Externalize the border, generate the crisis

Until 1991, a Moroccan citizen could enter Spain without a visa. The economic situation in Morocco was worse than it is today, and there was no migration crisis. The Ceuta fence, which today is presented as a mere geographical accident, is younger than many of those who try to cross it. It is worth remembering this now, as it is discussed as if it were eternal rather than an administrative construction of four decades, the main product of which is not order, but the creation of a legal category called irregular migrant: a figure of all moral panics regarding criminality, almost a boundary of humanity itself. This ghost has come to life these days as the wet dream of all those who constantly try to associate migration with chaos and war. They have finally obtained the images of the flood, of the disorder that threatens us from the border of Europe: those that legitimize the discourse of invasion.

The spark arrives on terrain upon which gasoline has been poured for a long time. But, again, it is worth remembering that it is the closed border that provokes the mass attempt at crossing, that before the closure, people came and went from Morocco in rhythm with the needs for labor, and that not all migrants have Spain as their destination. What are seventy thousand people in a continent of four hundred and fifty million people?

This event reveals the contradictions of the European border model, which delegates the management of the southern border to a third party to do the dirty work. Thousands of people crossed at once because that night, quite simply, Morocco did not show up. As an analyst who signs with a pseudonym in an article in the magazine Strategy Zone, explained, what has happened is not so much a migration crisis as "the momentary failure of an entire regime of production, selection, and governance of mobility." What this event reveals is the political vulnerability of an externalized border, the weight of which will continue to burden the Spanish state regardless of the political color of those in government. Those who say that it is necessary to break with the Alawite country are not the ones who have to govern –for now.

However, the Moroccan attack –in the version held by the right– or the Trump and Netanyahu conspiracy –in the version held by the left– are narratives that turn, intentionally or not, migrants into weapons, into invaders. This framework denies the agency of those who crossed. Thousands of young people –but also entire families– crossed the border, putting their lives at risk. They did so seeking a better life or, more interestingly, as a protest against their own country, which ignores them, or as an adventure, or for reasons we are not even capable of imagining. But weapons do not have life stories.

We could have told these stories. But we haven't. Thinking of them as pawns in an invasion has legitimized everything that has happened since. The children sleeping and going hungry on the street. The patrols coordinated by WhatsApp to clean up the city or the pogroms –which in the form of citizen protest have long been occurring elsewhere in the State–. The pellets that Ali, an 8-year-old boy, received in his head, or the threats from emboldened ultras to the activists in Ceuta. Spanish nationalism regurgitates its own monsters, happy with its war, one that allows them to defend the fatherland, flex their muscles, and finally obtain a transcendent meaning for lives condemned to an infinite wandering between social media and the supermarket. The border is what creates their opportunity.

Unfortunately, behind it all is an ultra project that has been forming in Europe since the ravages of the 2008 bubble burst. For the moment, this crisis of the border model is driving Vox and the PP up in the polls. But we know that the underlying challenge is much deeper than that of the electoral contest. The nativist exit promises to offload the effects of a long crisis onto migrants and will take advantage of people's rage and panic at ending up in the ranks of the defeated. But there is nothing more in the offer that the ultras make. No solution to the housing crisis, nor higher wages, nor more budget for public healthcare. The solutions are elsewhere and require us to fight for them. The question, the only one, is whether we will organize and fight or continue to blame the cheap labor without which this continent could not function, without which the crisis would be even deeper and harsher, without which our societies would be older and sadder.