It was like scenes from a movie about Europe’s dystopian future: Wave after wave of mostly young men from North Africa pouring into European territory. So many people kept swimming around a breakwater of rocks at the border that, in their rush to get out, they climbed over others trapped underneath, drowning scores. Crowds forced open other parts of the frontier, and border guards watched helplessly as an estimated 72,000 people jubilantly came in, some shouting “Viva España.”
The images from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa last week went viral almost instantly, shaping up as a moment of global humiliation for Spain and its left-wing Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Anti-immigration parties and leaders across Europe, as well as President Trump and Elon Musk, said it was the ultimate symbol of Europe’s softhearted inability to contain immigration. Trump and Musk called it a literal “invasion,” citing the numbers of military-age young men. Italy dramatically reimposed border checks with Spain to ensure none of the arrivals would enter Italian soil.
But that take proved very short-lived. The new arrivals weren’t welcomed with open arms. There were no waiting refugee camps with beds and a hot meal. Shops quickly shut to prevent looting, making it difficult for the arrivals to eat or drink water. Some locals turned up with makeshift weapons to protect their stores. Within a day, tens of thousands of those who crossed began to return meekly on their own. Heavily armed Spanish troops frog-marched most of the rest back to the Moroccan border, no questions asked. Morocco didn’t object.
Within days, an estimated 70,000 had gone back, leaving about 2,000 left in Ceuta, according to the Spanish government. Many of those are unaccompanied minors who will eventually be returned to Morocco after Spanish officials locate their families, while some sub-Saharan Africans will be put up in a nearby migrant camp. None can leave Ceuta for mainland Spain or elsewhere in Europe without a visa check. That means it is unlikely more than a few will ever set foot in mainland Europe.
Questions remain about who organized the mass crossings, and whether the Moroccan government is guilty of either stoking it or allowing it to happen unimpeded. But a week later, it seems more like a spontaneous rush to the border more than a long-planned attempt to emigrate. Migrants crossing the Darién Gap or Mexico travel with documents, money and spare clothes. These turned up with flip flops.
Crazy as it seems, the whole episode also suggests something unexpected: Europe, having struggled to cope with a surge in illegal immigration over the past 11 years, is making progress securing its borders, though too belatedly for many of its voters. Even Spain’s Sánchez, the self-positioned flag bearer of a new, anti-nationalist left, has quietly taken a hard line on asylum seekers.
“The irony here is that this incident had almost no impact on immigration in Europe in the end, but the images will endure and will fuel the sense of loss of control over borders among European countries,” said Andrew Selee, head of the Migration Policy Institute, which advises several governments. “The real lesson of this—which policymakers largely got but the public didn’t—is that the control mechanism worked.”
Most European countries eventually congratulated Spain for handling the crisis quickly. Spain has now erected new barriers along the breakwater to deter future crossers.
For Europe as a whole, the number of those arriving illegally fell sharply over the past two years to 177,000 last year from 380,000 in 2023, according to Frontex, Europe’s border and coast guard agency.
By comparison, the U.S. registered about 130,000 encounters of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in the past year, a similar level when adjusted for Europe’s bigger population. That is far fewer than the millions coming across during the Biden administration, and many arrivals are now turned around at the frontier rather than processed for asylum.
European countries aren’t turning everyone back who makes it, but they are making it harder to claim asylum, and holding growing numbers of asylum seekers in detention camps while their claims are assessed, at least for up to six months. They are tightening border security, and outsourcing enforcement downstream to countries where migrants must cross, be it Morocco, Libya or Turkey in return for money, visas or security cooperation.
“By every measure Europe has not had this much control over illegal migration in a decade,” Magnus Brunner, the EU’s commissioner for migration, said earlier this week. “But the events from Ceuta show that dramatic images beat the best statistics.”
Consider Spain. The country has taken an open border policy toward Latin Americans, most of whom can enter visa-free and apply for citizenship after just two years of legal residence. It is a ready-made labor force for an aging economy that shares language, culture and religion, and are therefore less controversial for Spanish voters.
