Last December, the president of the Catalan employers’ association, Josep Sánchez Llibre, said “companies need immigration like the air we breathe and the water we drink. Spanish companies absolutely need immigration to be competitive.”

He did not have the scenes in Ceuta in mind. For those already worried about migration, tens of thousands of mostly young males descending on the Spanish enclave in north Africa will have confirmed their worst fears. Images colonise our imaginations before our reason has a chance to catch up, militating against anything except simplistic analyses.

The majority of Moroccans were sent back within days, and many of the more than 2,000 who remain are from sub-Saharan countries such as Mali and Somalia and the war-torn regions in Sudan. In other words, people likely to have legitimate asylum claims, unlike Moroccans who are typically found to be economic migrants.

The situation in Ceuta involves often-tense relations between Morocco and Spain, online disinformation campaigns and despair among Morocco’s youth. The recent regularisation of illegal migrants in Spain was one of the pull factors cited as a possible cause of the influx. Ireland conducted a small-scale regularisation in 2022, but the Spanish regularisation stemmed from a direct democracy initiative.

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