Spanish Coastal City Overwhelmed by Migrants

“What happened yesterday [was] an attack, a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said this morning at a news conference.

Some 60,000 migrants, 70 percent of the city’s regular population, entered the Spanish coastal city Ceuta yesterday from Morocco, according to the city’s president, Juan Jesús Vivas.

• Ceuta is an autonomous city of Spain on the North African coast bordering Morocco. Yesterday, it asked the Spanish government to declare a national emergency.
• A court ruled that migrants who come by sea cannot be immediately sent back, unlike those who climb border fences. So thousands of migrants started swimming.
• Spain has been sending them back regardless at a rate of 150 people per minute, the interior ministry remarked this morning.

Europe’s response shows that it has had enough of illegal immigration.

• “The images coming from Ceuta are unacceptable. We cannot allow anyone to come to our union without abiding by our rules,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said today.
• Spain should be suspended from the Schengen Agreement, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni argued yesterday, “to defend our borders and ensure the safety of our citizens.” Italy does not share a border with Spain, but once migrants are in a European Union country in the Schengen Zone, they can freely travel from one to the next.
• “The EU’s return regulation must now be implemented immediately,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote on social media today.

Europe is a changed place from 2015 when millions of migrants began entering EU nations—and never left. Politicians are now willing to take extreme measures to protect their borders. Soon they will take the next step and tackle the problem at its source.