Remember Those ‘Root Causes’ of the Border Crisis?

By John R. Puri

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

For four years, the Biden administration and the media kept telling us that the crisis at the southern border was out of the president’s hands because it was caused by international, uncontrollable “root causes” of migration. No matter what policy changes Biden made, millions of migrants would keep showing up. They were pushed out of their home countries by forces beyond domestic politics, like poverty and violent conflict — as though these were novel developments.

 

This was the official line from beginning to end. In March 2021, two months after Joe Biden was sworn in, he assigned Vice President Kamala Harris to help stem the flow of migration by addressing its “root causes” in poor Latin American countries. The administration rarely specified what forces or events it was referring to.

 

Almost three years later, in 2024, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview that the migration crisis was

 

not specific to the United States’ southern border. This is something that we are seeing throughout the hemisphere and throughout the world. We have an increase in authoritarian regimes. We have more extreme weather events that are driving people from their homes. We have poverty. And America is proving to be prosperous with more than 8 million jobs that need to be filled. We recovered from the COVID pandemic more rapidly than any other country. This is something that is not specific to the southern border.

 

Based on such defeatism, media outlets concurred that the administration was helpless to deal with record border crossings.

 

Time magazine wrote in 2023: “There’s very little a homeland security secretary or an American President can do to reverse human migration patterns predominantly caused by climate change, new storm patterns, rampant violence and economic need.”

 

The New Yorker wrote in 2023: “Much of the migration to the United States in recent years has been driven by profound developments in Central and South America and in the Caribbean, where economic turmoil, natural disasters, and drug-related violence have brought many states to the brink of collapse, and where gangs and drug cartels often operate beyond state control.”

 

The Cato Institute told Axios in 2024 that “apprehension numbers have little to do with changes in enforcement tactics or new policies,” because “it’s really primarily reflective of the state of the U.S. economy,” and “the smuggling networks have taken years to build out — but once they’re built out, there’s nothing you can do to rewind the clock and eliminate those.”

 

Axios itself wrote in 2024: “Much of the current crisis is rooted in factors Biden’s team has had little control over — including unprecedented global calamities that have pushed millions of migrants to the U.S., decades of congressional inaction, and the state of key agencies after the Trump administration.”

 

Mayorkas told PBS that year, “We can only do so much within a broken immigration system, a system that is fundamentally broken,” since the problem was “hemispheric and global.”

 

Then, in 2025, the Trump administration entered office and immediately changed border policy by shutting down pathways to admission. In the administration’s first full month, border encounters fell to the lowest level in recorded history — 8,349, compared to 140,641 the year before and 29,105 just a month earlier — and have pretty much stayed at that level ever since. The record was beaten again in July 2025, with just 4,592 encounters.

 

So much for those supposedly insurmountable “root causes.” When the push factors of migration — poverty and conflict in home countries, attractive conditions in America — are relatively constant, it turns out that policy incentives are what really matter.

The Repulsive Online Attack on Indian Americans

National Review Online

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

A few University of Texas at Austin students of South Asian descent cheered their football team’s dramatic comeback win against top-ranked Ohio State, and found themselves in the foreground of a picture worth a thousand tweets. Bo French, the Republican nominee for railroad commissioner (a more important position than its name might suggest, having jurisdiction over energy policy), did not like what he saw. “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” he posted on X.

 

While other Texas Republicans criticized French — some vigorously, some tepidly — a retinue of online defenders ventured creative interpretations of what the problem was. The university catered too much to foreigners. Never mind that the picture did not disclose the citizenship or nationality of its subjects, and the law mandates that 90 percent of students be Texans. Its admissions standards are unfair to white Texans. French himself retreated to this position, but the university has no preferential standards for Indian Americans. In fact, French in the past joined the near-uniform chorus of Texas Republicans in supporting the university’s admissions system, which was designed to eliminate consideration of race and was defended for years by foes of racial preferences.

 

So the rationalizers had to go farther afield. Too many Indian Americans are Hindu: another trait not discoverable from the photo, and also one that appears to pose no practical difficulties for America’s republican institutions. They’re not assimilating. But the photo bears every possible visible sign of assimilation. College football is one of the most uniquely American of institutions and is unknown in India. Indian Americans are participating fully in U.S. life, generally know English, and have high intermarriage rates. Unless the test of assimilation is being white, they’re doing it.

 

To be more charitable to the photo bombers than they deserve, some of these attempted justifications raise issues that, outside this ridiculous context, are legitimate and even important. The H-1B program through which many Indians came here is too often exploitative and needs reform. Too much immigration — even when the immigrants themselves are law-abiding and economically successful — can be disruptive to communities and nations, threatening their sense of shared belonging, creating tensions or at least frictions. In the case of Indian Americans, however, the difficulties have been thankfully minimal; and in any case, needed reforms are no reason or excuse for belittling or demonizing the immigrants in question or their families.

 

The picture gave some viewers a misleading impression of how many dark-skinned people were in the Texas crowd; X.com, for its part, creates a misleading impression of how many Americans have an aesthetic objection to the presence of such people. Barring what seems an unlikely mass conversion to their cause, the objectors will just have to get over it. Most Americans, of all races, find their repulsion itself repulsive. And white Americans, by and large, have too much sense to believe that greater racial consciousness is the answer to any problems they have.

 

The commenters who object to the picture are wrong about many things, but they are right to feel that their side is losing. Those harmlessly happy young people have found their perfect counterpoint in the toxically miserable.

No Alternatives for Merkel

By Andrew Stuttaford

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

In the wake of the Alternative for Germany’s victory on Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt, I looked back at some articles I had written about the party in the past, including this one from 2016. It was mainly devoted to discussing an article in Der Spiegel asking why people were voting for the AfD, a party for which the authors did not have much sympathy, but about which they had clearly thought carefully.

 

Der Spiegel:

 

 At its core, the rise of the AfD is the story of strife and of growing alienation between the chancellor and a portion of the German electorate. The triumph of the AfD is nothing less than a revolt against Angela Merkel.

 

It is a rebellion targeting a CDU leader who has continually led her party to the left, stripping many conservatives of a political home. It also targets a chancellor whose open borders policy in the refugee crisis may be attractive to left-leaning Germans, but is one which strikes more conservative voters as high-handed. . . .

 

And so we see the developing stages of a process in which Merkel’s CDU (the story was somewhat different with her partner-party, the CSU in Bavaria, although the AfD is now making substantial inroads there, too) had left a gap on the right, which the AfD filled, and filled in a much more aggressive way than it would have been able to had Merkel herself not chosen to ignore those on the right who didn’t share the immigration extremism she revealed in 2015.

 

Der Spiegel:

 

A vital part of any healthy democracy is having alternatives and parties that are distinguishable from each other. At the moment, it’s no longer possible to tell what it is that separates the CDU from the SPD or the Greens. The party is whatever Merkel says it is. There are close to no correctives left in Germany and there is no longer a balance of power. The more Merkel tries to peddle her policies as being without alternative, the greater the anger within the populace will grow. . . .

 

Merkel has not understood the depth of this alienation, as her closest confidants proved in the wake of the March 13 [local elections]. Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, who has, at times, been seen as a possible heir to Merkel’s political throne atop the CDU, noted blithely that 80 percent of voters cast their ballots for parties that support the chancellor’s refugee policies.

 

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Ursula von der Leyen, the Ursula von der Leyen, the woman who now heads up the EU Commission?

