Another would-be migrant claimed Moroccan police encouraged him, crying “come to Spain!”

It sounds like a tourist board slogan, and it turned out to be misleading. By Friday afternoon, these men, along with most of the illegal arrivals, were already trudging home, baffled by Ceuta’s lack of suitable accommodation, food or drink. Europe’s famed hospitality had let them down.

The stories of illegal migrants who made the journey there and back again contrast markedly with official Moroccan reports. Moroccan rights groups claim police used water cannons and fired warning shots to prevent crossings (clearly with little success). Morocco’s ambassador to Spain said events unfolded against Morocco’s wishes and that “we have always prioritized legal, orderly and safe migration for all” — a Freudian slip for the ages.

The days since have seen a rash of speculation over Morocco’s motivations for encouraging — or at least facilitating — the crisis. Commentators and experts point out Spanish ties to Western Sahara separatists and the reopening of lucrative economic ties with Morocco’s regional rivals Algeria, as well as Moroccan resentment over the perceived colonial nature of Spanish rule in Ceuta. Other analysts argue that a nexus of Moroccan, Israeli and American interests has combined in order to undermine the Spanish government led by socialist Pedro Sánchez, whom Donald Trump appears to see as the embodiment of Europe’s ills.

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Did Morocco facilitate the crisis? Were the young men’s claims of police encouragement true? This would help explain the scale of the migrant surge, but it cuts against Sánchez’s public response. Rather than rebuking Morocco for its egregious lapse in border enforcement, the Spanish leader thanked Rabat for its “cooperation” in defusing the situation.

Sánchez saved his ire, instead, for the 22 EU leaders who signed an open letter criticizing his pro-migration policies, in particular Spain’s recent mass regularization of illegal immigrants. Sánchez condemned the “selfish, polarizing and unlawful reaction” of his EU peers, saying countries that backed Spain’s temporary suspension from the Schengen Zone were “driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance, or political interest.”

In short, Sánchez appeared happier with Morocco — the state accused by many of facilitating the crisis — than with fellow Europeans seeking to enforce stronger migration controls.

Granted, Sánchez is typically a defender of migration. But his refusal to cast blame on Morocco illuminates a shift in relations between the EU and north Africa, driven by migration dynamics. This shift puts European leaders of all stripes in the same boat.

The EU has made the externalization of migration controls a crucial factor in relations with countries around its external borders. A cornerstone of the bloc’s rightward shift on migration — often labeled “Fortress Europe” — is a focus on bilateral agreements with third countries, particularly in north Africa, which act as gateway states for those seeking to attempt the perilous voyage across the Mediterranean.

These agreements tie EU financial aid to efforts from countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to contain illegal migration flows. European nations equip and train local maritime police while disbursing hefty financial aid to sweeten the deal. The EU’s controversial 2023 deal with Tunisia on migration proposed over €1 billion in aid, while Morocco, another key gateway state, has received hundreds of millions of euros, most of it earmarked for “integrated border management and the fight against smuggling and trafficking in human beings.”

EU leaders thought that by externalizing migration controls — and washing their hands of the dirty work involved — they had found the perfect solution. Stopping illegal migrants from ever reaching EU soil would, it was reasoned, save the bloc from ever having to confront the thorniest problem relating to illegal migration: the knot of human rights legislation that protects migrants once they arrive. For that reason, leaders hoped that partnership agreements would neutralize public concerns over illegal immigration.

But the Ceuta crisis suggests that “Fortress Europe” is a castle built on sand, one that is perennially vulnerable to the caprice of Europe’s partners. Incentivizing non-EU states to manage migration flows creates a mutual dependency: the gatekeeper states depend on EU financial aid, while the EU depends on their efforts to keep migrants off European soil. The seismic implication of Ceuta is that, amid growing Western panic over migration levels, that mutual dependency is no longer balanced — and the West’s partners are learning the art of blackmail.

Are Sànchez’s words, then, those of an out-of-touch, anti-European traitor, as many onlookers caricature him? Or are they, instead, the supplication of a man with a figurative gun to his head? It should, again, be emphasized that there is no hard evidence to prove that Moroccan authorities were complicit in the Ceuta crisis. But the EU’s externalized migration controls have handed its leaders significant power to disrupt Spain and the bloc as a whole, whether they choose to use it or not.

In that sense, the Ceuta incident shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The EU doesn’t have to look far for a precedent when it comes to hostile weaponization of illegal migration flows. For years, Poland has accused Belarus of sponsoring illegal migration, luring migrants from across the Middle East and Africa on tourist visas with the promise of an easy jaunt into the Schengen area. Successive Polish governments have undertaken heavy militarization of the country’s eastern border, and the route has become deadly. 

