The Ceuta Clownshow

Also open thread.

Image from Agence-France Presse.

I have some things to say about Ceuta:

Contrary to various claims, the Spanish Supreme Court Judgment of 29 June 2026 did not grant a right of indefinite residence to migrants who swim their way to the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta. What that judgment did do, is inspire social media rumours among would-be young North African emigrants that Spain was suddenly open to them, perhaps particularly if they chose a watery route. These migrants spent the latter half of July networking on websites like Facebook and gathering in Moroccan Fnideq, just south of Ceuta. Finally they charged the enclave border en masse on Thursday, largely unopposed by Moroccan border security, which may have been simple incompetence or a sly effort by the Rabat government to punish Spain for recent rapprochment with their rival, Algeria.

Nobody knows exactly how many migrants surged into Ceuta, a town of 85,000 people, because nobody was in a position to count. It was perhaps as many as 70,000. Some came over land, but many others swam around a small concrete breakwater into the enclave. The new arrivals – overwhelmingly well-nourished and ill-behaved young men – set about rioting, looting and giving breathless interviews to naive New York Times reporters on the lack of career opportunities in North Africa. In the absence of any 2015 German-style welcoming committee, shelter or provisions, many of these petty criminals and lowlives then returned whence they came, but thousands have stayed.

This video was taken in Ceuta on Saturday night:

And this video of migrants transporting a wounded comrade and shouting “Allahu Akbar” was shot Sunday afternoon:

Local officials estimate that between 3,000 and 5,000 migrants are still in Ceuta as of today. Spanish police are arresting individual migrants on the street for deportation to Morocco, but the operation appears sporadic and slow-going. European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen at first pledged to monitor the situation with particular intensity; today she offered to increase Frontex support for the enclave. Pedro Sánchez’s government reportedly ignored advance warning from intelligence services about the pending influx, and heads of state across the European Union have criticised the leftist Prime Minister’s flatfooted reaction, with Giorgia Meloni and some of her top ministers going so far as to demand Spain’s suspension from Schengen.

Many have seen in these remarkable events a deliberate weaponisation of mass migration by state actors to punish or pressure Spain for whatever reason. That the Rabat government might have initially tolerated the crossings is the scenario with the most precedent, but for me these speculations mostly miss the point. The most obtrusive factor here is just the incredible weakness of EU border security, which our leaders have happily outsourced to neighbouring third countries like Morocco, in the process ceding these countries incredible leverage. Thus all it takes to overrun ancient Spanish territory in North Africa is a diffuse social media propaganda campaign, limited cooperation from organised smuggler networks and the momentary inattention of Moroccan border police. Europe stands at the mercy of whatever random geopolitical upset, third-world economic malaise or passing confusion can summon the hordes.

The reason this post is so late, is that I just hate repeating myself. As the same things happen over and over again, I have to fight ever harder to find an original perspective. I read my older posts on the migration problem now with some faint embarrassment, because I think the standard explanations I once entertained for this strange and unprecedented phenomenon are at best minor footnotes to a problem that can best be explained by some combination of inattention, disinterest and weakness. The migrants aren’t really a great labour force; they remain overwhelmingly on the dole and unemployed. The humanitarian thesis feels increasingly post hoc to me – a story we started telling ourselves when the migration was already happening and we needed somehow to feel good about it. And some parties on the left may once have hoped that the migrants would form a favourable client class to cement their political dominance, but on the electoral front migration has served only to fuel the rise of the populist right.

Mostly these insane things happen because we’re weak, and our leaders have lost interest in basic state functions like border security. They’ve moved on to more interesting and exotic projects – weird social engineering projects to stamp out whatever they imagine “the right” to be, weird energy projects to phase out fossil fuel combustion, weird governance projects to relocate responsibility over many aspects of the economy and daily life to unelected managers and technocrats. Mass migration is in nobody’s interest but it keeps happening because the flabby and distracted states of Europe can’t be arsed to stop it.