Wednesday briefing: ​How misinformation and ​a​ hardened immigration policy ​turned Ceuta ​into Europe’s ​latest ​flashpoint

The pictures were more dramatic than the reality on the ground. Photograph: Reduan Dris/EPAView image in fullscreenThe pictures were more dramatic than the reality on the ground. Photograph: Reduan Dris/EPAFirst Edition newsletterMoroccoWednesday briefing: ​How misinformation and ​a​ hardened immigration policy ​turned Ceuta ​into Europe’s ​latest ​flashpoint In today’s newsletter: The past week shows how quickly images, rumours and ​right-wing political opportunism can eclipse the facts on the ground

Prefer the Guardian on GoogleGood morning. Last week, an estimated 72,000 migrants began crossing into a tiny Spanish enclave on the tip of Morocco. Within 24 hours, most of them had headed home. At least 88 people died after attempting the crossing, according to local officials. This isn’t the whole story of what happened over the last week, but the facts are worth remembering.

At an emergency meeting yesterday, EU interior ministers sought to draw a line under Ceuta, insisting that the passport-free Schengen area had never been at risk from the arrival of migrants at this scale. Despite this, much of the media coverage has suggested that events in Ceuta represent a territorial threat to Europe, sparking calls for greater security across the region’s borders.

It’s a pattern that has become familiar since the 2015 refugee crisis. As Europe has created fewer opportunities for migrants to legally cross its borders, people have tried to cross them illegally, resulting in dangerous bottlenecks, human tragedies, and a slew of spectacular images that the right has seized upon to justify draconian policies.

For this morning’s newsletter, I spoke to Daniel Trilling, a journalist who writes about refugees and migration, about the political actors trying to capitalise on Ceuta, and why tragedies like this are bound to keep happening. That’s after the headlines.

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Ceuta | Hundreds of people have gathered in the northern Moroccan town of Fnideq, near the border with Spain’s Ceuta, flashing photos of their missing loved ones to passersby in the hope of tracking them down.

View image in fullscreenMigrants who crossed into Spain via Ceuta are escorted by the Spanish army back to Morocco. Photograph: Antonio Sempere/APOn Thursday, a group of people roughly the size of Guildford’s population began crossing into Ceuta. Many of them swam around the border fence. Some drowned; others were crushed. Dozens died. “There were so many people in the sea. Everyone was trying to grab on to you to save themselves, and you were trying to escape and move forward so they wouldn’t drag you down or drown you,” one told the Guardian.

Most of these people were young men searching for work and hoping to build a better life for themselves. There are no reports suggesting any of them reached mainland Europe. “It’s very difficult for people without the right documents to travel from Ceuta to mainland Europe, and Spain has lots of experience returning people who cross without permission,” Trilling says. “So the claim that this is some kind of invasion of Europe is entirely untrue.”

Although Spain was reporting on Friday that most of these migrants had returned to Morocco, videos of men clambering on rocks and walking through Ceuta’s streets had already gone viral on social media, where they were amplified by right-wing voices. “Ceuta has been turned into a third world city in only 48 hours,” Tommy Robinson posted on X. Elon Musk, no stranger to sticking his oar into the politics of foreign nations, posted: “all military age males means it is an invasion”.

“By the time the images started circulating, the so-called crisis was over. But the political damage was already done,” Trilling says.

Why did so many people make the crossing?

As the hoax spread, Moroccan border surveillance dwindled to a minimum, allowing thousands of people to cross into Ceuta. Some analysts have suggested that Rabat, Morocco’s administrative capital, deliberately opened the border to protest Pedro Sánchez’s recent visit to Algeria (Morocco has a territorial dispute with the country). Others have pointed to Rabat’s increasingly toasty relationship with the Trump administration, which has clashed with Sánchez during the Iran war.

“The central problem is that European border policies have given countries like Morocco a means of exerting pressure on European states,” Trilling says. The EU has increasingly outsourced (“externalised,” in the policy lingo) border policing to non-EU countries, which have the power to loosen their borders whenever they choose. We’ve seen versions of Ceuta happen before: in 2021, Morocco allowed 10,000 people to cross into the territory during a diplomatic row with Spain. Turkey tried something similar on Greece in 2020, and Poland has long accused Belarus (a close ally of Russia) of encouraging migrants to cross into the Schengen area.

The EU has taken an increasingly hardline stance on migration since 2015. This has paradoxically helped to create some of the problems that politicians say they’re trying to solve. The fortification of security means that people are forced into taking illegal and unsafe routes where there might have been safe, legal routes previously. When border security is breached, it results in a sudden influx of people, and the kind of alarming images that we’ve seen this week, which are then used to justify even further restrictions. “The performance of control very often leads to precisely the sense in which things are out of control,” says Trilling.

How is the right capitalising on this?

Following the events in Ceuta, Nigel Farage wasted no time in resurrecting his pernicious “Breaking Point” poster from 2016, and he and Zia Yusuf, Reform’s spokesperson, have described those who made the crossing as “fighting-age males.” The term is one of the right’s favourite new ways to frame people crossing borders, depicting them as threats, while giving little thought to those who lose their lives or don’t fit the brief. By Monday afternoon, Farage had alighted on a new policy that would use the Royal Navy to “stop the boats once and for all”. We published a useful explainer on why this would probably violate international law.

It would be possible to dismiss this announcement as a last-ditch attempt to change the subject, considering the £5m gift that Farage currently seems to want to avert eyes from (and his impending byelection bin fight). But that would be missing the bigger picture. Ceuta has given the right a powerful new argument for why hardline immigration policies are common sense, and, by contrast, why a more pragmatic and humane approach to migration is foolish, harmful or, as one Spectator piece put it recently, the result of “luxury” beliefs.

This sort of language encourages centre-left parties to accept the right’s logic. Take, for example, Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who was among 22 signatories to a letter on Saturday that suggested Spain’s liberal migration policies compromise Europe’s security. These policies have no application in Ceuta, but Merz will soon be trying to fight off the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in state elections.

In a speech delivered from the White Cliffs of Dover on Monday, Andy Burnham pledged to be “relentless” in curbing small boats while building a system that offers “safe routes”. It marked a change from Starmer, whose attempts to appease would-be Reform voters culminated in his infamous “Island of strangers” speech. Still, it’s too early to say how Burnham will approach migration, and whether he will reopen routes that his predecessor closed.

“Time and again, the right has tried to claim that you can basically shut yourself off from the rest of the world and make these things go away,” Trilling says. “But they don’t go away. And Ceuta is a perfect example of that.”

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