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.

If you want to better understand the world we have started living in for the past few months, there are a couple of news items of the day that are very helpful.The day before yesterday, Pedro Sánchez stated that Morocco did not instigate the massive entry of people into Ceuta, that it had been the work of Russia and Israel, who had spread through the networks in Morocco that Spain was waiting for workers with open arms, so to speak. Putin himself has denied that Russia had anything to do with it, and the Israeli government has also denied it. But this morning, the digital newspaper El Español published that the Spanish police have informed the judge that the massive entry into Ceuta was guided by Moroccan gendarmes under the orders of plainclothes agents with the aim of collapsing the border control system and eliminating Spain's response capacity.

Ceuta. It is what now occupies, according to Moncloa, a good part of the Spanish executive's task, and that is why this Tuesday's Council of Ministers press conference focused on economic and social measures to respond to the migratory crisis. The Vice President and Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, has promised to mobilize up to 309 million euros to be disbursed in four months to the autonomous city. These aids will be directed, he said, to essential services, security, reception, and support for businesses. "It represents 16% of Ceuta's GDP," highlighted Cuerpo, who assured that the mobilization of resources will be "agile".

We are happy to meet with you all as we begin this new season of daily analysis at l'ARA. Happy and especially responsible, because the 2026/27 academic year awaits us, which would be correct but frivolous to call "exciting". Because it will be a serious year. Just look at the crisis in Ceuta, the start of the school year with the same conflict it ended with, the expectation that the Supreme Court will finally apply the amnesty law and President Puigdemont will return, the possibility that Pedro Sánchez will advance the elections, the municipal elections in May, which will mean a first confirmation of the support that Aliança Catalana has in the polls and in conversations, the midterm elections in the United States, and that's without mentioning the open wars in Ukraine and Iran. And this is only what can be glimpsed, not to mention what Rubén Blades said, "life gives you surprises".

The images this Thursday of young Ceutans waving Spanish flags while blocking the distribution of humanitarian aid carried out by the Red Cross and while assaulting an immigrant camp on Benítez beach and setting fire to their (few) belongings are not a coincidence. They are the product, on the one hand, of erratic crisis management by the Spanish government and, on the other, of the manipulation and hate speech with which the far-right has flooded social media since July 30. Language, in these cases, is everything. PP deputy for Ceuta Javier Celay called for calm yesterday, saying that "the scenes of violence position the invaders who entered irregularly as victims, when the victims are the Ceutans." That is, violence is not bad in itself, but because in this case it benefits "the invaders." Clearly, qualifying immigrants as "invaders" has a very clear political connotation, it dehumanizes them and turns them into enemies, that is, into people who endanger Spain's existence. Hence, the young Ceutans in the images probably do not see themselves as racist and xenophobic, but as saviors of the homeland.

"It is not true". With these three words, the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, responded to all the deputies who, this Friday, during his appearance in Congress, referred to prior warnings about an entry of people into Ceuta – Marlaska put the figure at 72,000 – on July 30th. "Do not say that someone saw what would happen on the 30th [of July] coming, because it is not true," stated Marlaska, who began his speech by calling for calm in Ceuta and rejecting "partisan" speeches that "incite hatred".

If there has been an issue that has focused the Spanish government's appearance this Thursday on the Ceuta crisis, it has been the role of Morocco. After the clash within the executive due to the information transmitted by the CNI, the Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños, appeared before the Joint Committee on National Security in Congress, with the aim of accounting for the management following the massive entry of more than 70,000 immigrants on July 30 into the autonomous city. What happened? According to Bolaños, it occurred due to the "distortion" of a Supreme Court ruling that rejected hot returns in case of entering by swimming, as it considered that in these cases an administrative process and an individualized evaluation should be opened before an immediate return. The minister has dissociated Morocco from the events:

Twenty days after the Ceuta migratory crisis, the Spanish government seems to be starting to realize that it also has a humanitarian crisis to manage. After the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, insisted at first that all the people who crossed the border that day would return on their own as if by magic, the passage of days has shown a much more dramatic reality. Almost three weeks after the entry, there is not even an official figure of how many adult and minor migrants remain in the city. It is known, however, that 2,168 children are registered in the protection system, although registrations are ongoing. Estimates from NGOs and the Ceuta government are that between 5,000 and 8,000 migrants remain in the autonomous city. Returns, however, continue to be very slow. And, meanwhile, all these people, including minors, have spent days and days without any kind of attention or place to stay, thus creating a very critical situation in the city.

What is happening in Ceuta is, right now, a humanitarian drama. What is happening in Europe, following Ceuta, is an ideological battle between those who see immigration as "an invading danger" and those who want to manage it without naive good intentions, but taking into account the basic human values that, at least on paper, form the European ideal, and the economic reality, with relevant sectors demanding labor (by the way, what has happened to origin-based recruitment?).