Not so for migrants from elsewhere. Before Sánchez took office, he railed against the barbed wire fence crisscrossing Ceuta’s ridgeline, claiming Spain had a moral duty toward refugees. Yet over his eight year term, Spain’s grant rate for asylum seekers has dropped from 35% to 12%—far below many other countries, including the U.S. And the 19-foot tall barbed wire symbol Sánchez campaigned to remove has been replaced by an even taller set of three fences, the highest reaching 33 feet, twice the height of the more well-known barrier built in Hungary by former Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
By comparison, Trump’s borderworks top out at 30 feet, and aren’t as densely outfitted with thermal cameras and motion detectors.
“It is a border fence that Trump can only dream of,” says Anna Terrón, a former Spanish immigration minister.
Europe vs. USA
As anyone who has tried to hold Europe in the board game Risk can attest, the continent is geographically harder to seal off than North America or Australia. Its east rolls through vast steppes, easily crossed by centuries of invading armies. The waters between Turkey and Greece are dotted with endless tiny islands, as Odysseus learned the hard way, many of them reachable by rowboat.
Spanish and Italian agencies watching inbound migratory flows have to monitor the Sahara—a desert larger than the European Union—and the Mediterranean’s broad blue waterway. Then there are the overseas territories, which require France to post immigration officers across 12 time zones, including France’s longest border, the jungled 450 miles between French Guyana and Brazil.
It is also more difficult for Europe to act in concert. The U.S. is a single federal country. The EU has 27, each with their own laws and politics.
Europe, unlike the U.S., was long a land of emigration not immigration, sending millions of its sons and daughters to the Americas and overseas empires. Until the end of the Cold War, most European countries were fairly homogenous. France and Britain housed small communities from former colonies—an immigration pattern so mundane that 1960s France let citizens of former West African colonies fly into Paris without a passport.
It was, paradoxically, the erasure of border controls within Europe that led to its first attempts to seriously tighten its borders beyond. In the 1990s, as remnants of the Berlin Wall were chiseled into souvenirs, a reunited Germany started assembling a passport-free travel zone with France and its neighbors. A seamless grid of autobahns and high speed rail linking a transnational union no longer scarred by checkpoints and exit visas. The catch was that any one external border was now every country’s border.
The new EU stepped in to help build border fences, including an eight-foot-tall barrier built in 1995 to replace the rusting, chest-high wire that cordoned Ceuta off from Morocco. Spain called it “waterproofing the border.”
Almost immediately, Spanish lawmakers started to debate a taller fence.
Spiraling debt crises were forcing West African countries—Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria—to lay off state workers, who struggled to land jobs in the private sector. Migration began replacing public service as the means of advancement.
Globalization suddenly gave money and means for people to move; smuggling networks rose up; smartphones provided instant feedback on the best routes. Remittances flowed into remote villages where the most reliable way to reinvest the windfall was to send another family member across the Sahara.
Both Europe and the U.S. saw a sharp increase in numbers of residents born outside the country. Since 1990, the percentage of foreign-born population in the U.S. rose from 9.2% to 15.2% now, close to levels in the 1920s that prompted a backlash. In Britain, it went from 6.4% to 17.1%, and in Germany from 8.7% to 19.8%, though in both cases about a third of those came from other European countries. Even if governments cut back new arrivals, it could take years before the tensions fade.
Adding to the problem, many voters in Europe and the U.S. feel they have had no say in this transformation.
“People in most developed countries feel like immigration is happening to them rather than something they are choosing,” said Selee.
The frustration turned once-fringe parties into the leading opposition in France and Germany. In Britain, it delivered Brexit, to give the country what other EU countries lacked: control over national borders. But then the Conservative government of Boris Johnson, having shut off access for European migrants, opened the doors to the rest of the world, sparking record levels of legal immigration.
Tens of thousands of asylum seekers followed, arriving on small boats from France. Having left the EU, the U.K. has little sway over Paris in getting them to stop the boats. The public are fuming. Immigration is the top voter concern in polls. And though the Labour government has sharply slashed both legal and illegal immigration, it runs neck-and-neck in polls with the anti-immigration party Reform U.K., while a new, harder right party, Restore Britain, is gaining ground.
An Emerging Consensus
Europe’s current immigration system is a hall of mirrors. Liberal leaders like Sánchez oust conservatives on a vow to welcome refugees—only to crack down once confronted by the cold reality of foreign men massing toward their borders. On the right, past prime ministers from Britain’s Johnson to Hungary’s Orban have sworn to resist multiculturalism only to quietly preside over record-busting levels of legal immigration that keep pensions funded and low-wage jobs filled.