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk justified this uncompromising response by saying: “We are not dealing with just any asylum seekers, we are dealing with a coordinated, very efficient operation to break the Polish border and attempts to destabilize the country.”

The Polish response has been harshly condemned by human rights groups, which, given the severity of Warsaw’s measures, is unsurprising. Measures at the border with Belarus include a 5.5-meter-high steel fence with electronic monitoring systems to detect attempted crossings. Poland has also loosened rules around the use of firearms — introduced after a soldier was murdered at the border — that NGOs say give officers a “license to kill”. And since 2025, Poland has suspended the right of all arrivals from Belarus to claim asylum. The latter move was lambasted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as Poland’s commissioner for human rights, an internal ombudsman, as a violation of European law.

From the perspective of stopping illegal migration at the Belarusian border, though, Warsaw’s harsh measures have been a resounding success. While 40,000 attempted crossings were reported in 2021, and 15,500 in the first half of 2025, the official figure for the first half of 2026 was just 235. Belarus’s focus for illegal migration flows has now shifted to the Baltic states, forcing Latvia to seal its southeastern border at the end of July.

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Given openly hostile relations between Belarus and the EU, Minsk’s actions are understood as a form of hybrid warfare and punished as such through sanctions. The EU has no similarly clear-cut way of understanding the new power wielded by its partner states in north Africa. European leaders must, in this context, ask themselves two questions: how can they be sure that gatekeeper states are on their side, and, if there are concerns over these partners’ good intentions, what options does that leave?

One potential path is appeasement. Sánchez’s thanks for Morocco’s cooperation — in defusing a crisis which it stands accused of having created — can be understood in this light. The more money Europe pumps into external migration partnerships, the more dependent it becomes on those partner states, and the greater their strength — and Europe’s concurrent temptation towards appeasement — becomes.

A second option, in which Europe accepts that externalization agreements pose risks, would be to take back responsibility by significantly strengthening EU states’ own illegal migration controls and enforcement capabilities. This won’t happen, though, until leaders tackle the legal protections that migrants gain once they reach EU soil. There is a tight connection between changes in international human rights law and resultant migration: hence the apparent link between the Ceuta crisis and a Spanish Supreme Court ruling blocking deportations without due process for sea arrivals. It is the opposite effect to the plummeting rate of arrivals to Poland from Belarus since all asylum applications from that country were banned.

Thirdly, Europe could consider applying the playbook which it already uses against Belarus and Russia to any state which it suspects of weaponizing migration with hostile intent — even gatekeeper countries. Hostile exploitation of migration by Russia and Belarus is met with punishment in the form of sanctions and the severing of diplomatic relations. These tools, or at least the threat of them, could be applied more broadly. Facilitating mass illegal migration is not, after all, the act of a friendly nation.

The EU is the largest trading partner for all the key migrant gatekeeper nations in north Africa. It has the economic clout to deter potential hostile exploitation of migration by those states, and while not every lapse in migration controls is an act of hybrid warfare, a carrot-and-stick approach — the “stick” being the credible threat of sanctions — may restore balance to the increasingly lopsided nature of these relationships.

It is disturbing to think that exploitative illegal migration flows may be motivated by geopolitical power games. But Europe should be more disturbed by its powerlessness in the Ceuta affair; a powerlessness created by counterproductive elements of human rights legislation, formalized in externalization agreements with third countries, and exemplified by Sánchez’s thanks to a state which dramatically failed to uphold its end of the bargain in protecting Europe from illegal immigration. 

The EU must also face up to the fact that in the event of instability elsewhere in the region — renewed conflict in major migrant transit nation Libya, for example, or a breakdown in the EU’s fraught relationship with Tunisia — potentially hostile regimes may similarly wield migration as a weapon. This risk is only heightened by the ongoing surge of refugees north from war-torn African states; an estimated two million Sudanese refugees have fled to key EU partners Egypt and Libya alone since the nation’s civil war began in April 2023. 

One thing has become alarmingly clear: the ability of non-European states, who may not have our best interests at heart, to dictate migration flows, in so doing undermining societies and sowing panic. Europe gifted them this ability. Whatever conclusions it draws from the Ceuta crisis, it must now learn to stand up for itself.

That field now contains around 10,000 terrified migrants from various African countries, living in makeshift tents and hoping to find a safe route out of South Africa. After false rumors claimed that they were being given accommodation rather than deported, the camp last week came under attack from rioters, who had to be dispersed with rubber bullets.

