential gain as well as confusion. Yet when the extension is violent and unconsented, the first result is not opulence but disorder.
Here the disorder appears not wholly accidental. It is reported that some sixty thousand migrants poured into Ceuta with the cooperation of the Moroccan state. When the gatekeeper throws open the gate, we must consider not merely the eagerness of those who rush through, but the motives of him who holds the key. In every age, neighbouring states have discovered that the movement of people can be a lever more convenient than the movement of troops: cheaper to employ, easier to deny, more pliable to sudden reversal. The visible drama is of exhausted swimmers and harassed local police; the invisible play is of ministers testing one another’s resolve with other people’s misery.
Whenever public policy is made upon such a scene, one ought, as I urged in the Wealth of Nations, to trace every proposal to its effects upon prices, wages, and the liberty to enter trades, and to ask who quietly pays. The Spanish government has deployed additional soldiers and police; there will be emergency provisions, temporary housing, medical care, and perhaps new fortifications or surveillance. These costs do not fall upon the sea, but upon taxpayers who already labour under other burdens. If regular workers in Ceuta find their neighbourhoods disturbed and their employments unsettled, while contracts for new security arrangements fall to favoured firms, then we witness once more that familiar conspiracy against the public, dressed this time as solicitude for order.
Yet we must not, in our zeal to detect manipulation, forget the state’s proper duties. Defence of the frontier, and the exact administration of justice to those within it, belong as much to good government as do roads and harbours. We are told that many of the migrants, having entered, were escorted back to Morocco. The impartial spectator will ask whether those who had a plausible claim to refuge, or whose lives would clearly be endangered by return, were distinguished from those who merely sought better wages. To push back all indiscriminately may be cruel; to admit all indiscriminately may be ruinous. A government that refuses this painful discrimination abandons either justice or prudence, and often ends by sacrificing both.
The temptation, after such a shock, is always to let the man of system have his day. He will promise, on the one hand, a perfectly sealed Europe, or on the other, a perfectly open one. He will speak of suspending long-standing agreements for the free movement of people, or of new universal schemes to regularise all who arrive. He imagines, as I once observed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, that he can move the pieces on the great chess-board of human society at his pleasure, forgetting that each piece has a principle of motion of its own. The migrants will continue to seek employment; the employers will continue to seek cheaper hands; the politicians will continue to seek applause; and no geometrical line upon a map will annul these propensities.
It is said that interior ministers shall meet in urgent council, while partisans across the continent, assisted by the arts of rapid communication, inflame opinion with images of migrants racing through Ceuta’s streets. The language of catastrophe, invasion, or betrayal is as cheap as it is gratifying to those who employ it. Yet the true measure of this episode, as of any economic event, is its effect upon the labouring poor. If, after the excitement fades, they find their rents higher, their wages lower, and their public services more burdened, while the architects of new regulations enjoy greater power and patronage, then the impartial spectator will know for whose benefit the crisis was truly managed.
What remains most obscure to me is how far the reported cooperation of the Moroccan state, and the deaths at sea whose precise number is still unsure, will alter either government’s conduct in future similar emergencies.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The division of labour (the pin factory) as the engine of opulence, limited by the extent of the market.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — Trace every policy to its effect on prices, wages, and entry, and name the invisible loser.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action?