Migrants fib their way through an asylum system whose administrators can’t possibly check whether each claim of persecution in a faraway land is true. Voters tell pollsters they want stricter borders—but also things like affordable groceries, made possible in part by cheap immigrant labor.
Take Poland, where the 2015 migrant crisis helped usher in the conservative nationalist Law and Justice party, which vowed to protect the 98% Catholic country from mass migration. Then it faced the labor strains of a nation whose economy has grown fifteen-fold since 1990 while the population barely budged. From 2017 to 2022, the nationalist government awarded more first time residence permits to arrivals from outside the EU than any other European country. Now, Poland is led by a pro-European centrist party that has quietly tripled forcible deportations, creating a precedent Germany’s far-right hopes to test next door.
For all the noise and electoral tumult, immigration remains both Europe’s most widely-debated issue—and one where governments of all stripes now broadly agree.
The turning point was the 2015 crisis when more than one million people, most fleeing Syria’s civil war, poured into Europe. That September, Angela Merkel resolved to welcome them in Germany and took a viral selfie with a teenage Syrian. But within weeks, Merkel flew to Turkey, agreeing to give billions of euros to a country drifting into autocracy, for its security forces to stop more from coming. The EU, once a reliable source of pressure for Turkey to hold more competitive elections, suddenly had a stake in regime stability.
For Turkish liberals, it amounted to a European nail through their democratic hopes. For Europe’s liberals, it would become a playbook. In 2017, Italy’s then center-left government struck a controversial deal with Libyan authorities in Tripoli. Italy provides financial and technical support to the Libyan Coast Guard, which in turn intercepts boats and returns migrants to mainland Libya. A U.N. report accused the loosely organized coast guard forces of shooting at vessels, and packing migrants into a system of rudimentary jails where there they were extorted, beaten, used for forced labor, even raped.
Arrivals from Libya plummeted. Italy periodically renews the deal.
Now, Europe’s land borders are nearly all barricaded in imposing fences. The EU’s European Commission once compared such structures to the Berlin Wall; these days it helps outfit them in AI-powered surveillance equipment.
From Scandinavia to left-wing Spain, some of the most human rights-minded governments coordinate to get the less scrupulous governments across the Mediterranean to perform the grunt work European voters don’t want to see their own border guards engaged in.
“Governments across Europe are generally moving in a more restrictive direction, hoping they can see off the populists,” says Alan Manning, the former head of the U.K.’s Migration Advisory Council that advises the government on migration policy.
It is all too late for many voters, who have watched Muhammad overtake Noah as England’s most common newborn boy’s name, or Syrians reshape Germany’s demographic landscape.
Spain has financed and supplied Morocco with border control equipment, and invested on big projects including a new railway. Morocco gets first dibs for temporary work visas in areas like agriculture. In exchange, Spain can return any Moroccan that enters Ceuta and a sister enclave Melilla illegally, unless they are minors, and Morocco enforces its own borders to prevent people from sub-Saharan Africa from crossing toward Spain.
The strategy doesn’t come without risks. Spain’s arrangement has given asymmetric leverage to its smaller, poorer neighbor. Morocco claims Ceuta and Melilla as its own. In effect, Spain is counting on a historical rival that covets its territory to protect that same territory.
“Their regime absolutely wants Ceuta and Melilla, and this is a form of aggression,” said Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, a lawmaker for the conservative People’s party. “Migrants are being used as weapons.”
Europe’s age-old rivalries, muted for years, are reasserting themselves in the politics of immigration. Turkey periodically demonstrates its power by allowing migrants into its rival Greece, with which it has long-running disputes over Aegean waters and islands. In late 2021, Belarus, with Vladimir Putin’s support, bussed Middle Eastern immigrants to the Polish border, distracting Europe from the Russian president’s ominous massing of troops near Ukraine.
Perhaps the last lesson from Ceuta is that—thanks to social media—immigration is now far more visible in real time than ever before, whether its Moroccans pouring into Ceuta, migrant caravans snaking their way through Mexico, or dinghies crammed with men floating toward England’s white cliffs of Dover.
These images matter. The migrant caravans helped propel Trump back into office. If Europe’s centrists want to prevent far right parties from taking power, they need to try to win the argument beyond numbers—because every picture of a migrant boat probably stays with voters longer than border-crossing statistics.
Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com, Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com and Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com