The clash between Spain and Italy over the Ceuta crisis is escalating dangerously for the interests of the European Union. The Spanish government has announced that it will also impose border controls on travelers coming from Italian territory, after Giorgia Meloni's executive announced this Friday that it will maintain, at least until August 15, the controls with Spain imposed following the massive arrival of migrants in Ceuta last week. Madrid had requested the restoration of free movement, but given Rome's refusal, the socialist executive had already warned that it would take equivalent "measures". And so it has been.

On July 8, the Supreme Court issued a ruling confirming that pushbacks of migrants attempting to reach Spain by swimming are illegal. The high court set its doctrine based on the case of an Algerian boy who tried to reach Ceuta by swimming and was handed over to Moroccan authorities. Eighteen days after this judicial decision, on July 30, hundreds of people made the same journey and accessed the autonomous city by swimming from Morocco. After negotiating the return of the vast majority of them to their country of origin, the Spanish government has installed a 500-meter buoy barrier, lent by the army, on the maritime border. Now Melilla has announced that it will do the same.

The Spanish government plans to activate Article 35 of the immigration law, which describes mandatory and solidarity-based reception by the rest of the autonomous communities when an "extraordinary migratory contingency" is declared. Ceuta finds itself in this situation and, therefore, this will be the next step the Spanish government will take to face the crisis the city has been experiencing since the massive arrival of migrants last week. Until now, the PP had left its position on this distribution up in the air, but this Wednesday the deputy secretary for Sectorial Coordination of the PP, Alma Ezcurra, confirmed that the autonomous communities governed by her party will comply with the law. They will thus participate in the distribution of the approximately 1,100 unaccompanied migrant minors – according to data released by the president of Ceuta – who have arrived in the autonomous city, although she has requested that the process be "fair" and "planned." She said this in an interview with Onda Cero, one day after Vox – a governing partner of the Popular Party in four communities – openly refused to take in these minors.

In the new European migratory crisis due to the serious and dramatic events in Ceuta, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has finally come to the rescue of Pedro Sánchez, who, under the leadership of the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, the far-right and right-wing Europe has sought to position as a danger to the common border-closing migratory policy and, therefore, to the security of the Schengen area. The images and figures of arrivals on the first day impacted public opinion and continental chanceries, and gave rise to positioning the Spanish government in a supposed position of tolerance with illegal immigration, adding to the critical package the recent regularization, to which a supposed "pull effect" was quickly attributed. This Monday, the Spanish PP was still insisting on it.

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?

The images about Ceuta are repeated once again. They show thousands of young people arriving by sea, exhausted, but also families and even babies. We see how the Civil Guard is unable to do anything, paralyzed by what most media outlets do not hesitate to call an "avalanche". Beyond the beach, we know of overwhelmed reception centers and hundreds of people sleeping in the open. Images of closed shops also arrive, of a completely paralyzed city.In this context, Ceuta is requesting the declaration of a national emergency while the Spanish government continues to praise the "exemplary collaboration" of Morocco and the Moroccan government remains silent. All of this is a déjà-vu. It seems incredible how the staging of chaos can follow such a precise pattern.But where the focus should be placed is on the causes and consequences of this theatricalization. Among the causes, what makes it possible is the willingness of thousands of young people to jump to the other side at any moment. Many of them do not notify their families until they have already arrived. Some come from afar. They are willing to leave everything behind because deep down they feel they are leaving nothing. Some do not work or study. Others are young people with studies but with few future prospects.Their demands became clear with the mobilizations of the so-called "Gen Z" during the fall of 2025, which denounced the deterioration of public services (especially healthcare and education), youth unemployment, and corruption. As Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev recalls, "when you can't change the government, you change geography".

The European far-right, including the Spanish one, is being very quick and forceful in taking advantage of the propagandistic and dramatic gesture of Moroccan migratory pressure on Spain in Ceuta to distance itself from Pedro Sánchez's government, the government of regularization. It doesn't matter that what Meloni, Abascal, and co. call an "invasion" will ultimately have been a one-day episode: the massive arrival has been followed by a massive return. And it doesn't matter that more than fifty young people have died at sea: the far-right leaders have not spoken of this humanitarian drama. What Italy and Finland are concerned with is reinforcing the idea of the need to fortify Europe, an idea that does not fit with the demand for labor and which follows the xenophobic discourse of America first that the United States under Trump has also embraced.

The European Union has been backtracking on its defence of human rights for some time now, especially when it comes to immigration and, even more so, when it comes to confronting the xenophobic policies of Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria and Poland. While last week it announced that he would allocate some €3.5m to pay for the repatriation of immigrants stranded in Belarus after Aleksandr Lukashenko's tour de force, on Wednesday it opened the door for Poland, Latvia and Lithuania – the countries that have come under greatest migratory pressure at their borders because of this policy – to cut back on the right to asylum and to bypass international standards on refugee protection. The situation is very delicate because, although it is clear that this is a complex problem in which the Belarusian government has used the desperation of migrants to put pressure on the EU and avoid sanctions, the result is that, in the public eye, it seems that the dictator has got away with it.