Similar scenes have been unfolding across South Africa, where a grassroots campaign to evict and intimidate illegal immigrants has gathered steam since early May. Displaced foreigners — some of whom say they are in the country legally — have taken to huddling in large groups outside police stations and churches, or hiding in the bush and on remote mountainsides. Homes have been torched and businesses looted. Vigilantes have gone from door to door demanding papers. The protests are loosely fronted by groups such as March and March, led by the former radio presenter Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, and Operation Dudula, which has previously tried to obstruct illegal immigrants from accessing healthcare and schooling. The Zulu activist Nkosikhona Ndabandaba, who has more than 1.5 million Facebook followers, has donned traditional tribal garb to lead large crowds through the street.

The riots have so far left at least two dead — though the Malawian government claims the real number is five — while prompting other African countries, including Nigeria and Ghana, to evacuate hundreds of their citizens. In terms of death and destruction, the current unrest has yet to match some earlier waves of anti-immigrant violence, which have erupted periodically since 2008. Ominously, though, the vigilantes have declared a 30 June deadline for illegal migrants to leave South Africa. What they will do after that date is unclear.

In the past, Britain could look at such events with detached incomprehension, but it no longer has that luxury, given the incipient unraveling of its own multicultural regime. The riots in Belfast, where a Sudanese asylum seeker stands accused of a brutal knife attack, came on the heels of a furious response to the police’s handling of Henry Nowak’s murder by a young Sikh man, and against a backdrop of violent intimidation of British Muslims. Notwithstanding Andy Burnham’s opportunity to change the country’s mood following his victory in Makerfield — that mood became notably worse, after all, with the beginning of Keir Starmer’s ill-fated leadership in the summer of 2024 — there is a grim sense that it is only a matter of time until the next inciting incident turns the ratchet of civil strife a notch further.

Three years ago, when I argued in UnHerd that Britain was beginning to resemble South Africa in its institutional dysfunction and loss of social trust, I made an exception for ethnic tensions. “One only has to look at the frequent anti-immigrant pogroms in South African townships to see that, for all the anxieties over integration, British society remains a relative picture of harmony,” I wrote. Depressingly, the distinction no longer seems as obvious as it did.

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Commentary and debate surrounding the unrest in South Africa — which are generally described as “xenophobic” or “Afrophobic”, in light of the protestors and their targets both coming from black communities — has been uncannily similar to the recent discourse in Britain. In a speech on 7 June, president Cyril Ramaphosa attempted to walk the same tightrope as mainstream Labour and Conservative politicians in Britain, signaling attentiveness to popular grievances over immigration and crime, while portraying the aggressive expression of those grievances as alien to the nation’s values. Ramaphosa spoke of the “legitimate concerns” of South Africans being hijacked by “forces” seeking to “further their own personal, political, or criminal agendas”; he denounced “social media campaigns that spread misinformation, fake news and lies”; he emphasized the country’s legal obligations to refugees, and stated that immigration “is the reason for our diversity and contributes to our vibrancy”. At the same time, he announced measures to crack down on illegal migration and the illegal employment of migrant workers.

Ramaphosa has to attempt this balance because in South Africa, as in Britain, populist movements have sought to harness anti-immigration sentiments as a way of peeling off support from his African National Congress (ANC) party. With municipal elections taking place later this year, uMkhonto we Sizwe, the breakaway party led by former ANC president Jacob Zuma, and Action SA, a Johannesburg-based party that supports mass deportations, have both expressed sympathy for the protesters. Their relationship between these parties and the groups orchestrating the protests is opaque, but a source familiar with the political landscape in South Africa tells me that they are widely believed to be “connected somehow”. On the ground, meanwhile, interviews with anti-immigrant protesters in South Africa produce similar responses as those with disgruntled Brits on the high streets of market towns. They talk about pressure on public services and housing, a lack of jobs, and crime.

Obviously the differences between Britain and South Africa remain vast, and immigration is no exception. Most South Africans live with a degree of poverty still unknown to Britain, and the conditions in which they must accommodate newcomers — who come from still poorer countries — are therefore totally different. Migrants survive as entrepreneurs running small businesses in townships, often quite successfully, or meet a prolific demand for cheap labor in hospitality, domestic work, and agriculture. One farmer tells me that he fears losing his entire workforce due to the current protests. Anti-immigrant pogroms take place in the context of a society that is violent in general. Contacting a local politician in the Western Cape for his views on the recent unrest, I received an apologetic voice note explaining that he was busy because “one of our councillors has just been shot”.

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And yet, the scale of migration into South Africa has been far smaller than in Britain and other Western European countries. Whereas the latter have foreign-born populations comprising about 20% of the total, in South Africa the estimates are typically 4-5%, though the true scale of illegal immigration is difficult to assess.

