On July 30, 2026, enormous crowds crossed from Morocco into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta. Within hours, Spanish authorities estimated that roughly 72,000 had entered Ceuta, overwhelming a city of just 83,000 residents. Spain’s other North African enclave, Melilla, also experienced attempted crossings, albeit on a much smaller scale, and closed down its border crossing with Morocco later that day.
Madrid’s response involved roping in the police, military, and migrant services. Many who entered had little intention of remaining, with roughly 70,000 returning to Morocco over the next few days, leaving Spanish authorities to deal with hundreds of unaccompanied minors who stayed.
The “mass crossing” was preceded by several developments. Spain began the process of regularizing 500,000 undocumented migrants in April. And, in July, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that “migrants arriving by sea would not face immediate removal,” according to Euronews, which increased the country’s appeal as a destination for those looking to immigrate. “We discussed this ruling and its impact. We explained that this ruling was going to create a problem. And it did create a problem,” said a Moroccan senior official.
The incident, however, could not have occurred without at least the tolerance of Morocco’s government. Rabat denied involvement, while Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska Gómez, blamed “criminal mafias” for the crossings. Ceuta’s regional president, Juan Jesús Visas, however, claimed that the crossings were “if not orchestrated, at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco,” stated The Guardian.
Spain’s pledge on July 20 to rebuild ties and deepen cooperation with Algeria, Morocco’s regional rival, provided some incentive to fuel the crisis. On July 23, Spain also advanced a proposed legislation granting an expedited path to citizenship for Sahrawis born in Western Sahara when it was still a Spanish colony, before August 1977. The proposal would also extend to their descendants, further aggravating tensions between Madrid and Rabat.
Spain’s criticisms of Israeli and US military operations in the Middle East also strained relations with Washington, at a time when Morocco is assuming an important role in US regional diplomacy. Since joining the Abraham Accords in 2020, Morocco has developed close military, intelligence, and economic ties with Israel, while receiving US backing for its position on the Western Sahara. Spain has meanwhile emerged as one of Europe’s most vocal critics of Israeli policy in Gaza and has denounced the US and Israel’s war on Iran.
Meanwhile, the 2027 House Appropriations Committee report, accompanying a bill passed on July 15, gave credence to Morocco’s claims over Ceuta and Melilla, reinforcing Rabat’s confidence. Against this backdrop, the situation in Ceuta unfolded as tensions between Spain and an increasingly aligned Morocco, Israel, and the US were already mounting. Jerusalem and Washington had little incentive to defend Madrid as Rabat has become an increasingly important partner to both. Israeli and American figures subsequently seized on the Ceuta crisis to criticize Madrid’s “liberal migration policy” and the Sanchez government.
The episode, while another demonstration of how governments can employ migration as an instrument of statecraft, is consequently entangled in these tensions between Spain on one side and Morocco, Israel, and the US on the other. “When a state perceives shifts in the regional balance of power, borders often become the first arena through which strategic messages are conveyed,” stated The Jerusalem Post. The changing balance of power in the region has led to Ceuta emerging as more than a border city. “[I]t is one of the places where the future balance of power between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East is beginning to take shape.”
This isn’t the first influx of migrants from Morocco to Spain. In 2021, after Spain admitted the leader of a movement seeking independence for Western Sahara, Brahim Ghali, for COVID-19 treatment, Morocco relaxed border controls and roughly 8,000 people entered Ceuta over two days.
Spanish authorities labeled the move as “blackmail,” and as The New York Times noted at the time, “hours after the migrants began pouring into Ceuta, Spain approved 30 million euros, about $37 million, in aid to Morocco for border policing.” In 2022, Spain’s foreign minister was replaced, and Madrid reversed its longstanding position on Western Sahara, backing Morocco’s proposal. “Five years later, when a larger crossing occurred amid a different set of Spanish disputes, that structural vulnerability had still not been addressed. This does not mean 2026 repeated 2021’s mechanics. It means the vulnerability 2021 exposed was still there to be exploited, deliberately or not,” pointed out the Middle East Political and Economic Institute.
