Ceuta is not an exception: to govern by border blows

The images from Ceuta repeat a familiar scene: exhausted bodies emerging from the water, overwhelmed police forces, headlines speaking of an "influx" and an "emergency." For those who only look at the border when it appears on screens, it might seem like an exceptional episode. For those who know the trajectories of the people arriving there, it is the concentrated expression of a stable system: a mobility regime that turns the Mediterranean and El Tarajal into a filter of class, origin, and race.The metaphor of the "wave" is not innocent. It presents people as a threatening natural phenomenon – a mass to be contained – and erases faces, individual and collective biographies, and motives. A wave has no name or project; it only has volume and direction. This language prepares a specific political response: if what arrives is a depersonalized and depoliticized force, the imaginable response is no longer welcome or the guarantee of rights, but exception, containment, and closure. Violence thus appears as an almost natural reaction.But at the border there are no natural phenomena: there are political decisions. For decades, a combination of closing legal and safe routes, externalizing migratory control to neighboring countries, and global inequalities that facilitate the mobility of some and immobilize others has been in place. When a crack opens up — a change in Moroccan surveillance or a diplomatic crisis — a movement that already existed concentrates and becomes visible. We then call it a "crisis".The border functions as a political valve. It opens and closes according to power dynamics that rarely have to do with the concrete lives of the people who arrive there. In 2021, the presence or absence of Moroccan police in Ceuta was not just a technical matter of surveillance, but also an instrument of diplomatic pressure. Reducing everything to "mafias" or the "pull effect" avoids the essential question: who can regulate the porosity of this border, and in whose interests?

These situations are not just a consequence of the European externalization of the border: they also reinforce its logic. Each episode of controlled permeability, diplomatic tension, or sudden arrival confirms Europe's dependence on third-party governments to contain mobility and turns migrant people into geopolitical bargaining chips.For many of the people who see us in the water, crossing is not the beginning of the journey, but one of its last episodes. Before that, there may be years of precariousness, police racism, internal controls, low-paid jobs, detentions, or improvised camps. There may also be interrupted studies, political persecutions, domestic violence, or the impossibility of freely living one's sexual orientation. The image of a swimming body concentrates, in a few seconds, a long biography that almost never becomes interesting.When they arrive in European territory, the law often does not receive them as people with a history, but as files to be managed. The categories of "irregulars", "unaccompanied minors" or "asylum seekers" determine who will be heard, who can be returned, and who will be trapped in an indefinite wait. Legal guarantees may limit immediate returns, but they only partially correct a system often designed to prevent there being time and conditions to explain a personal trajectory.State racism becomes visible here: not only because rights are violated, but because they are not applied with the same intensity to everyone. Europe has shown that it can activate rapid protection and reception when there is political will. But when faced with people from Africa or other territories of the Global South, the rhetoric of emergency prevails and the margin for restricting guarantees is widened. Mobility is a right for some and a suspicion for others.This management focused on emergency, police deployment and containment lends credibility to the far-right framework. It presents mobility as a threat and the border as the only possible form of governance. When institutions adopt this vocabulary and these practices, they do not just manage a crisis: they contribute to normalizing the racist narrative that makes it possible.The border, finally, does not end at the beach: it moves from the external border towards the interior of society. It continues in the CIEs (Immigration Detention Centers), in the immigration offices, in denied registrations, in contracts that require unobtainable papers, in police controls of a racial nature, in school segregation by origin, in leisure venues that exclude racialized people and in discourses that systematically associate certain origins with insecurity and disorder. Ceuta is not an exception, but a radiography of Europe: the moment when structural violence, usually discreet, becomes visible. The question, therefore, is not only how many people enter, but what kind of community accepts that, for some, mobility is a right and, for others, a risk of death.