 

The very same.

 

Von der Leyen, an incompetent defense minister, went on to become the president of the EU Commission in 2019. The Commission’s tolerance of dissent, never high, has fallen far lower since von der Leyen took over. She had clearly learned a lot from her old boss, a pioneer in the field of censoring online speech, something in which the EU, faced with rising unhappiness among its own subjects, has become something of a specialist.

 

The thickness of the bubble inhabited by Merkel’s loyalists can be seen from von der Leyen’s comment that 80 percent of voters voted for parties which supported Merkel’s “refugee policies.” That was indeed the case, but it did not mean that they liked those policies. Indeed, a chart accompanying the article reflects the findings of a survey that suggested that 61 percent of all German voters were either “not very” or “not at all” satisfied with them, including majorities in the AfD (99 percent!), but also in the free market (ish) FDP and the far-left Die Linke.

 

That latter result may well foreshadow the split within Die Linke that resulted from the departure of Sahra Wagenknecht. She had joined East Germany’s governing SED Party less than a year before the Wall came down as, it seems, a true believer. These days her beliefs combine both hard left and some conservative views — the horseshoe theory in action. The BSW, the party she formed in 2023 after leaving Die Linke, is currently talking to the AfD (which fell three seats short of an absolute majority), about giving it enough support to form a minority government, although there would be no coalition between them.

 

Looking at the chart in Der Spiegel, the only voters who supported Merkel’s refugee policies were her own (the CDU), the center-left SPD, and the Greens, but even within those groups the dissenting percentages were 45, 48, and 41 percent respectively.

 

Never mind! The future president of the EU Commission looked at the voting numbers and decided that the votes of those who thought they had nowhere else to go were good enough, an example of the cynical complacency that is such a hallmark of Brussels rule.

 

As for Merkel, Der Speigel reported that she was determined to plug on:

 

On the Monday following the election, the chancellor made an appearance at CDU headquarters in Berlin — and acted as though nothing had happened. There is “both light and shadows,” she said. The rise of the AfD is certainly not nice, she said, “but it is not an existential problem.” She was flanked by Julia Klöckner of Rhineland-Palatinate and Guido Wolf of Baden-Württemberg, both of whom had lost their respective elections — and they looked as though they couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They kept glancing at their boss with skeptical looks on their faces. . . .

 

Shortly before her comments at CDU headquarters, Merkel had met with party leaders and made it clear that she sees no reason to rethink her course. According to people familiar with the meeting, her words were met with a combination of horror and resignation. . . .

 

That sounds a bit familiar, but to be clear, Merkel was the second-worst chancellor in German history.

Immigration Policy Matters

National Review Online

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

Anew report from the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that the foreign-born population of the United States is down 2.9 million over the first 18 months of the Trump administration, and from this we can estimate that the population of illegal immigrants has fallen 2.3 million — from 15.8 million to 13.5 million. If these numbers extrapolated from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey withstand further scrutiny, the significance of this development is difficult to overstate. This would be the first time America’s net migration numbers have been negative — more immigrants leaving than coming in — since the 1930s.

 

Proponents of mass immigration have often argued that the movement of people across borders is practically unstoppable. Proponents of amnesty have argued that policy cannot remove illegal immigrants who have already arrived here, and that attempts to enforce the law backfire and bring about even more immigration.

 

It’s important to understand that these are not direct numbers for deportations or immigration. The Current Population Survey is not designed to measure immigrants and migration. But it does capture data from which researchers can make solid inferences over time. New lawful permanent residents and other new arrivals add to the foreign-born population each month. Deaths of foreign-born people living in America subtract from it. There is also a regular flow of foreign-born people who return to their home countries or travel to new ones.

 

The data from this survey captured the massive surge of the foreign-born population under former President Joe Biden, when the foreign-born population increased by 8.32 million in just four years, the fastest four-year increase of any period in American history. The CIS report notes that “the clear upward trend followed by a dramatic downward trend does track well with changes in the nation’s immigration policies, from a highly permissive approach to immigration during the Biden administration to the more restrictive policies during the second Trump administration.” Over the past 18 months, by this account, Latin American noncitizens who arrived in 1980 or later account for all of the decrease in this population.

 

Not all of it, not by a long shot, is the result of interior enforcement. The best data we have suggest that 350,000 people were subject to some kind of enforcement act that led to their departure from the country in this 18-month time period. This enforcement pattern created incentives for others to leave voluntarily. Researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler write, “Based on the data available, interior removals and voluntary departures could not by themselves account for the higher levels of emigration implied by the CPS. Voluntary emigration would have to have increased substantially for the foreign-born population to decline this much.” Overall, the numbers point to one overall conclusion — that “the number of people settling in the country legally and illegally has fallen significantly, while the number leaving has increased dramatically.”

 

The survey suggests that only 44 percent of the net decline is among workers. This lines up with the administration’s hands-off approach to the workplace. The Trump administration has practically exempted entire sectors, including hospitality, agriculture, and construction, from examination, allowing those sectors to continue to be labor gray zones, where illegal labor is tolerated, and increasingly a cultural and economic norm institutionally.

 

What can we conclude? The first is that President Trump has followed through dramatically on his promise to control immigration after a period of lawlessness and chaos under Biden. For this he should be commended. Second, the president and the Department of Homeland Security should step up workplace enforcement. The Republican Party has a proud tradition of fighting for a nation in which workers compete fairly on the same legal standing. Tight labor markets at the bottom end of the skills distribution raise the wages of poorer workers and spur innovation. Not every immigration enforcement action has to be a dramatic, GoPro-filmed kinetic action. Much of it involves carrying a briefcase and checking documentation.

 

Finally, and most important, these numbers refute the arguments of those who try to mystify the issue by portraying immigration as an uncontrollable feature of market economics or the process of globalization. Immigration can be controlled by policy and profoundly shaped by enforcement decisions. Self-deportation is a real phenomenon, and actions that increase voluntary compliance with our just laws should be redoubled. Commonsense enforcement is neither ruinously expensive nor injurious to the broader economy. The president is winning on this issue and should double down on his success.

The Vindication of Tom Homan

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, September 02, 2026

 

Where does Tom Homan go to get his apology?

 

When Trump put his border czar in charge of unwinding the controversial Department of Homeland Security operation in Minneapolis earlier this year, critics on the right believed that Homan would be the instrument of a broad Trump climb-down on his signature issue.

 

Gregory Bovino, the border officer who had been in charge in Minneapolis before getting supplanted by Homan, accused him of pretending to be tough while giving up on mass deportations.

 

As it turns out, immigration arrests hit a record for Trump’s second term in June at 43,000, and the number increased again in July to 50,000.

 

Removals, too, were at a high in July — 34,000.

 

There was a dip in enforcement after Trump pulled back from Minneapolis. It didn’t last long, though. As the administration settled on a new approach, and funding from the Big Beautiful Bill Act — $75 billion for ICE — flowed into additional enforcement assets, the numbers began to increase again.

 

Homan has avoided the pyrotechnics favored by the attention-seeking former head of DHS, Kristi Noem, who sent Bovino to Minneapolis. Instead, he’s continued robust enforcement without relishing cinematic images of militarized raids and clashes with protesters for their own sake.