The latest crisis is far larger, and Spain is again negotiating with Morocco over migration and bilateral relations. But the consequences are not just for Spain. Although migrants arriving in Ceuta cannot automatically travel onward to mainland Spain or the wider EU, the enclave’s status makes these border crossings a European issue.
Italy and France quickly floated tighter border controls with Spain, drawing support from other EU members and pushback from Madrid. But their tensions mask a collective anxiety and frustration over irregular migration to the bloc and the growing ability to exploit the issue as a diplomatic tool.
The Roots of Europe’s Vulnerability
Governments have long viewed outward migration as a domestic safety valve for overcrowding, unemployment, and unrest. Britain transported convicts and political dissidents to its colonies, alongside millions of its poorer citizens. Only in recent decades, however, has migration become a tool of interstate coercion used mainly against the US and Europe.
The US encountered the phenomenon first. During Cuba’s 1980 Mariel Boatlift, Fidel Castro allowed more than 125,000 dissidents, prisoners, and economic migrants to leave for Florida, followed by another 35,000 Cubans during the 1994 Balsero crisis. While Haiti also generated smaller migration surges during the same period, US Coast Guard interceptions and offshore processing at Guantanamo Bay or third countries demonstrated Washington’s ability to limit coercive migration surges.
Europe’s exposure to migration developed more gradually as integration accelerated and the continent became a net importer of migrants after World War II. By the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia generated migration within Europe, while Algeria’s civil war and instability elsewhere in Africa drove migration north. This coincided with the beginning and expansion of the Schengen area, alongside affordable air travel and international smuggling networks, which made movement into and across Europe much easier.
Unlike the US, with its relative maritime isolation and ability to restrict its land border with Mexico, the EU was tasked with policing thousands of miles of Mediterranean coastline, numerous islands, external land borders such as Ceuta, and a growing eastern frontier. The EU also exercises less influence over neighboring transit states looking to pass migrants along, while its common asylum system has made irregular migration a collective European issue.
Conflict and Migration Leverage
Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was among the first to recognize Europe’s vulnerability. As he began normalization efforts with the West by the end of the 1990s, Gaddafi linked “migration management to renewed cooperation,” securing billions of euros in funding for border control, according to a report produced under the 2024–27 “Securitization Without Security” project. During a 2010 visit to Italy, Gaddafi suggested Libya needed “at least €5 billion a year” to prevent much larger migration flows from Africa and beyond.
Libya’s importance to Europe’s migration security became clear when protests in the country turned into civil war in 2011. Italy’s islands have typically been the choice for migrants departing Libya, and Italian officials warned that Gaddafi’s fall could unleash a major influx. Then-UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, meanwhile, stated Libya was potentially expelling migrants to overwhelm Europe.
After the NATO intervention and killing of Gaddafi later that year, wartime displacement initially subsided, but the collapse of central authority transformed Libya into an even more important transit hub. Rival governments, militias, and smuggling networks built increasingly organized and profitable routes across Libya, allowing them to “extract political and financial rents from their role as gatekeepers,” according to the report on the securitization of migration.
Migrants from Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, and elsewhere continue to make the central Mediterranean one of Europe’s main migration corridors. Efforts in early 2026 to disrupt some of these networks simply pushed routes to eastern Libya and onward to the Greek island of Crete, demonstrating their adaptability.
Turkey, meanwhile, came to understand the same dynamic on Europe’s eastern flank. As the Syrian civil war intensified in 2015, with European countries among the outside powers intervening in the conflict, millions of Syrians and other migrants sought to reach Western Europe through the Balkans. Greece recorded 860,000 arrivals in 2015, mostly from Syria, along with Afghanistan and Iraq, out of 1.3 million making their way to Europe.
