On Thursday, shocking footage spread online of droves of primarily young male Moroccans storming Ceuta, a small Spanish territory on the North African coast. Thousands of them swam around breakwaters and climbed fences to enter the tiny enclave. An estimated 60,000 people are believed to have arrived in Ceuta—where the permanent population is 84,000—in 24 hours. Eighteen immigrants have died during the crossings. Meanwhile, local bars and shops are closed for fear of looting. The chaos has caused the leader of Ceuta to appeal to Madrid to send in the army.
The Spanish government has done so, but it should never have come to this. It was bound to, though, because Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, a Socialist, oversees one of Europe’s most permissive migration regimes. In January, Sánchez announced a blanket amnesty program to regularize the immigration status of half a million migrants living illegally in Spain. In a New York Times op-ed published in February, Sánchez characterized the move as both humane and economically necessary, and contrasted his policy to the restrictive ones of “MAGA-style leaders” (read: Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán).
By summer, applications had soared to over one million—this, in a country whose migrant population is estimated to be at around 15 percent of the national total. Granted, the beneficiaries of this program are mostly Latin Americans, who, owing to a shared language and cultural similarities, are relatively easy to integrate.
