Ceuta, from autonomous city to deportation center?

The Spanish government has led the opposition to the creation of extraterritorial deportation centers, that is, centers located outside the European Union where asylum seekers would be forcibly moved while their application is processed, and those irregular immigrants subject to an expulsion order while its execution is resolved. As is known, it had been Giorgia Meloni's government that had led the idea, and it already has two centers in Albania with a capacity for 3,000 people. Although the Commission had expressed reservations, they are part of the European border management policy following the approval, by the Parliament, of the European Pact on Migration and Asylum.As is known, the centers in Albania are not quite working because the Italian justice system has seen many problems with them. Paradoxically, Spain is building the first fully operational European extraterritorial deportation center. In Ceuta.On the one hand, Sánchez is under enormous pressure not to transfer any of the thousands of people who entered irregularly and do not want to return to Morocco to the Peninsula. This pressure comes not only from opposition parties, but also from many European chancelleries, which are very uncomfortable with the recent mass regularization of immigrants in Spain. He also knows that Spanish public opinion would view it very unfavorably. He has tested the possibility of transferring a particularly sensitive group—unaccompanied minor girls—and doing so to private centers at the State's expense, but has not had much success. On the other hand, for a significant part of those who took part in the entry to end up managing to reach the Peninsula would constitute a suicidal precedent. The official policy is, therefore, that all those who entered illegally will be expelled except for those who have the right to asylum and unaccompanied minors who cannot be returned to Morocco with sufficient guarantees. The expulsions, however, will be very slow, as Minister Torres has been quick to warn.Meanwhile, administrations are providing migrants with centers where they can sleep, shower, and receive medical care and food. The rest of the time, these thousands of people, mostly young men, wander around with not much to do in a city of 80,000 inhabitants with very little work to offer them. It would take a miracle for this state of affairs not to lead to conflicts, and, in fact, these have begun very quickly. The Spanish authorities need time to issue expulsion orders with the guarantees required by law, but, once they have done so, the Moroccan government will not make their execution easy. Why should it do so if its strategic interest is to destabilize Ceuta and Melilla?

It is foreseeable that the pressure from the citizens of Ceuta to remove migrants from the streets will end up being irresistible: let us remember that we are talking about one migrant—mostly young men—for every ten or twelve inhabitants—including children and the elderly, half of whom are women—. In this way, it is to be expected that migrant reception centers will progressively become migrant detention centers, in a process that will accelerate with each incident. We all know that often provisional solutions become permanent when they satisfy a problem for which there is no better solution. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to imagine that the flow ends up going from the Peninsula to Ceuta instead of in the opposite direction: that is, that migrants with an expulsion order but with difficulties in executing it are sent there. Obviously, with the consequent economic compensation for the prison-city.In this way, and paradoxically, Spain would be building an extraterritorial deportation center for irregular migrants with twice the capacity of Meloni's in Albania. It is true that technically Ceuta is Spanish territory and, therefore, European, but it is also true that Ceuta is outside the Schengen area and, therefore, outside the area of free movement of people, which is, after all, what matters.Is there any alternative? Joaquim Coello proposes converting Ceuta into a large free port capable of creating thousands of jobs. In the long run, a project like this would allow Ceuta to escape the fate that geopolitics has established for this enclave of “fortress Europe” within the people-exporting Africa. In the short term, it would give its citizens the only thing that can allow them to endure the difficulties: hope. However, the difficulties of the project are enormous, and would therefore require an iron will on the part of the State and the city. In any case, what is clear is that, contrary to what Sánchez promised in Congress on Thursday, Ceuta will never again regain normality.