Liberals Are Ceding Ground to the Far Right on Ceuta Border Crossings

Summary

Over 50,000 people last week risked their lives to cross the border between Morocco and Ceuta, the tiny Spanish enclave in north Africa, in the hope of making it to mainland Europe. As a wide array of responses to the situation on Ceuta make clear, a commitment to harsh border regimes is not the sole preserve of the far right. Once again , liberals and centrists who claim to decry the right’s anti-immigrant stances are themselves treating immigrants as a threat to be secured against. A spokesperson for the White House decried Spain’s new immigration regularization proposal as “far-left, globalist policies.” Meanwhile, conservative and right-wing leaders across Europe and the U.K. echoed similar sentiments, conjuring the old lie of an “invasion” confronting the West. By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use . “In less than 48 hours, my government has succeeded in fully restoring control over the border,” he wrote on Saturday in a response to criticism from other European leaders. The mainstream defense against far-right fearmongering, then, was merely a regurgitation of the right’s anti-immigrant premise. A few things are, however, clear: Misinformation had spread in the preceding days on social media suggesting, falsely, that a recent Supreme Court ruling in Spain would prevent the Spanish authorities returning immigrants. In a world of increasing and inevitable mass migration, it is a moral failure to treat the swift removal of immigrants as a victory. Such a framing is also a gift to the far right, who will continue to benefit within a political consensus that treats immigration as a bad thing . The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse.