When the Border Becomes an Invitation

Ceuta’s sudden collapse and the Biden-era border surge expose the same governing failure. When illegal entry offers a credible path to release, work authorization or eventual legal status, the state creates an incentive that enforcement agencies cannot contain.

Spain awoke on Friday, July 31, to a border crisis of historic proportions. The Spanish Interior Ministry estimated that about 50,000 people had entered Ceuta from Morocco within roughly 24 hours. Juan Jesús Vivas, the president of the Spanish territory, placed the number closer to 60,000, equivalent to about 70 percent of Ceuta’s normal population. By Friday morning, at least 34 people had died while attempting the crossing, and thousands were sleeping in streets, parks and public spaces as the city’s institutions struggled to function. The latest figures dwarfed the early report that 1,500 people had arrived during the preceding week.

The scale matters because Ceuta demonstrated something Western governments continually pretend not to understand. Immigration policy does not affect only the people already standing at the border. Every court ruling, release policy, legalization program and deportation decision sends information outward. Migrants compare the cost of the journey with the probability of being admitted, released or eventually legalized. Smugglers advertise whichever legal opening appears most promising. A border policy that appears compassionate inside a government ministry can become an invitation by the time it reaches another continent.

The modern left’s immigration doctrine rests on the assumption that enforcement is inherently cruel while admission, release and legalization are presumptively humane. Ceuta revealed the civilizational danger of that belief. A government that cannot determine who may enter, remove those who enter illegally or maintain public order after a mass crossing is no longer exercising full sovereignty.

The Signal Reached Morocco Before Spain Could React

Spanish officials linked the Ceuta surge to a recent Supreme Court decision holding that migrants arriving by sea could not be summarily returned under the same procedure applied to people crossing the land perimeter. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said traffickers had circulated an expansive interpretation of the ruling through their networks, causing the perceived opportunity to spread “like wildfire.”

The ruling did not establish an unrestricted right to remain in Spain, but that distinction mattered little once the message passed through smuggling networks. Prospective migrants did not need a complete understanding of Spanish administrative law. They needed only to believe that reaching the water would make immediate removal less likely.

The explosion also followed one of the largest regularization programs in modern European history. Sánchez’s Socialist government received 1,174,978 applications between April 16 and June 30. Nearly 80 percent sought authorization through extraordinary residency provisions, while another 20 percent involved applicants for international protection. More than 156,000 applications came from Moroccan nationals.

The people entering Ceuta in late July were not automatically eligible for that program, which generally required prior residence in Spain. It therefore cannot be stated as fact that the regularization directly caused the crossing. The broader signal, however, is difficult to ignore. Spain told more than one million people living without ordinary legal status that unlawful residence could be converted into permission to work and remain. Weeks later, a narrower judicial opening produced an immediate rush toward Spanish territory.

Repeated regularizations create a long-term expectation that immigration law is provisional. The written statute prohibits unauthorized entry. Political practice suggests that removal may never occur and that a future government may eventually erase the violation. Even migrants excluded from the current amnesty may gamble on the next one.

Ceuta had already shown how vulnerable Europe becomes when another government controls the gate. In May 2021, approximately 8,000 people entered within 24 hours after Moroccan border enforcement receded during a diplomatic dispute with Madrid. Spain deployed soldiers and additional security forces while families and unaccompanied minors crossed in full view of Moroccan authorities. Migration had become an instrument of foreign pressure against a European state.

A country that depends on a neighboring government to prevent mass entry has outsourced part of its sovereignty. A country that simultaneously weakens its own return procedures makes that dependency even more dangerous.

Biden Built a Border System Around Release

The United States followed the same logic after Joe Biden entered office in January 2021.

The administration suspended new enrollment in the Migrant Protection Protocols, commonly called Remain in Mexico, and later issued a formal termination memorandum. The program had required many asylum applicants to await their American court proceedings outside the United States. Its termination restored the possibility that reaching the border, asserting a protection claim and surviving initial screening could lead to release into the country.

The resulting pressure was extraordinary. Customs and Border Protection averaged roughly 2.2 million southwest-border encounters annually from fiscal 2021 through fiscal 2024, compared with approximately 600,000 annually during the previous four fiscal years. A recent Government Accountability Office investigation found that CBP granted roughly 2.4 million paroles at the southwest border between October 2018 and May 2025, with the agency expanding humanitarian parole policies in 2021 as encounters increased. In fiscal 2023 and 2024, 97 percent of appointments made through the CBP One application resulted in parole.

An encounter does not necessarily represent a unique person successfully entering the country. The total includes repeat crossers, people expelled under public-health authority and inadmissible travelers presenting at ports of entry. Even with those qualifications, the numbers document a system under sustained pressure far beyond historical norms.

