Ceuta, broken mirror between Europe and Africa

Since the entry of tens of thousands of people from Morocco into Ceuta, this Spanish city in North Africa has become the epicenter of an existential problem: the West looks in the mirror and identifies that the cause of its crisis is the arrival of non-white foreigners. Looking at the figures, it does not make much sense. The European Union, with 452 million inhabitants, trembles at the possible entry of 5,000 people, and lives inhibited by Morocco, which politically exploits its role as the African guardian of European borders. The Moroccan monarchy monetizes the European rejection of African migrants: the more fear in Europe, the more it wants to charge.It is logical that the people of Ceuta are fed up: receiving thousands of people and keeping them without access to food and the most basic necessities for more than a month is not a formula that can end in harmony and well-being. They—and the 141 people who died crossing the border—are the most direct victims of a crisis manufactured by the lack of political consensus: seeing how the electoral pendulum swings, no one wants to be identified as the person who opens the door to Africans, and the situation in Ceuta continues to rot. Along the way, we even forget the rules that oblige us to process asylum requests from people fleeing a war, as is the case with the Sudanese—at least 150,000 dead since the start of a civil war in April 2023 that has already caused famine for 22 million people, half the country's population—. For those who believe it is a shame, but that this has nothing to do with Europeans. One of the sides in this civil war, the so-called Rapid Support Forces (RSF), were paid at the time by the European Union to carry out migration control and block the path for Somalis, Ethiopians, or Eritreans who wanted to reach Europe. Subcontracting, in the long term, reinforces monsters.The price of neocolonialism

I do not know how the Ceuta crisis will end. Perhaps the migrants will be returned to Morocco, perhaps not. Be that as it may, the pull factor will not end. The pull factor is not a declaration, a judicial sentence, or a legislative change in a European country. The pull factor is that the GDP per capita of sub-Saharan Africa is 9% of that of the European Union. As long as this is the case and there are no safe ways to travel, the only thing that will be achieved is to reinforce the parallel markets that offer the possibility of moving – often, by exploiting migrants.Ceuta should be a different wake-up call. Europe's trade pact with Africa is expired and has not been renewed since the colonial conquest: the offer we make to Africans is that we will take their resources and, in return, we will pay their leaders to contain their populations. We will have industry to manufacture their resources –and the jobs that this generates–, and they will not. We will generate the energy we need with their gas, their oil, and their uranium, and they will not. We will sell them weapons to support their dictators and in return they will be able to deposit –and spend– their fortunes in Europe. In societies dependent on the export of natural resources in the hands of foreign companies –European, North American, and Chinese–, many young Africans find no work anywhere and a few leave following the path that their resources have followed before.Those who are clearest that a security response cannot be the only one are, often, the police who carry out border control. A few months ago, a source in the sector summarized their task for me in the following way: "Migratory flows are like a river full of water. When we block one point, the water simply moves to another side."