A very opportune migration crisis

BarcelonaWhile Morocco rushes to build football stadiums for the upcoming World Cup, thousands of its citizens are trying to leave the country to earn a better future. Among the images of these days from the breakwater of Tarajal, families with small children clinging to floats or toy vests attract attention. Don't forget that on this very beach, in 2014, about fifteen young sub-Saharan Africans drowned while the Spanish police fired rubber bullets at them.

Someone on the Moroccan side of the fence has decided to relax controls in recent days. The last time a similar situation occurred, in 2021, young Moroccans, still wet after swimming across the breakwater, explained to me that the mayor of their town had gone to the school exit to assure them that the border was open.

This time, the crisis coincides with the approval in the Justice Commission of the Spanish Congress of Deputies, on July 23, of the bill to grant Spanish nationality to Sahrawis born when Western Sahara was a Spanish colony and to their descendants.

This initiative, proposed by Sumar, aims to cover up the main foreign policy fiasco of Pedro Sánchez's government: having given in to pressure from Morocco and the United States to renounce the holding of a referendum on self-determination for Western Sahara, the Spanish ex-colony that Morocco illegally occupied at the end of the Franco dictatorship. The promised self-determination referendum, the last pending item of African decolonization, which the UN was to implement with its peacekeeping mission, has come to nothing. Spain, as the former colonial power, had a moral and legal obligation to guarantee this referendum, but Morocco's pressure as the guardian of Spanish borders and that of Donald Trump's United States, which recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for Rabat recognizing the state of Israel, proved stronger.

The law will be voted on in the plenary session of Congress in September and will then have to pass through the Senate, but with the surprising abstention of the PP in the Justice Commission, it has every option to move forward. And what Morocco does not want is for between 100,000 and 200,000 Sahrawis who live in the refugee camps of Tindouf, in the Algerian desert, and also in the Sahara occupied by Morocco or in other countries to become, with their right to vote, a pressure lobby on Spanish policy, now that it is so favorable to Rabat. And provoking a migratory crisis, in these times, can serve to change policies.

We have known for a long time that it is not a good idea to subcontract a regime without democratic guarantees to monitor your borders, and now it is being proven again.