Who Really Benefits from the Ceuta Migration Crisis?

**Alastair Campbell** (0:01)
You've all no doubt been following events in the Ceuta. As many as 50,000 people swing from Morocco into this small Spanish enclave in the space of a single day, a dozens dying en route. Immediately on seeing the pictures that we've all now seen, many of the world's politicians rushed in. It's an invasion. Let's blame weak borders, blame Spain, blame Morocco, blame the migrants, blame anyone. But there is another bigger question I think worth asking. Who actually gained from what happened here? Maybe the people smugglers that Spain blames for orchestrating it, but I'm not so sure. But there's a second set of winners, most of them far away from the waters around Ceuta. The far right round the globe using this tragedy to further their agenda on immigration. Donald Trump using it to needle Spain over their stance on Gaza and Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu ditto. Putin's disinformation network, which moved on this story so fast and so hard. I just wondered if they knew what was coming. Italy's Prime Minister, Giorgio Maloney, invoking it to push for tighter internal EU borders, despite this having nothing to do with European free movement. Back home, Reform and the Conservatives, both claiming that the Moroccan migrants were heading for Britain. The AFD in Germany saying they were heading for Germany.
And the Rassemblement Nationale in France, they were heading for France. This is the three P's at work. Populism, polarisation, post-truth. And if a rumour can move tens of thousands of people and reshape a continent's political dialogue in a single day, what does that say about the immigration debate, immigration policy, and what does it say about what politics has become?
Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

**Rory Stewart** (2:00)
With me, Rory Stewart. Quick introduction to who Gerald Knaus is, who's joining us today. Gerald is one of my great heroes, and Alastair will tease me about the eclectic nature of my heroes, but Gerald is a campaigner who has set up something much more than a think tank. He passionately advocates for issues and tries to bring change in the world. Concretely, he started in the Balkans. He then worked on European Union enlargement, which he believes in profoundly. He's been fighting the far right across Europe, and he's been trying to come up with a humane, workable asylum policy. He's somebody who knows so many cabinet ministers across Europe, knows the European Commission well.
But above all, he's somebody who never gives up. He has a clear idea of how he wants to change the world. And despite all the things that might throw you off balance over 30 years, he remains incredibly energetic, incredibly good-humored, incredibly passionate. And we're very lucky to have him with us today.

**Alastair Campbell** (2:59)
And we wanted to get him on here because he's been following the immigration debate in Europe and knows a lot about this Spanish enclave that suddenly has become perhaps the most talked about place on earth.

**Rory Stewart** (3:12)
Most people in the world will have followed this extraordinary story, but it is a confusing story. The first thing is that Ceuta is a part of Spain, which is not connected to the European mainland. It's in North Africa. It's a tiny little peninsula across the Straits of Gibraltar. And that matters because it's a little enclave surrounded by Morocco. There's large Moroccan cities of half a million, one and a half million people not far from this tiny Spanish territory.
And you can, it's dangerous, but you can literally swim from Morocco just around the wall and get into Theuta. Theuta became part of the Iberian culture a very long time ago in 1415
Originally conquered by Portugal, then becomes part of Spain. In other words, it's been part of Iberia for longer than places like Granada. Before the Reconquista came down, when the Spanish monarchs came down and conquered the Muslim areas of southern Spain, Theuta was already part of the Iberian setup. But from the Moroccan point of view, the presence of what they see as a European colonial power in this tiny northern tip of Morocco, raises questions of decolonization even though this was Spanish territory long before modern Morocco was formed. Now, on that, I'm going to hand over to Gerald to try to give us a little bit of the recent history of what happened in the last week, and what's happened in Theuta over the last few years.

**Gerald Knaus** (4:36)
Well, what we all saw in the last week, I think it's worth underlining, it was completely extraordinary in terms of the numbers involved. 50,000 people crossing in one day a European Union border, in this case to this Spanish exclave, that is five times more than during the refugee crisis in the Greek islands, when on average 10,000 people crossed from Turkey to Greece. And we remember the dramatic pictures. And what makes this even more striking is, as you said, Theuta is a small place, 85,000 people. So if 50,000 or even 60,000 people, as the mayor of the town said, come in suddenly, I mean, it is an invasion. I mean, this is how people experience it. There's no other way to describe this. It's also striking, it was all Moroccan, I mean, mainly, not all, mainly Moroccans, mainly young men. And it had built up for about 10 days before. So I was first contacted by journalists to talk about this when there were around 3,000 people in the city, 1,500 had come in over a week. And to put that in context, those 50,000, that is more than the whole irregular migration to Spain last year, from all of Africa to all of its borders.