 

In fact, anti-ICE activists are complaining about the lack of flashiness. According to The Guardian, they say that because arrests are “generally happening routinely, and quietly, volunteers who had taken to keeping watch for ICE vehicles and officers in certain cities and blowing whistles when they spotted immigration agents, were lately having trouble seeing how and where ICE is operating.”

 

The new tactics depend heavily on routine pickups of illegal aliens at traffic stops and immigration check-ins, as well as at airports.

 

A spate of news stories has emphasized, in a critical tone, how for the first time a majority of those apprehended haven’t committed other crimes besides their immigration offenses. It may be that Trump and Homan have put too much emphasis in their rhetoric on going after “the worst of the worst,” but there is no reason that more routine immigration offenders should be held harmless.

 

(The effort to track down and detain criminals continues, by the way — Operation Rotten Apple in New York has taken murderers, rapists, and gang members off the streets over the last few weeks.)

 

It is true that staying and working here illegally doesn’t necessarily make someone a threat to public safety. It does, however, involve committing other crimes — identity theft, Social Security fraud, falsifying I-9 employment forms, and the like. Regardless, immigration law very clearly gives the government authority to arrest and detain illegal immigrants, and in some instances, mandates it.

 

ICE is required to detain aliens who are under final orders of removal, and there are plenty of those. Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies points out that immigration judges issued nearly half a million orders of removal in the first nine months of this fiscal year alone.

 

The fact is that the illegal immigrant population in the United States is roughly 15 million people, with a substantial number arriving during the Biden years alone. The only way to reduce this population is to arrest and deport illegal aliens, or to convince them — as a way to avoid their own arrest and deportation — to leave under their own power.

 

It is Tom Homan’s insight that the most politically sustainable way to effect this policy is to pursue it in a nonconfrontational manner and keep it out of the headlines to the extent possible. There is even more the administration could do along these lines if it used various forms of bureaucratic enforcement to squeeze businesses employing illegal workers.

 

For now, though, Homan has established proof of concept for a less lurid, but more effective version of immigration enforcement. There is much work yet to do, but Homan was never waving the white flag on enforcement and now has the numbers to prove it.

Identifying the Enemy

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, August 15, 2026

 

I wrote last year about the way in which Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, led her center-left party to take a tougher stance on immigration after she became its leader in 2015. Not unconnectedly, she became Denmark’s prime minister in 2019. Unsurprisingly, Frederiksen has reiterated her position on immigration in the wake of the events in Ceuta, and in language unimaginable from almost anywhere else on the left.

 

On August 12, the Danish parliament debated Ceuta and its aftermath. Among Frederiksen’s remarks were these (translation by Google Translate, but from my very, very limited knowledge of Danish it looks to be accurate):

 

A few years ago, Denmark stood very much alone in Europe. Now a majority of EU countries support it, and this has made it possible to create concrete political results. We have succeeded in changing EU legislation so that it is now possible to establish reception and departure canters [for illegal migrants] in countries outside the EU, and . . . Danish authorities are working concretely to make it a reality. In other words: Denmark is now pushing Europe forward, and we intend to continue to do so — also when it comes to the issue of legalizing illegal migrants who are already in Europe, because we are against that. We are against that. It is no secret that I and the Spanish prime minister deeply disagree on immigration policy. We do so at a national level, and we do so at a European level. The Spanish government can make its own national decisions, just as Denmark can. But I and we will not accept that Danish society has to pay the price for decisions in Spain that we fundamentally disagree with. [Emphasis added.]

 

In other words, given the rules governing internal movement within the EU, the amnesty for illegal migrants forced through by Spain’s far-left prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, had implications elsewhere in the bloc. That’s something that Sánchez, who has complained loudly about a lack of “solidarity” within the EU after the Ceuta crisis would do well to remember, a point that Frederiksen addressed later in the debate.

 

Frederiksen also turned her attention to the danger posed to Europe by “undemocratic forces.” After identifying Russia as the principal threat, she then turned her attention to what she referred to a “big enemy that has started to grow from within (en stor fjende er begyndter begyndt at vokse op indefra).”

 

Who might this be?

 

It is foreigners who have come to Europe [“udlændinge, der er kommet til Europe”], it is Hamas supporters, it is people who commit terror against European societies, it is people who do not recognize our fundamental European values, it is people who sympathize with some of the darkest forces in this world. So Europe is threatened. The problem is that we are threatened both from outside and now from within, but it is not because of a disagreement between the Danish and Spanish governments, but because of people with an Islamic background [“folk med islamisk baggrund”] who do not want the open, free European society, unfortunately.

 

As a reminder, Frederiksen was on the left and is on the left. To Bernie Sanders, she must be the Dane from hell.

 

Moreover, she has just co-signed a letter with Italy’s redoubtable (oh, sorry, “far right”) Giorgia Meloni, who is, in many respects, Frederiksen’s polar opposite, as the duo acknowledge in the letter:

 

We are aware that many might be wondering about our cooperation. We come from very different political backgrounds, and we certainly do not agree on everything.

 

But:

 

We do not accept uncontrolled immigration to Europe, and we have promoted a strict immigration policy, both in our Nations and in Europe.

 

And they defend their stance not only on conventional grounds (problems with crime and so on), but something deeper:

 

We are both proud of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage and we want to protect it. We expect those who come to our countries and choose to make Europe their home to respect our values and not seek to impose ways of life on us that we do not share.

 

The reference to “cultural heritage” is carefully chosen. This is not, it should be stressed, some sort of theological declaration. Meloni is a Catholic, if somewhat idiosyncratically so, and a churchgoer. Frederiksen is a member of the Church of Denmark but is not a believer. However, for reasons tied to culture and social cohesion, she is a “virkelig hardcore tilhænger” (a really hardcore supporter) of the Danish church, a stance, incidentally, that has its equivalents in the home of the Church of England.

 

Contrast the attitude of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France’s hard left LFI. He will be running (again) for the French presidency next year and, based on current polling, he may emerge as the leading candidate of the left.

 

Mélenchon talks of a “New France” formed and defined by a process he refers to as “créolisation” (a concept borrowed from Édouard Glissant, a poet born in the French Caribbean), something new formed by the mix of traditional French and immigrant culture, rather than the traditional French model which is, at least in theory, assimilationist.

 

Mélenchon’s approach is, above all, a matter of political calculation. He has realized that the white Catholic working class (“les ouvriers blancs catholiques”) are not going to help build the path to socialism he is looking for. He seems to have concluded that citizens of the nascent New France just might. Given France’s demographics, that has meant a sharp turn toward Muslim voters, which seems to be working. In the 2024 European elections, an estimated 62 percent of those French Muslims who voted (there was a high abstention rate) opted for the LFI and an estimated 69 percent chose Mélenchon in the first round of the 2022 presidential elections.

 

Mélenchon dismisses talk of an informal Islamo-leftist “partnership.” He also denies allegations of antisemitism.

 

Of course he does.

 

Fortunately, his sort of politics would be impossible in New York City, say, or Michigan.

 

Oh.

The Roots of the Ceuta Crisis

National Review Online

Tuesday, August 04, 2026

 

The massive (if largely temporary) incursion of about 70,000 illegal migrants out of Morocco into Ceuta, a Spanish city of 80,000 people on the North African coast, has set off a debate that, to say the least, has been wide-ranging.

