Tens of Thousands of Migrants Enter Ceuta from Morocco, Most Return
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?
When I wrote the Second Treatise of Government, I defined political power, in paraphrase, as a right of making laws with penalties, only for the public good. This assumes that men are by nature free, equal, and independent, and that no one may rule another save by his consent and for the preservation of his property, taken in the broad sense of lives, liberties, and estates. The Spaniard within Ceuta and the Moroccan without are equally the workmanship of one Maker and equally under the law of nature, which, as I there argued, forbids any to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Border, flag, or treaty do not suspend that law.
Here, two governments claim authority over the same narrow strait. Spain stations soldiers and police, enforces a border, and joins in wider European arrangements, including what is called Schengen, for freer movement within. Morocco, for its part, is reported to have cooperated in the passage of some sixty thousand persons toward that border. Each exercises power that touches the life of the same migrant: one by allowing or encouraging him to set out, the other by receiving, repelling, or returning him. Both act, not upon cattle or waves, but upon free agents whose natural liberty they may restrain only on trust.
The event itself, so far as it is described, shows that trust failing at several points. First, men are allowed or induced to enter dangerous waters in such numbers that scores drown. Secondly, many who survive are, in the phrase reported, escorted back by armed force, even though a court of that country is said to have ruled that those entering by sea may not be pushed back immediately. Here reason must ask: were these persons given a known standing rule and an impartial judge, or were they exposed to the discretion of officers who are, in effect, judges in their own case? If the latter, then what marches under the name of law is only force.
Some will say that such harshness is required by necessity; that when fifty thousand arrive in a day, the ordinary rule must give way to what I elsewhere called prerogative, a power to act without the law, sometimes against it, for the public good. I do not deny that emergencies exist. Yet prerogative, if it is not to rot into tyranny, must be narrowly bounded. It must be plainly for the good of all, not of one people against another; it must be temporary; and it must remain accountable to the original consent of the governed. When other states in Europe respond, some calling for urgent councils of ministers, others suspending the ordinary liberty of movement with that country, they too claim prerogative. They too must show that their measures secure, rather than invade, the natural rights of persons who never consented to be treated as a threatening mass.
There is also the question of the earth itself. I once argued that men may appropriate land by their labour, provided they leave ‘enough, and as good’ for others. Whatever errors or obscurities lay in that argument, one point stands firm: no people may so close up the world with lines on a map that multitudes are condemned, by another’s mere will, to misery where they stand. Migration on the scale described does indeed test the prudence of any government; but the right of a man to seek better conditions for his life and liberty cannot be dismissed as a crime in itself. The burden of proof lies on those who would confine him.
Yet I do not conclude that the governments concerned are thereby dissolved, or that resistance in arms is warranted. For that, as I wrote when treating of dissolution, there must be a long train of abuses, all tending the same way, until it is plain that those in power have set up an arbitrary dominion and put themselves in a state of war with their people. What I can say, from the few but grave facts at hand, is that both the deaths at sea and the summary handling of the survivors are strong marks of a trust ill‑kept. They demand, not panic and louder cries of invasion, but a sober re‑founding of border policy on consent, standing law, and equal regard for every person who comes within the reach of public power.
uncertainty_note":"I write under the disadvantage of incomplete accounts, especially regarding the precise conduct of forces on the ground and the actual voice and consent of those most affected, and my judgment must be held proportionably modest."}```
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — The dissolution of government and the right of resistance: when legislators invade property or set up arbitrary power, they rebel against the people, not the people against them.