“This was not a migration crisis. It actually revealed how we have made ourselves extremely dependent on the whims of transit and origin countries that weaponise migration,” Nathalie Tocci, professor of practice at John Hopkins University, told The European Correspondent.

Most of those who arrived in Ceuta were young Moroccans looking for better opportunities abroad. They were attracted by a seemingly coordinated social media campaign, and let through the border by Moroccan authorities.

Fortress Europe has made us more vulnerable – and colder

“We can speculate on the reasons why Morocco chose to weaponise migration against Spain now. But the fact is that Morocco has done it in the past, just like Tunisia, and Türkiye has done it time and time again,” Tocci said.

A decade after the 2015 crisis, the continent's migration policy is looking more like a fortress. For years, the EU has paid transit countries like Morocco, Tunisia, and Türkiye billions of euros to hold back people who would otherwise reach Europe, often involving torture and mistreatment.

Belarus, too, uses migrants as hybrid warfare. A DW analysis found that after the EU sanctioned Belarus for a fraudulant presidential election, nearly 150,000 migrants attempted to enter Poland irregularly between 2021 and 2024.

Most recently, the EU made it legal to establish so-called “return hubs” in third countries. These countries in return would receive money for hosting unwanted migrants. The EU's Migration Pact, which came into force in June, accelerates the securitisation by introducing faster, harsher procedures, detentions, and, most importantly, furthers externalisation via third countries.

“The right-wing nationalist forces pushing for this externalisation of migration have made us more vulnerable. They're fundamentally unpatriotic. Sadly, centre-right to centre-left politicians have all copied their policy,” Tocci said.

Europe's migration policy has also dehumanised the discourse. At least 141 people died in the Ceuta tragedy, most of them drowning while attempting to swim around a breakwater. It took five days for the EU to officially acknowledge these victims.

“The total dehumanisation is to me the most shocking dimension,” Alberto Alemanno, professor for EU law at HEC Paris, told TEC. “It seems almost impossible for any political leader to show empathy.”

The right-wing is lying about regularisation

European leaders' initial reaction was to punish Spain. Italy, Denmark, Czechia, and Finland wanted to suspend Spain from Schengen, which is not legally possible. 22 European leaders then said they were ready to reintroduce internal border controls against “risks arising from secondary movements” – movements that did not happen.

It took five days for European countries to express full solidarity with Spain. “This was a trap, which we rushed right into and too late realised that it was one. Europe's worst enemies, from Trump to Putin to Netanyahu, will learn from this,” Alemanno said.

Over the past weeks, European leaders have repeatedly blamed Spanish prime minister's Pedro Sanchez’s decision to regularise hundreds of thousands of migrants, with some naming it as a reason for the Ceuta incident.

Besides the fact that Spain's regularisation only applies to people who were in Spain before July 2025, the criticism is also hypocritical. “Many European countries are regularising migrants in one way or another,” Alemanno said. “They are just hiding it from their citizens.”

Under Giorgia Meloni, the continent's migration-restricter-in-chief, Italy has issued over 590,000 work permits to non-EU immigrants so far, including immigrants from Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia. These permits are in most cases granted to people already residing in Italy irregularly.

Greece's conservative government passed a law in 2023 for around 300,000 undocumented migrants to receive regular status, but not all eligible migrants applied for the status.

“European countries need migrants. Why should we hide it? Let's make it a competitive advantage of Europe as opposed to something that has to be hidden from the public,” Alemanno said.

Concretely, according to Alemanno, the EU should Europeanise migration. “A migration policy that would set common quotas for regularisations across Europe as opposed to the national level would address the root cause of the divisions we have been witnessing.”

“Migration is an imagined problem”

“Fundamentally, migration is an imagined problem,” Tocci said. “Sanchez can make a pro-migration argument because Spain's economy is growing. The minute you're no longer doing well economically, identity politics of fear kick in. And rational debates become very difficult.”

It's a vicious cycle: Foreign nationals have been responsible for 40% of average GDP growth in the EU between 2022 and 2025. Non-EU workers have filled over half of the net job growth in the EU during that time. They are now even marginally more likely to be employed than EU citizens.

At the same time, European societies are ageing, and without immigration, pension systems worsen, and fast. In Italy, a block on new worker inflows would mean a net loss of €38 billion in social benefits by 2040.

In other words: without migrants, our economies would be even worse off than they are now.

But until European countries get their economies going, it will be difficult to frame migration as anything else but a threat, Tocci said. “I don't think this is going to happen, but let's say Germany rediscovers a winning economic model. If that were to happen, it would be the moment to reintroduce migration as something different.”

So, what has the Ceuta crisis taught us? Tocci is clear. “The main lesson from Ceuta is the same we can draw from migration, energy, climate, or defence. The real cancer in Europe is the rise of the nationalist far-right.”