 

We will start at the beginning. Ceuta has been under Spanish or Portuguese rule since it was taken by the Portuguese in 1415, almost 40 years before the fall of Constantinople. Asserting that it is unacceptable to have a Spanish city on the African mainland is a variant of blood-and-soil nationalism that, if taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that Turkey should quit East Thrace and Istanbul.

 

Self-determination is the better principle. Ceutans are Spaniards who want their city to remain Spanish. That wish should be respected. Ceuta juts into Morocco, which argues that Ceuta (and Melilla, its “twin”) are part of its patrimony, a claim without any legitimacy. If there is any substance behind recent hints of discreet U.S. support for Morocco over this, it is evidence of appallingly misguided thinking. Spain’s hard-left prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, is profoundly and dangerously anti-American, but his time will pass. The U.S. should not confuse Spain with Sánchez or, for that matter, Morocco with reliability.

 

Much of the controversy over the influx into Ceuta revolves around Sánchez’s responsibility for it. Earlier this year, his government forced through an amnesty for illegal immigrants. About 1 million people applied, roughly double the official, but widely disbelieved, estimate. Eventually, family reunification provisions may increase the total admitted or regularized to, on some estimates, between 2 and 3 million. After, typically, five years of legal residence, they will be able to settle elsewhere in the EU. Unsurprisingly, the news of this amnesty horrified many in a bloc already wrestling with the consequences of mass immigration and badly scarred by the Merkel debacle a decade ago. Thanks to the EU’s rules on free movement within its borders, an immigration problem in one member-state can easily spill over into another.

 

The amnesty sent a signal to would-be immigrants. It was not the first in Spain, and there was no reason to think that it would be the last, Moreover, just weeks ago, the Spanish Supreme Court had opened a loophole in the special immigration regime in place for Ceuta and Melilla. Under this, asylum-seekers can be turned back at the border but, the court ruled (for reasons that are now being addressed), not if they swam there.

 

People respond to incentives, whether real or imagined. Some sort of surge was foreseeable. Indeed, there are claims that Madrid was warned that one was on the way. The government’s response has ranged from denial to the somewhat more credible position that it was given no warning of the size of any incursion. Whatever the truth, no new steps were taken to deal with a surge, a negligent coda to a reckless amnesty.

 

The sheer size of the crowd that overwhelmed Ceuta’s inadequate defenses and poured into the city has understandably given rise to suggestions that the incursion was organized. But by whom?

 

The most obvious suspect is the Moroccan government. Not only does it claim that Ceuta is Moroccan, but also, some argue, it was angered by a recent visit by Sánchez to Algiers during which he described Algeria as a “strategic partner.” Morocco and Algeria do not get along. Under the circumstances, for Morocco to take advantage of the opportunity created by Madrid to demonstrate Ceuta’s vulnerability would make a lot of sense. There are reports that the Moroccan government encouraged the exodus, and there are others that suggest something more complex. If only, perhaps, for diplomatic reasons, Sánchez has distanced himself from the accusations against Rabat and cast some of the blame on people-traffickers and, one way or another, social media.

 

Sánchez was, however, enraged by criticism from some EU countries (above all, Italy, which also introduced temporary checks on non-EU citizens traveling directly from Spain) and their supposed lack of “solidarity.” However, in a letter sent on Saturday, 22 EU prime ministers (the EU has 27 member-states) made clear what they thought of Sánchez’s solidarity. They stressed the importance of working jointly against illegal immigration, an approach that included “addressing all policies that can serve as pull factors, such as the regularization of [a] very large number of irregular migrants.” Ouch.

 

In an attempt to defuse matters, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission, has praised the speedy resolution of the Ceuta crisis (even if more migrants remain there than was first claimed). She is calling for tighter external border controls, something that obviously makes sense. These would, however, have done nothing to stop Sánchez’s amnesty. So, what to do? We would recommend offering member-states a choice. If they want to preserve their prerogative to unilaterally pass such measures, they should agree to withdraw from the EU’s border-free Schengen Area. This is unlikely to happen, though, and Schengen will limp on until it collapses.

The Ceuta Migrant Wave Was a Power Play by Morocco Against Spain

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Most of the commentary on Ceuta that you’ll find on platforms like X reiterates the same four points.

 

·         If we hadn’t reelected Trump, this is what America would look like.

 

·         This is what you get when you elect socialists like Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

 

·         The Moroccans attempting to cross the border are overwhelmingly military-age males, so this isn’t migration, it’s an invasion.

 

·         The 1973 French novel The Camp of the Saints is more than a xenophobic tirade, it’s a prediction of our future.

 

All those arguments are true to varying degrees. Most notably, in February the Sánchez government said it would offer amnesty, expecting to legalize an estimated half million immigrants who had arrived illegally in recent years. More than 1.3 million applied for the amnesty. Under the laws of Europe’s Schengen area, if you’re a Spanish citizen, you can travel or work in 28 other countries. (Our Andrew Stuttaford, back on July 3: “This amnesty, the seventh in 40 years, will only encourage more arrivals. Needless to say, it is a mistake.”)

 

But there are also a couple of wrinkles in the rush to Ceuta that are getting overlooked, although not by John Gustavsson or Josh Treviño, both writing for National Review Online.

 

On July 20, Prime Minister Sánchez visited Algeria:

 

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in Algiers on Monday that he sought to deepen ties with Algeria, as the countries mend relations after a dispute over Western Sahara.

 

Sanchez told reporters that the visit, a first in four years, held “particular importance” for Spain, which views Algeria as “not only a neighboring country but also a strategic partner.” . . .

 

Ties between Algiers and Madrid deteriorated in 2022 when Spain backed Morocco’s sovereignty claim over Western Sahara, reversing its decades-long neutral stance on the conflict over its former colony.

 

The governments of Algeria and Morocco do not get along and have not gotten along for a long time. They both want to be the big dog in northwest Africa, and any gain by Algeria is seen as a loss for Morocco, and vice versa.  Algeria cut ties with Morocco in 2021, and the land border between those two countries has been closed since 1994.

 

There’s even an arms race:

 

Against this backdrop, the two countries began to prepare for the possibility that their dispute might evolve into armed conflict. Both sides ramped up military spending. Morocco bought Israel’s anti-drone Skylock Dome system in November and its Harop drones in December. In February 2022, it additionally acquired Barak MX, a modular Israeli-made system that can knock down both missiles and drones. Finally, in April 2023, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of eighteen U.S. HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, along with other military equipment, to Morocco.

 

Algeria rushed to keep pace with these purchases. In November 2022, the Algerian parliament approved a staggering increase in the 2023 military budget to around $23 billion, up from around $11 billion the previous year. In late 2022, local media indicated that the authorities were preparing to buy Su-57 stealth jets, SU-34 bombers and Su-30 fighters, in addition to new air defence systems, such as the S-400, from Russia. To diversify its weapons sources, Algeria turned to Türkiye to buy Anka S+ drones and to China to acquire Halcon drones, to give two examples.

 

Do tens of thousands of people spontaneously decide, all by themselves, to rush a fenced border? No, they do not.

 

From the New York Times (emphasis added):

 

Like so many others in Morocco, Mohammed Ahmidho saw on his social media feeds early Thursday that the heavily guarded border his country shared with the Spanish territory of Ceuta was open.

 

Soon enough, he joined a crowd in the tens of thousands, many of whom were astonished to see Moroccan police urge them, as he recalled, to “come to Spain.”

