A very opportune migratory 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 from these days of the Tarajal breakwater, families with small children clinging to floats or toy vests draw 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, told 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 fiasco of Pedro Sánchez's government's foreign policy: having yielded to the pressures of Morocco and the United States to renounce the holding of a self-determination referendum 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 issue of Africa's decolonization, which the UN was to implement with its peacekeeping mission, has come to nothing. Spain, as an ex-colony, had the moral and legal obligation to guarantee this referendum, but the pressure from Morocco as the guardian of Spanish borders and from Donald Trump's United States, which recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for Rabat recognizing the state of Israel, has prevailed.

The law will be voted on in the plenary session of Congress in September and will then have to go through the Senate, but with the surprise 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 living 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 lobby of pressure 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 demonstrated again.