Ceuta Refutes “Diversity is Our Strength”
Ceuta is the case in which the arrivals did not become a workforce, a cuisine, or a growth story. They became a fifth of the city, sleeping in tunnels, and the government that called this humanitarian is now trying to send them back.
Jim Lawley's 30 September piece in The Spectator starts nine weeks after the crossing. Tens of thousands came over the Moroccan frontier into the Spanish exclave. Most went back quickly. The number who stayed is the part Madrid cannot settle. At one point it said "only" about 5,000 remained. Government sources later accepted that around 20,000 were still there after 30 July. Last week Ángel Víctor Torres, the minister running the crisis, put the figure at about 18,000. The city has 83,000 people and covers seven square miles. Eighteen thousand is more than a fifth of the population, and the state still cannot count them. Firemen found a settlement they had not known about, in old military tunnels. Police counted more than a hundred young men sleeping rough at the abandoned Guano site and on the rocks. Child-protection officials estimate at least 600 unaccompanied children still hiding in the hills and the neighbourhoods.
The scale of the original rush is not in dispute, only the rounding. Reuters reported that Spain's Interior Ministry counted about 50,000 crossings from the Thursday morning, with 48,300 said to have returned by Friday evening, and 57 bodies recovered on the Spanish side, drowned or crushed on the breakwater. Ceuta's president, Juan Jesús Vivas, put the push at as many as 60,000, about 70 per cent of the city's population in a couple of days. Pedro Sánchez flew in, was insulted by protesters, called it a violation of territorial sovereignty, and blamed traffickers misreading a Supreme Court ruling that had limited summary returns at sea. Italy suspended Schengen arrangements with Spain. That was 31 July. The "most humanitarian decision," as Sánchez then described absorbing those who remained, is what Lawley finds still sitting there in late September.
The joy, if it was coming, has not arrived. Madrid says nearly 8,000 have gone back voluntarily since 10 August, and that 150 to 200 leave each day. The police union says officers at the border have counted about 60 a day for three weeks. People have been sleeping under plastic and reeds. The first real rain soaked the shelters, which is now being treated as a reason some might leave. Madrid's answer is to race them into reception centres, with beds, meals and washing. Lawley's point is that a bed makes staying rational. On Sunday hundreds of police cleared settlements at Benítez beach. Many of those moved promptly fled into the hills, reportedly because they feared return to Morocco. Sánchez told the United Nations the people of Ceuta had faced the crisis without renouncing decency. Residents hear "stabilised by the end of the year" as "normalised." They do not want the rough sleepers relocated into the town by day. They want them out of Ceuta.
So some have tried to stop volunteers handing out food. The argument is crude and explicit: comfort is retention. Aid groups have taken logos off vehicles. Staff hide their identification off duty. One worker's report of what people say in the street is: "The migrants are staying because of you." Streets next to migrant accommodation have been closed behind high fencing. Residents complain of people sleeping, drinking, fighting, and defecating in gardens and on steps. On Saturday police arrested two Moroccan men after the alleged rape of a 17-year-old girl at the Trampolín beach settlement. Officers found her semi-conscious and injured; she lost consciousness, was resuscitated, and was taken to hospital. La Razón, writing the next day, described two months of clashes, attacks on officers, fights among the migrants, and some thirty reported sexual assaults. That is a local paper's tally, not a court finding. It is also not a story about restaurants opening.
Morocco says it will take its nationals back and blames Spanish processing. Sánchez now wants emergency legislation so some asylum applicants can be returned before a final decision. Whether a minority government can pass it is open. What is not open is the result of the experiment on this rock. A city that could not house, count, or police the influx did not receive a dividend. It received a camp, a fence around the neighbours, and a prime minister hoping the situation will look stable by Christmas. It won't.