 

It is still unclear why so many people came to Ceuta. Many of the Moroccans who wandered around Ceuta on Friday wondered if the doors hadn’t opened because of some unknown plan by Morocco, which has been accused of using immigrant flows in the past for political pressure.

 

“I don’t know why they let us through,” said Ajoub el-Arrot, 24, who said he heard about the open border on social media. “Maybe they had some political reason. They opened the border and let everyone go by.”

 

He added, “When there are political problems, Morocco opens the doors and tells us to go.”

 

Douae Tabit, 19, who also said she heard about the unchecked crossing on social media, said it went “viral” and passed by word of mouth, attracting people from all around Morocco. Fluent in English, French and Spanish, she said she worked as a nurse and photographer and spontaneously decided to take advantage of the opportunity.

 

Moroccan police do not just randomly encourage people to cross into Spain without documentation.

 

Do you think it’s a coincidence that less than two weeks after Sánchez went to Algeria and declared that country a “strategic partner,” the Moroccan police started encouraging tens of thousands of Moroccans to attempt to cross the border into Ceuta? Me neither. Yes, Sánchez’s amnesty policies are a factor in this, but what happened here is that the Moroccan government, irked that Sánchez is trying to build a better relationship with Algeria, sent a signal to the Spanish prime minister that it can make life for him, his government, and the people of Ceuta miserable, any time it wants.

 

In the combined fiscal years 2024–2025, the U.S. government sent $112 million in foreign aid to Morocco. According to ForeignAssistance.gov, the U.S. has sent $1.4 million so far this fiscal year, although that data may be incomplete.

 

One last point: Andrew Stuttaford notices with irritation that the National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2027, which passed the House nearly unanimously a few weeks ago, states:

 

The Committee notes that the Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory and remain the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim.

 

And:

 

The Committee supports efforts by the Secretary of State to encourage diplomatic engagement between Morocco and Spain on the future status of Ceuta and Melilla.

 

“The wording of the committee’s report has no legal status, but it was, at the very least, careless,” Andrew concludes. “Making matters worse, it didn’t pass unnoticed in either Spain or Morocco.”

 

Was someone in our government, irritated with Spain over the amount of its NATO spending, attempting to stick a thumb in the eye of the Spanish government?

 

By the way, for all the legitimate gripes about Spain and its contribution to NATO, let us observe that the Spanish government has increased its defense spending by 70 percent in the last decade; its investment of 32 percent on equipment is above the 20 percent required by NATO and actually a bit higher than the U.S. level at 29.7 percent. Spain spent $40 billion on defense in 2025; we all love the Poles, but Poland spent about $46 billion. The reason Spain’s defense spending as a share of gross domestic product seems so much lower is that Spain has a GDP just above $2 trillion, while Poland — now in the top 20 economies in the world — has a GDP of around $1 trillion.

 

The Cyberattacks That President Trump Doesn’t Want to Acknowledge

 

Considering the importance of what it does, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is surprisingly low-profile. It could use a CBS prime-time drama or two. Then again, the agency may well like it that way; like offensive lineman, you usually hear about the more obscure federal law enforcement agencies only when something goes wrong.

 

Efforts to hack into critical infrastructure are widespread: in 2024, Check Point Research documented 1,162 cyberattacks on U.S. utilities, a 75 percent year-over-year increase. Given those numbers, perhaps it’s good that we hear about CISA so rarely. But the agency regularly puts out new alerts about foreign cyber threats. (Keep in mind that “approximately 50 to 85 percent of critical infrastructure is privately owned, depending on the sector, from large corporations to small and medium-sized businesses.” So it’s up to the private company to make sure its cyber defenses are up to the task.) China and Russia may take the gold and silver in the cyber-threat Olympics, but the Iranians consistently edge out the North Koreans for the bronze.

 

In February 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned six officials in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber-Electronic Command for a November 2023 attack on the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, Pa.

 

CISA put out alerts regarding “malicious cyber activities conducted by advanced persistent threat cyber actors affiliated with the Iranian Government’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” or similar Iranian threats in August 2024, October 2024, and December 2024.

 

Also in 2024, President Trump’s campaign said it had been targeted by “an Iranian military intelligence unit in June sending ‘a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor.’”

 

In mid-March, the U.S. Justice Department “announced the seizure of four domains as part of an ongoing effort to disrupt hacking and transnational repression schemes conducted by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.” Later that month, “cyber criminals linked to Iran accessed FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email account.”

 

Then, on July 30, the FBI put out a new public service announcement:

 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Environmental Protection Agency are issuing this Public Service Announcement to warn critical infrastructure asset owners and operators that malicious cyber actors are conducting cyber-attacks targeting Operational Technology devices, including Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers , specifically MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series. Since July 27 2026, Water and Wastewater Sector utility companies in at least seven states have reported incidents to the FBI, and some of that activity degraded water operations.

 

Minnesota and Michigan have been identified as two of those states.

 

Now, the most recent PSAs did not specifically state that the Iranians were doing this. But we know from past attacks like the one in Aliquippa, Pa., that this is the Iranian modus operandi.

 

Anyway, here’s our president on Friday:

 

Today, I just want to mention that we heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack and they blame it on Iran. I don’t think so. I think — I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent. There was a cyberattack of 30 water plants, and I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. They like to say, oh, it’s Iran. Iran should be so lucky. Iran’s got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota. This month it was announced that inflation is dropping at the fastest rate in more than six years. Walmart, Sam’s Club, Giant Eagle and others are slashing prices by hundreds of grocery stores.

 

And then later in that same appearance:

 

I don’t think — no, I think that Minnesota is behind it. You know who’s behind it, Minnesota, because they’re grossly incompetent. I think the governor’s behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyberattack. I think that Minnesota ought to get its act together. It’s one of the worst-run states. JD will tell you. He found tremendous corruption in Minnesota.

 

And how about the attacks on water systems in those six other states, Mr. President? Do you think “the governor’s behind it” for all of those, too? You think Tim Walz is the criminal mastermind behind all of these cyberattacks?

 

Our critical systems are under attack, and our rambling, erratic, living-in-his-own-world president does not want to acknowledge it. If he did publicly recognize that Iran is trying to harm Americans through their water systems, the public might be rather upset by the latest cancellation of a massive military response against the Iranian regime.

 

Oh, and under this administration, CISA has gotten significantly smaller:

 

At the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the government’s top cyber defense body protecting U.S. election systems, nearly 1,000 CISA personnel — or nearly one-third of the agency’s workforce — had left or been removed from active service by mid-2025.

 

Some were terminated, while others resigned or took administrative leave. Others had contracts that were not renewed or their programs were shut down. Altogether, staffing lingered at around 2,500, down from approximately 3,400 a year earlier.

 

Hey, didn’t our president just give a big prime-time speech about how “the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes [us], like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference”? If you’re so worried about foreign hacking and exploitation, why are you dramatically cutting the number of staff at the federal agency designed to fight foreign hacking and exploitation?

 

ADDENDUM: Out in Ohio, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno writes of his son-in law, Republican Congressman Max Miller:

 

If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives. I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake. I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does.

 

 

Spain and Europe’s Crisis of Meaning

By Joshua S. Treviño

Tuesday, August 04, 2026

 

The immediate Ceuta crisis may have receded, with most of the 60,000 invaders having returned to Morocco, but it leaves in its wake a series of follow-on crises for Spain, Europe, and America alike.