Ankara shouldered an enormous humanitarian burden but increasingly recognized the leverage created by its position. In 2016, the EU agreed to provide Turkey with nearly $7 billion to support refugees and curb migration to Europe. The situation flared up again in 2020, after a Syrian airstrike killed 33 Turkish soldiers in Idlib. Turkey briefly stopped preventing migrants from moving toward Europe, prompting a surge at the Greek border that ended after negotiations.
Turkish President Recep Erdoğan has periodically threatened to “open the gates,” but Turkey is more interested in extracting benefits without necessarily triggering another mass movement. The Middle East Forum has identified smuggling networks with alleged ties to Turkish officials, suggesting that authorities seem to tolerate parts of the lucrative trade for financial gain.
Neither Libyan nor Turkish actors created these migrant flows, but both have learned to exploit them. European involvement in the conflicts in these regions, meanwhile, has helped fuel the instability that allowed these countries to emerge as transit zones.
Manufacturing Migration Routes and the Next Crisis
Having observed Europe’s vulnerabilities, Russia and Belarus, whose relations with the EU have plummeted in recent years, began using migration as a tool of political destabilization. By reducing travel costs and expediting visas, they helped bring people from the Middle East and Africa into their territory, and Russian and Belarusian authorities further directed them toward European borders.
Russia first tested the tactic in 2015 and 2016, sending thousands of migrants to its borders with Finland and Norway. Belarus has adopted a similar strategy since 2021, encouraging migrants to cross toward Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania in response to EU sanctions. While these countries have drastically upgraded border controls on their frontiers with Belarus, Belarus has continued to encourage migrants to cross. In 2023, Russia began new efforts against Estonia and Finland.
This method is unlikely to overwhelm Europe numerically, but highly publicized arrivals of non-European migrants lead to the exploitation of existing political divisions. The migration crisis has fueled support for anti-establishment and far-right parties for more than a decade in Europe, making even relatively modest migration flows politically useful for Russia and Belarus.
Russia also contributes to Europe’s migration pressures by exacerbating conflicts beyond the EU’s borders. “It’s always Putin who is involved in those big migration movements. It’s always Vladimir Putin,” EU migration commissioner Magnus Brunner told the Financial Times. The Russian president supported former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad during the civil war in 2011, which helped escalate Europe’s migration crisis in 2015–2016.
Irregular migration to the EU has fallen sharply in recent years, from 275,000 in 2023 to 31,000 between January and June 2026, based on figures provided by the European Council. But they can surge suddenly, with Morocco’s latest pressure on Ceuta demonstrating how fragile Europe’s position remains. From the coercive tactics of Morocco and Russia to the pressures created by conflicts in Libya and Syria, Europe’s vulnerability to outside powers has grown.
Migration also remains a major source of tension between European states. Britain and France have argued over responsibility for migrants crossing the English Channel, while Greece, Italy, and other frontline states have periodically threatened to loosen migrant controls and allow them to move further into the EU. Central European governments, meanwhile, have resisted EU efforts to distribute migrants more evenly across the bloc.
The pressures are unlikely to disappear. High youth unemployment in countries like Morocco, Africa’s rapidly growing population, and increasing climate stress will continue to drive migration, even as European countries appear likely to continue with policies that have contributed to instability beyond their borders.
For governments’ position along Europe’s borders, the temptation to exploit these flows is clear. Migration provides political leverage and financial rewards against a far wealthier political bloc. As Libya, Turkey, Morocco, Russia, and Belarus demonstrate, controlling the migration lever can extract serious concessions while imposing costs on Europe.
But reducing migration to a geopolitical weapon, a source of profit, or a problem to be passed from one country to another undermines the people caught in it. More than 100 people died in the Ceuta crossing, according to the enclave’s leader, while Libya’s open slave markets show the dangers facing migrants caught in uncontrolled migration flows. Europe can strengthen its borders, but migration will continue, and governments that can control those movements will have a powerful source of leverage.
