Ceuta Invasion Is the Predictable Result of Spanish Amnesty

A vehicle burns at the site of clashes near Fnideq, on the Morocco-Spain border, on July 31, 2026. Thousands of illegal immigrants crossed overnight from Morocco into Spain’s north Africa’s Ceuta enclave. At least 41 people died while attempting to reach the Spanish enclave. Abdel Majid Bziouat/AFP via Getty Images

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On Thursday, Americans watched in stunned recognition as thousands of young men poured from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta.

Like Melilla, further to the east on the far northern shore of Morocco, the city is a relic of Spain’s once vast colonial empire. Nothing separates Morocco from these Spanish territories except shallow waters and light fencing. Ceuta’s local government has begged Madrid to declare a national emergency, but Spain’s interior minister said their law does not consider migration flows as a risk to national security.

Illegal immigrants have long targeted Ceuta and Melilla, the Canary Islands, and even the mainland coast of Spain.

Back in May 2021, more than 8,000 migrants illegally entered Ceuta in a few days. That looks like nothing compared to the current wave. Morocco won’t, or can’t, stop them leaving.

In the year 711, armies of the Umayyad Caliphate crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and fought the ruling Visigoths. The Moors established the region of Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula where they ruled for 700 years. But under a series of Christian rulers, Spain eventually drove the Caliphate out.

The last Muslim state of Granada fell in 1492, the year Columbus set sail for America.

Now the Moors are back, this time not by the sword.

The EU has basically given up trying to end mass illegal migration. Instead, to share the burden of mass arrivals at the frontiers, the EU forces member states to accept a designated share of migrants per EU direction, regardless of what national voters want. In June, the European Union’s Directive on Migration and Asylum took effect.

Under the new regime, EU countries can reject an asylum request if the applicant already could have received protection in a safe country they traversed.

The EU considers Morocco to be safe.

Member countries will be allowed to set up return hubs in safe third countries to return failed asylum applicants, instead of letting them hang around to loot, stab people, or attempt to torch schools. Countries will also be able to jail failed asylum applicants who don’t leave.

But across Europe, lenient immigration judges favor the desires of intending migrants over the safety of natives. In May 2025, Denmark and eight other EU countries told the European Court of Human Rights that the court’s interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights has “limited our ability to make political decisions in our own democracies.”

In 2025, the EU saw 669,365 first-time asylum applicants.

Of these, 39 percent were approved. Of those rejected, a further 21 percent were approved on appeal. Of the rejected asylum applicants, the EU claims to deport 27 percent. That means an asylum applicant, even with a bogus claim, has at least an 82 percent chance of remaining in the EU. For millions, those odds are worth playing.

In April, the socialist government of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced a scheme to give one-year, renewable residence permits to illegal immigrants. The bar was incredibly low—applicants only had to prove they’d lived for at least five months in Spain and had no criminal records.

The government claimed the program would apply to half a million people.

When the amnesty window opened, over a million applied. Just as with illegal aliens released or paroled by President Joe Biden between 2021 and 2025, Spain has no way of checking the applicants’ criminal records back home in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and scores of other countries.

Studies from Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and elsewhere have consistently shown that crime rates by men from North Africa and the Middle East in Europe are far higher than among the native-born. That risk will be borne by Spanish, and later European, people.

In August 2024, Sanchez went to the Gambia and announced partnership agreements to curb illegal immigration from West Africa to the Canary Islands. But in general, Sanchez is not opposed to mass migration, he just wants it better channeled and labeled.

For globalists like Sanchez, there is no national identity worth protecting. People are interchangeable labor units. Differences in education, culture, worth ethic, and religion are immaterial.

While visiting Mauritania in 2024, Sanchez said that “[d]espite the rhetoric that is growing in Europe, migration is not a problem … we must push formulas that allow us to manage the phenomenon of migration in a humane, safe and orderly way, to benefit our respective societies.”

From a mix of motives—political advantage, globalist ideology, or sheer feckless surrender—this is the approach of the European Union, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the former Biden administration, and the growing Democratic Socialists of America.

For Sanchez and the globalist Left that runs most of Europe, mass migration is an economic necessity to replace Europe’s aging population. Although it once peopled the Americas, Spain’s current fertility rate, measured in lifetime children per woman, is 1.4. That’s well below replacement level.

China and India have turned the demographic corner to sustainable levels, but Africa’s average fertility level is still above four children per woman.

Africa will not soon run out of unemployed young men to send, as long as Spain and Europe keep the borders open and the welfare taps flowing.

Unemployment rates among migrants in Europe are high—twice that of natives in France and Spain. But even being jobless in Europe, with free housing, education, medical care, and more, is better than staying in countries with no such social benefits.

With the reckless Sanchez amnesty, Spain has incentivized unlimited mass illegal migration. Medieval Spain was conquered by the sword. Modern Spain is subjugating itself by choice.

Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.