 

The Spanish predicament engages problems both foreign and domestic. The Moroccan state, having demonstrated its ability to overrun Spanish territory at will, has experienced neither counter nor penalty and is unlikely to do so. At the strategic level, Spanish defense confronts a problem long-known and also long-ignored, in the imperative to keep the difficult-to-defend Plazas de Soberanía strewn upon the North African coast secured: a challenge that becomes acute when Morocco leverages hybrid warfare. That level of warfare, exploiting “civilian” means and targeting systemic non-military vulnerabilities, is uniquely effective when its targets will not recognize it as warfare, and therefore do not bring the full array of capabilities to bear against it. Spanish governance is therefore confronted with three interrelated imperatives: to maintain a qualitative superiority versus Moroccan means, to recognize hybrid warfare as such, and to use the full spectrum of state power against it. This is easy to diagnose but exceptionally difficult to undertake, especially for a Western government of the left.

 

That government of the left, in Madrid’s case, is another of Spain’s problems. It is manifestly true that the Moroccan state bears direct responsibility for the immediate crisis, but its actions ought to be seen as opportunistic. That opportunity was presented by the government in Madrid. The Socialist regime of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has signaled throughout its tenure that it is inimical to Spanish identity, heritage, and sovereignty: from waging cultural war upon Spanish and Catholic Church sites and symbols within Spain, to pushing through a hasty and ill-considered program of legalization for extraordinary numbers of illegal immigrants, to forming its own government upon a base of concessions to territorial separatists. Based upon the record of the past three years alone, a Moroccan calculus that now is a good time to test Spanish territorial integrity is not irrational.

 

Sánchez has further achieved something extraordinary, brought to light in the international reactions to the Ceuta crisis, that he did not expect after posturing himself as the anti-Trump leader of the global left: near-total isolation of Spain in its moment of crisis. Having assiduously courted global anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian sentiment, and having sought maximum visibility in his opposition to the American war upon Iran, Sánchez gained no support whatsoever from the Arab and Muslim world when his nation’s territory was invaded by one of their own. Having positioned himself as the stalwart counter to an unpopular-in-Europe American leadership, Sánchez received no meaningful support whatsoever from European nations when Spanish territory, which means European Union territory, was violated. Worse than that, the general discussion within Europe centered upon how to isolate and punish Spain for failing to do its part in securing European borders. Having made Spain the sole NATO power to refuse the 5 percent defense-spending mandate, Sánchez was confronted with well-earned American remonstrances and reminders that American policy increasingly favors Morocco, which is at least a state with fruitful direction and purpose.

 

Spain is a victim in the Ceuta crisis, it is true: but the Spanish political leadership in power is its primary victimizer.

 

The Spanish political leadership not in power, facing a national election in the coming year, is now confronted with its own choices. Spain’s political landscape features two major parties of the right. One, the venerable Partido Popular, may be broadly described as a technocratic right, managerial and experienced. It is the larger of the two. The other, Vox, is smaller but historically more oriented toward issues of Spanish cultural inheritance. Both parties’ leaders, Alberto Núñez Feijóo of Partido Popular and Santiago Abascal of Vox, have seen fit to go to Ceuta in the wake of the crisis — as has, it should be noted, Sánchez himself. (One may ask why King Felipe VI has not gone, as might seem appropriate, and the probable answer is that the Socialist government has blocked the trip.) Whether Spain’s right, across both parties, can leverage this moment into something larger remains to be seen. The movement writ large, across the past 20 years, has not been as aggressive in the defense of Spanish identity and heritage as the left has been aggressive in diminishing both. If 60,000 Moroccans storming a Spanish city of 80,000 citizens does not inspire resolve, it is difficult to imagine what will.

 

Something must, because Spain is on its own. The enervated project of the European Union has shown its quality in this crisis just as much as Spanish Socialism has, and it looks just as weakened in its own way. The European powers have had much time and opportunity to reflect upon their self-defense and its challenges, from the 2014 Russian seizure of Crimea, to the 2015 migrant crisis, to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine proper, to the post-2024 American reorientation away from European defense, to the 2026 Iranian attacks upon European territory and energy supplies. Now, a European-power city is briefly overrun, and the general reaction of Europe is directed against that European power, and not against the Moroccan state proximately responsible for the overrunning. At this writing, 22 EU member states have called for an “emergency” meeting on Spanish irresponsibility and remedies for it. On the one hand, Spain’s Socialists deserve it; on the other hand, European preference for focusing upon process changes within Europe to the exclusion of confronting the external threat speaks volumes.

 

An American with ordinary historical consciousness might note that Europe finds itself in the era of America’s own Articles of Confederation, but with no Americans to set it right. What does Europe mean if Europe will not preserve itself?

 

From that American perspective, we learn much, little good, of the state of Spanish and European governance now. Yet there are reasons for optimism, if we discern them. The European response is insufficient, but it is also the opposite of 2015: The general reaction is to solidify borders, not open them, and this is progress. Spain will have elections no later than late-summer 2027, and the Spanish right — which contains within itself many good patriots whom Americans would recognize as such — may rescue both the situation and their country. Finally, the United States since January 2025 has arrived at the right policy formula for dealing with threats like the ones confronting Ceuta and Europe at large. Borders must be sealed, mass migration must be ended, benefits to illegal entry (from state welfare to remittances and beyond) must be stopped, human traffickers must be confronted and pursued, terror designations must be issued, state sponsors must suffer state consequences, and the full array of national power, including the military, must be brought to bear for all of it. All this requires recognizing hybrid warfare for what it is. What the Americans have imposed with much success in the Caribbean basin is equally appropriate for the Mediterranean basin. We have the lessons and the experience — we only await the partners with whom to share both.

Ceuta, or the Democratic Party’s Fantasy

By Abigail Anthony

Friday, July 321, 2026

 

Chaos is erupting in Ceuta, a small Spanish autonomous city and exclave on the northern coast of Africa. Ceuta had a population of about 85,000 — until yesterday, when an estimated 60,000 “migrants” (read: invaders) from Morocco stormed the coast. The Spanish Supreme Court decided earlier this month that migrants arriving by sea in Ceuta (and another Spanish exclave, Melilla) cannot be immediately kicked out without due process. In other words, people saw a loophole and exploited it.

 

I have exactly zero expertise in Spanish politics and law. I also lack any “insider” knowledge; I don’t have a single source in Spain, and certainly not someone witnessing the events unfold in Ceuta. I won’t pretend to know something that I don’t know; I’m at the mercy of what has been presented in the media and social platforms.

 

Still, I want to share a few observations — and fears.

 

First, I noticed that almost all the newcomers in the images and footage I’ve seen are fit and able men. The sole exception I’ve seen is one video that shows a handful of women in hijabs walking casually; I haven’t seen any young children, although some of the males might be teenagers. This demographic detail, coupled with the sheer number of them, means that three army divisions — nearly the size of the residing population, and more than the adult population — arrived in Ceuta without warning.

 

Second, those who have spoken to media outlets have explained that they are not fleeing persecution. They are motivated by the riches of Europe, and they just couldn’t be bothered to seek relocation through legal routes because they conceive of access to Europe as some natural human right. “I don’t want to live in Morocco, I want to live in Europe,” Zakaria Lahmer, 23, told the New York Times. He added, “I want a job, I want happiness.” A 33-year-old man, Ahmed Karim, told ABC News that “many people want to go to Europe, America, but they don’t have the opportunity.”

