There is a serious ripple effect from Spain’s immigration choices.
In an editorial published on August 4 about the recent (if largely temporary) influx of would-be migrants into the Spanish city of Ceuta, the Financial Times attacked critics of Spain’s far left prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, whose government had earlier bludgeoned through his country’s massive and ill-judged immigration amnesty, for not showing Madrid sufficient support.
Before getting to the question of “solidarity,” a much-used word in Brusselsspeak, the newspaper’s editorialists declared confidently that “none of the 72,000 [illegal migrants] have made it [to Spain]; all but 2,000 have returned to Morocco.”
Leaving aside the fact that Ceuta is in Spain (if on the North African coast), there is this (via Euractiv):
Ten days after a massive surge of over 72,000 migrants stormed Ceuta, security forces in the Spanish territory have warned the situation remains far from normal.
Socialist minister Ángel Víctor Torres headed to the Spanish city, an exclave on the North African coast, on Monday to assess the migratory crisis and meet with the conservative city’s mayor Juan Jesús Vivas.
The meeting happens one day after more than 15,000 people demonstrated in Ceuta calling for the resignation of Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, and Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, over what they claimed was a poor response to the crisis.
The government has repeatedly said 70,000 migrants returned voluntarily to Morocco. However, Vivas estimates that between 8,000 and 11,000 remain in Ceuta, a city of just about 84,000 people. . . .
Civil guard and police agents dismiss official estimates that around 2,500 migrants remain in the city, 500 of them minors.
“It is not the reality we saw on the streets of Ceuta. The pressure is much greater than what the government says,” Diego Madrazo, spokesperson from the main Unified Association of Civil Guards (AUGC), told Euractiv. . . .
Estimates by the main police union JUPOL are also closer to Vivas’ estimations. A government spokesperson told Euractiv there are no available definitive numbers until the “registration process is completed.”
Political bias may have pushed the estimates too high in the other direction, but even allowing for that, it appears that the FT rushed to judgment, backing the line put about by the Sánchez government, because that is what it wanted to believe.
And perhaps it was a little too early to say that “none” of the migrants had made it to Spain.
Dozens of migrants reached the Spanish mainland after entering Ceuta during the mass influx into the enclave, police sources have told Sky News.
Spanish sources in Andalucia said that around 75 migrants out of the estimated 72,000 who entered Ceuta illegally in a mass rush to the border at the end of July had reached the mainland.
That’s only a tiny fraction of 72,000, but it’s not “none,” and it is an inducement to others to try their luck.
The FT concludes:
The Ceuta crisis shows how far the EU — the Brussels institutions and the national capitals — have shifted to the right on immigration in recent years. With far-right forces threatening incumbents in several member states holding elections in the next 12 months, the temptation to find scapegoats will grow. The EU will be worse off for it.
Ah yes, the “far right.” Always. To the extent that there has been a growth in Europe’s “far right” (as opposed to conservatives, classical liberals, and centrists who disagree with state-run extremism on immigration, multiculturalism, net zero, and all the rest) it is has arisen as a reaction to the radicalized “liberal” authoritarianism of so much of the European establishment.
As for solidarity, Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of Sweden, a country badly affected by Angela Merkel’s narcissistic and reckless decision to fling open Germany’s doors in 2015, told the FT on August 11 that the Spanish amnesty had caused a “pretty big outcry” at the last meeting of EU leaders. He argued that it ran counter to what they were trying to achieve. And so it did. Spain, like Sweden, is a member of the Schengen “border-free zone” — a recklessly Utopian project that like so many such projects has had profoundly dystopian consequences. The Spanish amnesty risks making them worse.
Kristersson explained that Schengen depended on members acting “in a united way to be able to protect our external borders and to have as aligned policies as possible.” Indeed. It is thus rich of Sánchez to complain about a lack of “solidarity” from fellow EU member-states in the wake of the Ceuta influx, when his earlier amnesty had gone against everything that so many of them are now trying to do. Moreover, along with a Spanish court ruling last month, the amnesty obviously helped pave the way psychologically for would-be migrants to head for Ceuta.
In theory, those eligible for the amnesty will not be able to benefit from the right to work and settle elsewhere in the EU for a period (to oversimplify) of between two and ten years, but that is not forever, and it would be naïve to think that such arrangements will be watertight.