The scenes at Ceuta are eerily reminiscent of aspects of the infamous anti-immigration French novel, The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail – in which Western countries are overrun by mass immigration from India. 

They also illustrate Europe’s recent asylum crisis in a nutshell. A “luxury belief” ruling by liberal Spanish judges making it harder to deport people, a surge of people from a poor or middle-income country that the authorities in the receiving country are unwilling to resist with force, while the authorities in the sending country are either indifferent or happy to cause their neighbor political discomfort. It has echoes of the Syrian surge in 2015 and the explosion of small boat Channel crossings after 2018.

Much of Spain’s illegal immigration comes from Spanish speaking Latin American countries

Much of Spain’s illegal immigration comes from Spanish speaking Latin American countries

The pressing need for European states, as I have argued, is to replace an asylum free-for-all of irregular entry with a system of refugee selection via safe and legal routes. The chaos in Ceuta shows the problem at its........

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