 

Third, the newcomers immediately proved exactly why they should not be welcomed: They trashed the shore, torched vehicles, looted stores, destroyed property, broke into homes, threw stones at authorities, and assaulted locals. You can distinguish the invaders from the locals because the former are walking around with katanas.

 

Fourth, this is exactly what right-wingers warned would happen under lenient immigration laws and accommodating “asylum” or “refugee” policies. But our concerns and arguments were summarily dismissed as “racist,” “xenophobic,” and “white supremacist.”

 

Fifth, I’m not sure we would have heard about this catastrophe without Musk-owned Twitter/X. I suspect, somewhat conspiratorially, that the right-wing outrage about the invasion prompted large outlets to cover it. In an alternative hypothetical world where Musk’s Twitter/X doesn’t exist, it is possible that the mainstream Western media would have eventually mentioned the story, but I suspect the journalists would have sanitized the details, in part because they are currently describing the events as delicately as possible. Consider this Associated Press headline: “60,000 migrants crossed into Spanish territory of Ceuta, but many soon left voluntarily.” If you scroll through the stories in major outlets, you’ll see images of the migrants standing around or swimming with floats, rather than causing destruction. (Some articles don’t have any images whatsoever.) The media’s photographic strategy is to focus on the migrants arriving and entering without any regard to what they’re doing on land. Put simply, mainstream outlets are talking about Ceuta because they have to, and they’re attempting to placate the public with underwhelming photos of people swimming.

 

Sixth, Democrats will enable and encourage exactly this type of invasion the moment they next seize power. We know this because of what occurred — and was celebrated — under Joe Biden; the more recent anti-ICE demonstrations are further confirmation. This is among the many reasons why they should never win again.

When Following the Rules Leads to Disaster

By Graeme Wood

Saturday, August 01, 2026

 

On July 8, Spain’s supreme court issued a seemingly reasonable decision, unaware that by the end of the month, it would contribute to the deaths of at least 57 people, many by drowning. The court ruled that people who had migrated illegally could be sent back summarily only if they’d circumvented a physical barrier at the border. If no barrier exists—if they’d walked across open ground, say, or swum—then the government must go through a much more complicated process to deport them.

 

And if you’re trying to swim to Europe from Africa, there may be no better destination than Ceuta, a speck of Spanish territory in North Africa, surrounded by Morocco on its western edge and the Mediterranean elsewhere. Every year, some migrants try to swim to Ceuta, especially in the summer, when the waters are relatively calm. Ceuta has a facility that can process about 500 people at a time. But Thursday, 100 times that number—an estimated 50,000 people—made an amphibious attempt to swarm Ceuta and emigrate illegally from Morocco.

 

This was evidently a coordinated attempt, assisted by social media. One Facebook group, the now-defunct “Hraga Ceuta,” reportedly featured exact maps of the three-hour maritime journey from the Moroccan town of Fnideq, which bypassed the land border with Ceuta and ensured that anyone who arrived alive would break no barriers and would land on sand or rocks rather than at a fence or turnstile. People showed up with fins, wet suits, and floaties. They discussed going in together on kayaks and coordinating their departures. Their conditions on arrival were not all dire. An El País reporter in Ceuta met an unaccompanied 16-year-old girl, still wet from the sea, her mascara runny, wearing earrings and a gold necklace, “as if just back from clubbing.”

 

Europe will probably spend weeks trying to figure out exactly what led to Thursday’s catastrophe. (Danish and Italian leaders have called for suspending Spain from Schengen, the free-movement zone that allows someone to travel from Córdoba to Copenhagen without passing through border control.) But one contributing factor is that the supreme court effectively directed migrants to choose life-threatening routes. People saw their shot, and took it. Spain has alleged that human traffickers were among these opportunists. Morocco has been blamed for encouraging the migrants, to cause trouble for Spain. However, the Moroccan king happened to be giving his Throne Day speech nearby in M’diq, and it would have been an odd choice to spring a disaster of this magnitude so close by.

 

Another possible factor is socioeconomic: the long-term trends in Morocco that make life there miserable and send young people into the sea in search of opportunity. The youth-unemployment rate in Morocco is roughly one-third, and years of drought have led to a farming bust.

 

This second factor needs scrutiny, however. The past 25 years have been, droughts aside, good for Morocco’s economy. Indeed, its shift away from agriculture and mining and toward modern industry has powered consistent growth, led by such sectors as automotive manufacturing and phosphate processing. Youth unemployment is high, but it’s not much better in Spain, where it is currently about 25 percent, down from a high of 55 percent in 2013. So the migration is from a poor country without jobs to a rich one without jobs. I, too, would prefer a rich one, but the faster-growing economy of Morocco and the not-exactly-healthy labor sector of Spain complicate the picture.

 

In none of the accounts I have read from journalists in Ceuta do the migrants claim to be refugees—that is, people who fear persecution if they return to their home country. Some Moroccans have protested government policies, and according to reports, at least some of the migrants are sub-Saharan; some of them may have a legitimate asylum claim. But most of the Moroccans seem to be economic migrants, moving away from a country with economic problems but no economic catastrophe. In that sense, they are rational people seeking a better life, as anyone would. Because Spain has officially given swimmers a pass, it is also rational for them to have chosen that route, if they thought they could make it.

 

Far-right Spanish leaders are calling the incident an “invasion,” and even Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has described it as an “attack.” What I think perturbs Spaniards, and not just those on the right, is the combination of so many migrants’ awareness of the rules—knowing exactly how they work, and acting upon that knowledge for personal advantage—and their brazen unwillingness to submit to those rules when they prove disadvantageous. The name of the Facebook group that coordinated migrants used the Arabic-dialect word hraga. It means “burners,” and refers to the common practice of destroying one’s identity documents upon arrival in the intended country, to thwart even lawful efforts to detain, track, and deport their bearer. This combination of being a stickler for the rules and trying to evade them will leave a bitter taste for many Europeans.

 

The strongest case for mass immigration has always been that some people have no home to go back to, and need help. But the events in Ceuta seem very far from this category. They will empower right-wing parties that see Ceuta and say: Not a millimeter closer.

Morocco Tests Spanish Sovereignty

By Joshua S. Treviño

Saturday, August 01, 2026

 

The seemingly abrupt crisis in the Spanish city of Ceuta, perched on the North African littoral athwart the Straits of Gibraltar, is at once both alarming in the moment and portentous for the future. That future involves not just Spain, but the entirety of the West — of which the United States is an intrinsic part.

 

At this writing, the fast-moving invasion of Ceuta — we should call it what it is — has seen an estimated sixty thousand young men erupt into the city of approximately eighty thousand residents. They are, for the most part, coming in via a low-lying entry near the Mediterranean shore, poorly secured and now wholly breached. Fifty-seven individuals have died, presumably claimed by the sea or exposure; the number will probably climb. Within Ceuta itself, there are scattered reports of confrontations between Spanish residents and the new neighbors who may shortly outnumber them. Whatever the state of the streets, and even if all sixty thousand migrants are shortly expelled, the message is sent: this Spanish city, populated by Spanish citizens and part of Spanish sovereign territory for the past four and a half centuries, is no longer fully defended and possessed by Spain.

 

As you read this, perhaps the immediate crisis is ended — but all this remains true.