These discrepancies make the similarities between the two countries all the more striking, and potentially instructive. Most obviously, the failure of the state to control or even to know who is crossing its borders has proven, in both cases, a uniquely potent source of anger and injustice. In South Africa, as with Britain’s Channel crossings, the governing classes have judged the management of an unwieldy border to be impractical as well as undesirable on ideological grounds, with the principles of Ubuntu, or solidarity and fraternity, playing a similar role in the South African context as the ethos of universal human rights in the British one. Just as protesters in Johannesburg and Durban demand adherence to proper legal processes and documentation, invoking the state’s duty to the safety of its citizens, so the British public consistently express far greater anxieties over the asylum system than over legal immigration.

But the problem of disorder goes beyond the border. In South Africa, fears over migration are amplified by endemic corruption — beginning with the routine bribery of officials for visas — which makes the country a magnet for unsavory characters and fosters a general sense of vulnerability to opportunistic outsiders. The same is increasingly true of Britain, even if straightforward corruption is less of an issue here than incompetence. Immigration and multiculturalism have become associated with a multitude of institutional failures, from two-tier justice and bogus asylum claims to universities operating as visa factories and the conquest of high streets by financially suspect vape shops and Turkish barbers. Such trends are bound to make people sensitive to evidence of migrant criminality, though it seems that this is not simply a problem of perception: even the Guardian has suggested that asylum seekers are likely commit crimes at a higher rate.

Moreover, despite their economic differences, both South Africa and Britain have used foreign labor to compensate for their failure to educate and train their own citizens adequately, and both have maintained porous borders at a time of economic stagnation and high unemployment. The upshot is large numbers of newcomers arriving in societies whose outlook is colored by economic insecurity, and by the stress of competing for scarce resources and opportunities.

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To be sure, the situation in South Africa is worse. Education outcomes are poor even by African standards, and more than a third of young people are NEETs — not in education, employment or training. Rigid labor market laws have made it more attractive to hire illegal workers, who, besides being often better educated and having a work ethic born of desperation, cannot summon the authorities to investigate their employer. South Africans are therefore much more likely than British people to say that immigrants are taking jobs that they could and should be doing. But the situation in Britain is not good, either: 13.5% of 16-25-year-olds — more than a million people — are NEETs, and almost the entire increase in employment among young people since 2020 is accounted for by foreign nationals. Recent polling suggests that, as well as a majority of Brits being concerned about the impact on housing, a significant plurality sees immigration as having a negative economic impact, and thinks the numbers coming to work are too high.

Perhaps the most revealing parallel, though, concerns the loss of faith in established political parties. The ANC earned immense loyalty for leading South Africa’s black majority to freedom, but not infinite loyalty. The party’s loss of its absolute majority in 2024 came after a 30-year reign when it indulged in corruption and personal enrichment while failing to lift anything like a critical mass of South Africans out of poverty. Like most political movements, the ANC also has ideological commitments which clash with the views and interests of its voter base. The party’s commitment to Ubuntu, manifest in its reluctance to tighten its borders with other African states, stems from the historic connection of the anti-apartheid struggle with an ethos of pan-African solidarity. On taking power in 1994, the ANC welcomed refugees to South Africa. Over time, immigration has therefore presented populist parties with a wedge to drive between the ANC and some of its traditional supporters.

This story bears a more than passing resemblance to the decline of Britain’s two main parties, and especially to the post-Blair Labour Party’s estrangement from its traditional working-class base. We’ve become so accustomed to Labour as a party of progressive graduates, public-sector workers and minorities that we sometimes forget its purpose through most of its existence was to lead Britain’s workers in their struggle against the power of capital. The Party’s attitudes to mass-migration and multiculturalism show its evolution from a working-class liberation movement to a liberal cosmopolitan one, pushing a bloc of formerly loyal voters to the Right. In terms of voting patterns and geography, the party of the old working class is now Reform UK.

The untethering of political culture from its traditional party institutions, both Labour and Conservative, has helped to lead Britain to its current precipice, where further violent unrest seems increasingly plausible. As the authority of those institutions has waned, it has created space not so much for a politics driven by populists, but an anarchic and volatile form of mob rule, in which would-be figureheads seek to outbid one another for the attention of utterly disillusioned and frustrated audiences. The main mechanism, in Britain as in South Africa and indeed elsewhere, is of course social media. Yes, it is foolish to pretend that anger over immigration and related issues is simply an artefact of online misinformation and incitement; but it is equally foolish to ignore the role of social media in bringing that anger to a pitch where violence is tacitly accepted as inevitable, or even secretly welcomed.

In this context, recent events in South Africa are most salient not as a parallel, but as a warning. If political violence and vigilantism cross the threshold of normality, British society will be irrevocably changed.