In the last two days of July, some 72,000 mostly young people living in Morocco crossed the land border into the adjacent Spanish enclave of Ceuta, with 75 immigrants dying. Many attempted a 3-mile swim around the border breakwater to get into the small city. Ceuta, along with Melilla, also sharing a border with Morocco, serve as the Spanish rulers’ last colonial outposts in Africa.
The incident sparked headlines worldwide and raised questions about what led to the disaster.
The answer has everything to do with the deep capitalist economic and social crisis resulting in dire living and working conditions for the vast majority of toilers in semicolonial countries, from Asia to Latin America to Africa. Many in Morocco hope that their lives will improve if they can just get to mainland Spain, where the government is known for liberal immigration policies, including a “regularization” program for over a million people earlier this year. About half were from North and sub-Saharan Africa.
“I tried to work and have a job and make a living, but there is nothing for me here,” Mohammed Kinani told the New York Times. The 21-year-old construction worker made the perilous trip to Ceuta and was forced back to Morocco. “If I don’t leave this country, there is nothing that will save me.”
“Do you think if I had a job I would have gone?” Ahlam al-Adnan, 22, said. She swam to the Spanish enclave with her four siblings, including her 8-year-old brother. In Ceuta, they hid in a forest but got hungry, so she went to look for food, got detained and was sent back to Morocco.
This time, Spanish authorities clamped down hard, deploying police and military forces to rapidly round up the vast majority of the immigrants and force them back across the border Aug. 1-2. Some 800 children who made the trip are being held in facilities across Ceuta.
In the town of Fnideq on the other side of the border, Moroccan cops turned water cannon on people trying to get into the Spanish-held territory. Until six years ago Moroccans could enter Ceuta without a visa. But then “the state decided to close the border,” Alami El Makrini, a market stall holder in Fnideq, told Reuters. “They hurt the shopkeepers and didn’t give us any compensation.”
The official unemployment rate in Morocco is 11%. But youth unemployment is more than triple that in a country where half the population of 38 million is under 35 years old. Last year the World Bank said that over the past decade, Morocco’s working-age population had grown by 11.4%, while employment had increased by only 1.5%
In 2025, demonstrations broke out in at least a dozen cities over joblessness, poor healthcare and living conditions, while the government of King Mohammed VI spends billions of dollars upgrading soccer stadiums for the 2030 FIFA World Cup, which it’s set to co-host with Spain and Portugal.
Prospects looked brighter for immigrants in Spain when the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced a program for undocumented workers earlier this year. It allowed individuals already in Spain whose visas had expired to renew their work permits. When registration closed June 30, over 1.1 million people had filed applications to do so.
Also impacting the crossings into Ceuta was a recent ruling by Spain’s Supreme Court that migrants stopped at sea while trying to reach Ceuta or Melilla, cannot be summarily returned to Morocco without due process.
Ceuta, with a population of 83,000, is a 7-mile enclave on a peninsula jutting into the Strait of Gibraltar. It has been controlled by Spain since 1580. When Morocco won its independence from both French and Spanish imperialist domination in 1956, the Spanish rulers continued to hold Ceuta and Melilla. The government of Morocco doesn’t recognize either Ceuta or Melilla as Spanish territories and demands their return.
In response to the latest events in Ceuta, Spanish officials have extended their water barrier out another 500 yards to make it more difficult to swim to the enclave.