 

The question arises as to who, exactly, possesses the power to override Spanish sovereignty in this fashion we have just witnessed. It is not “the migrants” who have arrived in a flood, and who possess no political identity unto themselves. It is those who positively directed them — that is to say, agents of the Moroccan state. This is empirically confirmed by various media outlets, including the New York Times, which reports that the invaders could have been transported and directed by those agents. Deniability here is a feature: There is no directive nor policy from Rabat encouraging illegal migration into Spain, yet the apparatus of the state, in its police and functionaries, all tend toward the same end.

 

What Morocco has done is comparable to what Americans saw in late 2021, when several thousand Haitians suddenly appeared on the north bank of the Rio Grande at Del Rio, Texas. There too we saw reports of local officialdom urging and even moving Haitians from points within Mexico to crossings into the United States. Whether achieved through quiet direction by the state’s own hierarchy, like Henry II asking to be rid of a troublesome priest, or by human-trafficking cartels that function as state proxies, the fundamental responsible party is the state. A state that cannot account for the rapid assembly and movement of sixty thousand people is not a state. Morocco is a state in full. The question now is whether Spain is as well.

 

Further informing the picture of likely Moroccan-state aggression is the record of coercive Moroccan irredentism since its 1956 independence. The following year saw Moroccan forces invade and besiege Spanish possessions at both Ifni and in the Spanish Sahara, resulting, by 1958, in a Spanish retreat that resulted in the full cession of a strip of the Sahara, and all of Ifni, by 1969. Morocco then invaded neighboring Algeria between 1963 and 1964 in a futile effort to annex some of its bordering territory — an effort that eventually drew in Cuban forces in one of their first combat deployments to Africa. Morocco then invaded the remaining Spanish Sahara in the so-called Green March of 1975, resulting in a wholesale Spanish handover of the territory and the inception of a low-grade war with many of the Sahrawis that continues to this day.

 

From the outset of all this, Morocco laid claim to the Spanish Plazas de Soberanía on the North African coast, including the populated cities of Ceuta and Melilla. In other words, the Moroccan political project has from the start been focused on what it perceives to be the completion of its full territorial control over Africa’s northwestern corner.

 

It was not until Moroccan forces attempted in 2002 to forcibly occupy one of the Plazas de Soberanía, the uninhabited Isla Perejil, not far off Ceuta, that Spain decisively pushed back against the thus-far one-way ratchet of Moroccan territorial acquisition from Spain. That seven-day episode was resolved bloodlessly when Spanish forces retook the island from its minuscule Moroccan garrison; however, Morocco has not relinquished any of its claims. Since then, the tactics have shifted, away from the naked-aggression approaches at Ifni in 1957, Tindouf in 1963, or Perejil in 2002 and toward the Green March model of 1975, in which unarmed populations with state backing and direction are mobilized to deluge the territory of competing sovereigns, and render that sovereignty null by their entry and presence. Prior to the ongoing Ceuta crisis, the most-recent example came in the 2021 crisis in the same city, in which the Moroccan state facilitated the entry of approximately eight thousand migrants. That, of course, was a minor prelude to what we see now.

 

Those familiar with hybrid warfare and its manifestations will recognize this situation for what it is: a form of warfare, in which the population as such is weaponized, and an invasion as certain as if it were carried out by a uniformed army. This characterization is not hyperbole. In the American context, and specifically in Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution, invasion is classically understood as requiring two elements: entry into a sovereign and enmity toward that sovereign. It is on this basis, for example, that various U.S. state governments, including Texas, have declared that the border crisis of the Biden years constituted an invasion. The federal government in President Trump’s second term has also characterized the same crisis as an invasion. The involvement of the sending state — in the U.S. case, the Mexican regime with its robust cartel ties, and in the Spanish case, the Kingdom of Morocco’s direct engagement — is central to the characterization. The Spanish legal and constitutional context is obviously different, but the principles of governance are fundamentally the same. The goal of the individual migrant may be a better life, enrichment, or something else, but the goal of the state sending him is the weakening of sovereignty and, in the Moroccan case, sovereignty’s eventual transfer.

 

To that end, the Moroccan state has been strategically consistent, directionally engaged, and operationally savvy for generations. The same cannot be said for Spanish political leadership, which has veered wildly from the sagacious to the positively malign across the past fifty years. To the extent that the wounded and theatrical regime of Pedro Sánchez, enmeshed in scandal and reliant upon separatists elsewhere in Spain for his own tenuous fingernail’s grasp upon power, represents an opportunity to press a weakened Spanish state for territorial concession, the Moroccans will take it. They see the political moment within Spain, and they also see the broader currents afflicting Europe. It is improbable that they are not aware that the European left, not least under Britain’s Labour regime, is presently eager to find overseas territories to concede. To that end, Spanish leadership ought to expect that this Ceuta crisis will be followed by offers, putatively friendly and constructive, to assist in the administration of Ceuta’s borders, and perhaps beyond. The concession here, which may solve a temporary budget or administrative problem for the Spanish government, will be merely the end of a wedge: In the fullness of time, de facto will become de jure.

 

Sánchez’s government, having succeeded in plunging Spain into diplomatic isolation — at this writing, the French are sending forces to the Pyrenees crossings, the Italians are suspending visa-free movement from Spain, and the communicative apparatus of both the United States and Israel are mostly jeering — cannot be counted upon to refuse such a gesture. Having failed to defend Spain’s national territory in a moment of profound crisis, it is unlikely to secure its integrity across the long run. This is the tragedy of Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish cities of nearly half a millennium, in that they may be lost by a government that is both unpopular and fleeting to one that is iron in its vision and its pursuit.

 

A competent Spanish regime would impose costs. We know the working template because we see it at work in the United States. Borders must be militarily secured, and internal defense must be a well-funded priority. Remittances to sending states, whether Mexico or Morocco, must be placed under direct threat. Visas, especially by governing elites and their families, must be visibly curtailed. Market access must be predicated upon security cooperation. Deportations must be prioritized, and sending states compelled to accept them. These are realities in the United States now, to a greater or lesser degree. They will not be in Spain so long as a government of the left persists (though a general election is coming within the year). More broadly, if the European project is to mean anything, the European Union ought to be imposing exactly the same costs upon an external power mounting an invasion of member-state territory. “The terrible ifs accumulate,” wrote Churchill, but they point toward sound policy if it is desired.

 

The European powers, including but not limited to Spain, are going to have to decide what precisely their non-European geographic possessions are, and what they are for. These enclaves are broadly regarded as colonial relics, but this is inaccurate and frequently unjust to their citizenry. Mayotte is French, the Falklands are British, Greenland is Danish, and Ceuta is Spanish: This being so, each of those states has a positive responsibility to retain the adequate defense by arms for their people and possessions. It is a choice as to which side of the Melian Dialogue a nation wishes to occupy. Spain has for the moment failed in this duty. The failure is not fatal, but it will be in time. It need not continue to fail. The Spanish government is unequal to its task: Spain the nation is not.

 

Finally, in this moment, statecraft comes to the fore beyond mere material calculus. In the great House of Commons debate of September 1939 on war or peace, Leo Amery exhorted his parliamentary colleague to “Speak for England!” Someone must speak for Spain, a kingdom of equal dignity, now. Spain’s prime minister will not. The king, who properly ought to fly to Ceuta to share in the suffering of his people, has at this writing yet to move.

 

Spain, immersed in over a thousand years of champions, needs another. The question is who.