"Italy does not accept ultimatums or impositions from abroad regarding national security and border control". This is how the the Italian government's statement, led by right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni, with which the country announces it will maintain, at least until August 15, border controls with Spain imposed since August 1 following the massive arrival of migrants in Ceuta last week. It is the response to the Spanish government's ultimatum, which has requested the restoration of free movement and has warned that if normality is not recovered before Sunday, it will take "measures", hinting that it could also suspend the application of the Schengen area with Italy.

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.