Of the tens of thousands of people who tried to cross from Morocco to Ceuta last week, almost all have returned, more than 80 are dead and none have reached the Spanish mainland. That won’t stop European politicians from making hay.
The wrong response to Ceuta
When Jim O’Callaghan chairs a virtual meeting of EU justice and home affairs ministers on Tuesday, it will be on foot of two separate and conflicting requests. And while the meeting is supposed to be about the events in Ceuta over the past few days, the real debate behind it is broader, deeper and more fundamental.
The first call came in a letter to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, European Council president António Costa and Taoiseach Micheál Martin, written by Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen and signed by 22 other leaders, expressing “serious concern” about the developments at the EU’s external border. The second was in a letter from Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, lamenting the misinformation, prejudice, petty politics and lack of solidarity from some EU partners.
Meloni and Frederiksen, who pioneered the harshest immigration policies in the EU, were among the first to threaten to suspend freedom of movement in response to the events in Ceuta. The letter acknowledged that most of the people who came to the Spanish enclave in North Africa from Morocco had returned within a couple of days and that “no unauthorised onward movements have been recorded towards Europe”.
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They reveal their true purpose in the letter’s second paragraph when they say the EU must address “all policies that can serve as pull factors, such as the regularisation of very large number of irregular migrants”. This refers to a decision by the Spanish government to allow irregular migrants who fulfil certain conditions to regularise their status, which saw 1.2 million people applying to become legal residents before the deadline at the end of June.
“We cannot allow uncontrolled mass crossings, the instrumentalisation of migration or other hybrid threats to create the perception that illegal entry into the European Union is possible. That a migrant’s illegal entry can turn into legal stay. Such a perception would encourage further attempts, undermine confidence in our common migration policy and have repercussions for all member states,” Meloni and Frederiksen wrote.
The Spanish initiative, which has the backing of employers, the unions and the Catholic Church, enjoys a narrow plurality of popular support according to opinion polls. The Socialist government argues that it is a practical measure that helps to bring people who are already in the workforce out of the black economy and into the tax net.
Most of those affected came as tourists, often from Latin America, and remained in Spain to work, and EU statistics on requests to transfer migrants under the Dublin convention suggest that relatively few of those who arrive in Spain move on to other EU countries. Meanwhile, irregular migration into Spain has fallen substantially in recent years and it is a much less popular route into the EU than Greece or Italy.
The frenzied political reaction to last week’s events started with Sánchez’s opponents in the Partido Popular, which encouraged its colleagues in the centre-right European People’s Party to join in. Some of those who signed Meloni’s letter face elections over the next year or so and the dramatic scenes from Ceuta offer an unexpected opportunity to burnish their hardline credentials on immigration.
European politics can be a ruthless business and no EU member state is more skillful than Spain in taking advantage of political opportunities to advance its interests. But the centre-right leaders signing on to Meloni’s effort to weaponise popular misconceptions about the events in Ceuta against Sánchez are playing a dangerous game.
Spain’s regularisation of migrants’ status is the kind of reality-based measure that many European governments know to be in their economic interest but feel politically unable to advance. Tuesday’s meeting of justice and home affairs ministers risks ramping up the rhetoric in a way that further limits member states’ political room for manoeuvre on immigration.
The lack of support shown towards Spain during last week’s crisis also raises questions about the reliability of the solidarity mechanism in the EU’s new migration and asylum pact.
As for the dozens of people who died trying to swim across a breakwater to enter Ceuta, many of them teenagers and some of them women, the EU leaders’ letter didn’t mention them at all.
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