European show of unity over illegal migration

**Uncle Desai** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Uncle Desai, and at 15 Hours GMT on Tuesday the 4th of August, these are our main stories. EU member states put on a show of unity over migration after tens of thousands of Moroccans illegally entered a Spanish territory last week. Ukraine carries out a series of further attacks on logistics, warehouses and oil infrastructure in Russia. The Saudi state-owned oil giant Aramco sees its profits soar, despite the war in the Middle East.
Also in this podcast, exports of air conditioning units from China into the EU have risen more than 40% on last year. The question is how to get them to Europe quickly.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:45)
We transported some units, some thousand units by train. We will not make much margin, but at least we can provide some of the porters because of these big demands.

**Uncle Desai** (0:55)
And how a fake judge in Egypt remained undetected for three years.
The influx of migrants into the Spanish territory of Sueta may have abated, but the human and political storm it has created is still playing out. Many of those who crossed into Sueta last week have returned to neighboring Morocco, but several thousand remain, prompting residents to question who will look after them. Susana Rupp is a nurse working in a community health center in the territory.

**Susana Rupp** (1:29)
There is a lot of people wandering through the streets without a place to stay. They have a place for 500 immigrants, but there are almost 3,000. So as you can imagine, the situation is really dramatic for them, and also for the people in the city, Spanish people, because this is not a normal situation.

**Uncle Desai** (1:52)
In the past few hours, EU interior ministers have been meeting via Videolink to try to calm the anger among some member states. The European Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration, Magnus Brunner, said the ministers had supported Spain and praised Europe's handling of the migration issue.

**Magnus Brunner** (2:10)
By every measure, Europe has not had this much control over illegal migration in decade. But of course, the events from Ceuta, that's also pretty clear, show that dramatic images beat actually the best statistics.

**Uncle Desai** (2:30)
Our Europe correspondent, Nick Beek, is following developments and spoke to Rajini Vaidyanathan.

**Nick Beek** (2:35)
It does seem that all the main parties here are downplaying any sort of row among the member states. And you know, that is a massive departure from the past three or four days where there has been a bitter disagreement between some of those key countries, Italy really going for Spain. And over the weekend, we had 22 countries, including Italy, writing this letter suggesting that the policies of the Madrid government had acted as a sort of pull factor for some of the tens of thousands of mainly young men who tried to get to Ceuta last week. They were suggesting that the whole sort of integrity of the borderless Schengen zone within the European Union was at threat because of what the Spanish were doing. And today, I mean, the language is really different. You've got Denmark and Italy suggesting that they're satisfied with Spain and that really they're all in this together. And I suspect, Regina, what's happened here is that governments across Europe have seen how hard right and far right parties really sort of leapt on the extraordinary issues we saw last week. And also the suggestion that a lot of Russian disinformation was really amplifying what was being reported online. And also a suggestion that in the first place, this surge was caused by some sort of internet hoax that was telling people to try and make this journey because they might well get a Spanish passport, which of course was simply not true.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:57)
And Spain have said, haven't they, Nick, that they've already returned to Morocco 70,000 of the 72,000 migrants who reached Ceuta.

**Nick Beek** (4:05)
Yes, and I mean, Ceuta is a place where obviously right on the tip of northern Africa, it's not in the Schengen zone, separated by the Strait of Gibraltar. So you've got 25 kilometres or so of seed separating that city, the Spanish city, from the Spanish mainland, but yet there was such a large reaction to this. And in terms of how the governments play it from now on in, you really got the feeling that prime ministers and presidents across Europe felt they had to say something because immigration for so many electorates is a really crucial, important issue, we know that. It's one that the hard right have been picking up votes on. And so a lot of politicians felt compelled to speak. And I think now in the cold light of day, there's been a dialing down of the temperature.