Last week, more than 50,000 people illegally entered the Spanish exclave city of Ceuta, which normally has a population of only 80,000. Ceuta is located on the north African coast and shares a border with Morocco, an Arabic-speaking country with a population of 36 million. Many migrants pushed through the border barriers, with thousands more swimming short distances to bypass land-based barriers. Ceuta—like Spain’s other exclave city, Melilla—has long faced significant challenges over maintaining the integrity of its borders with the surrounding Moroccan territory.
Spain’s exclave cities are full-fledged Spanish territory—i.e., the residents have the same legal status as Spanish residents of the mainland. So, potential Moroccan migrants view residency in Ceuta—legal or illegal—as a means to establishing residency in Spain. Via the Schengen area agreements, this would grant access to the European Union overall. Moreover, the standard of living in the Spanish exclave cities—as with the rest of the European Union—is much higher than in the surrounding Moroccan territory. In Ceuta, for example, the GDP per capita is approximately $24,000. In Morocco, the GDP per capita is less than $5,000.
Morocco is a police state with a relatively primitive economy. There is no freedom of speech, and publicly rejecting Mohammedism is considered a criminal offense. It’s not difficult to see why average Moroccans—i.e., people who are not members of the ruling kleptocratic oligarchy—face enormous incentives to emigrate to Ceuta or Melilla if the opportunity presents itself.
The reasons for the sudden, enormous, and apparently coordinated mass migration last week remain debated. But the case offers an important example of why advocates of open borders refuse to confront the more difficult geopolitical questions that surround immigration. Rarely —if ever— do open-border advocates discuss the likely outcomes of open-borders policy for any polity that shares a land border with a much poorer and more populous state. The Ceuta situation helps show why.
Open-borders advocates tend to insist that the effects of mass migration are almost entirely to economic issues like employment levels and worker productivity. It is unclear if this is deliberate evasion or simply naivete about the realities of geopolitics. In any case, historical experience suggests that in the real world, unrestricted migration is often likely to lead to political upheaval, civil unrest, and violent reprisals. The governments of the world themselves know this, of course, which is why many countries have used migration as a tool of strategic policy. So, it is not at all surprising that there have been a number of reports suggesting that the Moroccan government in Rabat actively supported last week’s mass migration as part of Rabat’s explicitly policy of seizing control of the Spanish exclaves.
As suggested by last week’s events in Ceuta and Melilla—in which the total number of migrants exceeded fifty percent of the entire population of the receiving country—the effects of migration clearly extend well beyond economics. Indeed, were the borders of Ceuta and Melilla truly opened to all potential migrants, this would almost certainly mean the rapid disenfranchisement of the native Ceutans and Melillans. It would also likely mean the rapid de facto or de jure annexation by Morocco. That is, the cities’ population could be quickly overwhelmed by even a very small fraction of the population of Morocco. The native populations of these regions would then quickly become political minorities and irrelevant to the governance of the cities.
Once the old population was relegated to minority status, it could then be plundered easily. The property of the native-born minority—which would be denounced as “colonizers” on Moroccan land—would soon find that its property would be subject to confiscation as reparation for the “greater good” of the “colonized” majority. The de facto government of the cities would become that of local militias composed of ethnic Moroccans—probably with financial and military support from the Moroccan state. Eventually, a plebiscite would be set up as a show to demonstrate to the international community that “the people” of Ceuta and Melilla demand to be ruled from Rabat rather than Madrid. An open borders policy for Ceuta and Melilla would almost certainly lead to the abolition of the polities’ independence, the mass looting of the natives’ property, and little more than an extension of the militarist Moroccan state.
None of this has actually happened, of course, because neither Spain nor its exclaves have open borders. In spite of all the ruling socialist Party’s pro-immigration rhetoric, Madrid still maintains its borders with Morocco and has already expelled tens of thousands of the migrants that arrived last week. The ease with which nearly 60,000 migrants streamed into a city of only 80,000, however, shows how quickly political and demographic realities could change in the face of unchecked migration.
In his own writings on mass immigration, Ludwig von Mises recognized this problem.
He noted that it is true that some very large countries like the United States could potentially absorb very large numbers of immigrants over a long period of time. On the other hand, he recognized that countries with much smaller populations—Mises uses Australia as an example—would very quickly be overrun by immigrants from much more populous nearby countries. Mises notes that the native population would then become a political minority and be relegated to a political status similar to that of a population that had been “conquered” militarily.
Yet, open-border advocates steadfastly ignore the effects that mass immigration would have on small countries—and especially small wealthy countries next to larger poorer countries. Were such countries to actually open their borders, countries like Lithuania would cease to exist as independent entities almost immediately. Their people would be, to use Mises’s word, “conquered.” Nor is this only true for nations near the top of the income scale, as a Spain or a Lithuania. Were Botswana, for instance, to open its borders with Zimbabwe and Zambia, Botswana would soon find itself being partitioned between the two much larger countries as Zambian and Zimbabwean populations could easily overwhelm the Botswanan natives. The property of ordinary Botswanans would probably meet a similar fate. A similar fate would likely meet the residents of the Dominican Republic were it to open its border to the more populous Haitians.