Release also became difficult to monitor. A Homeland Security inspector general review found that 29 percent of migrants released through one form of prosecutorial discretion failed to report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement within the required 60-day period. The department’s fragmented technology prevented reliable tracking and left officials without assurance that every released migrant could be located.

The immigration courts then became an administrative waiting room. The pending caseload reached more than 4.18 million in late 2024 before declining after the change of administration. The Justice Department’s official case data showed that new filings had accumulated faster than judges could resolve them. When a final decision may take years, the process itself becomes the reward. A person who is ultimately denied asylum may still spend a substantial portion of his working life inside the United States before removal becomes possible.

By June 2024, even the Biden administration had effectively conceded the incentive problem. Its emergency asylum regulation stated that stronger restrictions would “realign incentives,” expand expedited removal and reduce large-scale releases. The new rule limited asylum access when encounters exceeded specified thresholds. The government had spent more than three years denying that policy signals were driving the crisis, then adopted a deterrence policy when the political cost became unbearable.

Europe Has Repeated the Experiment Since 2000

The European migration crisis did not begin with Ceuta, and it did not begin in 2015. For more than a quarter-century, European governments have combined expansive asylum obligations, weak removal systems, periodic legalizations and inadequate external-border enforcement.

Spain conducted multiple regularization campaigns during the early 2000s. Its 2005 program produced nearly 700,000 applications and ultimately regularized hundreds of thousands of unauthorized workers. The stated objective was to bring employment out of the underground economy, but the policy also reinforced the expectation that illegal residence could eventually become legal residence.

A decade later, Europe experienced its largest asylum movement since the Second World War. Eurostat recorded 1,216,860 first-time asylum applications in the European Union during 2015. The following year produced a record number of positive first-instance decisions. Germany, Sweden and other countries struggled to provide housing, screen applicants, adjudicate claims and return those who did not qualify.

The emergency faded from television screens without being institutionally resolved. In 2023, EU member states and associated countries received 1.14 million protection applications, the highest total in seven years. The asylum systems of Germany, France, Spain and Italy received more than two-thirds of the claims.

Asylum applications are not identical to illegal entries. Some applicants arrive lawfully, and some have legitimate claims arising from war or persecution. The structural problem appears when physical arrival becomes the principal means of obtaining access to a lengthy legal process. If applicants can remain for years while cases and appeals proceed, the distinction between temporary processing and practical settlement begins to disappear.

The Schengen system made the consequences continental. Once a migrant reaches one member state and moves into the passport-free zone, the border failure is no longer exclusively Spanish, Italian or Greek. It becomes a European problem. National governments retain responsibility for housing, policing, welfare and integration while smugglers exploit the weakest accessible point on the external frontier.

The Economic Argument Conceals Who Pays

Supporters of high immigration frequently answer concerns with aggregate economic figures. More workers produce more goods, pay taxes and enlarge the total economy. That claim is not entirely false. The Congressional Budget Office projected that the recent American immigration surge would increase federal revenue and reduce cumulative federal deficits by approximately $900 billion between 2024 and 2034. Its federal analysis also projected higher mandatory spending and interest costs, but a positive net effect on the federal budget.

Aggregate growth does not answer the political question. A larger gross domestic product does not necessarily mean greater income, security or public capacity for the existing citizen. The benefits and costs are distributed differently. Employers receive a larger labor pool. Property owners may benefit from increased demand. The federal treasury collects more revenue. Local governments must immediately provide classrooms, emergency medical care, sanitation, policing, transportation and shelter.

CBO estimated that the post-2021 immigration surge created a potential net state and local cost of $9.8 billion in 2023. Additional revenue of approximately $18.8 billion was outweighed by roughly $28.6 billion in additional expenditures. The federal government created and administered much of the policy, while cities and states absorbed much of the immediate expense.

Illegal immigration also distorts the labor market by expanding the number of workers whose status makes them easier to exploit. Employers can suppress wages, avoid labor standards or shift business costs onto public institutions. Legalization may reduce some exploitation after the fact, but repeated legalization does not repair the underlying incentive. It teaches employers that unauthorized labor can be hired today and regularized tomorrow.

A sovereign government should decide immigration levels by examining wages, housing supply, infrastructure, assimilation capacity and the interests of its citizens. It should not allow corporate demand for labor or humanitarian slogans to substitute for national policy.

The most serious cost cannot be captured in a budget table.

Modern states depend on social trust. Citizens pay taxes, obey laws and support public programs because they believe other members of the political community are subject to the same obligations. That confidence erodes when ordinary citizens see immigration laws enforced selectively, court orders delayed indefinitely and illegal residence rewarded with benefits unavailable to people who followed the legal process.

Research does not establish that ethnic diversity automatically destroys trust. The effect depends heavily on scale, institutions, economic equality and integration. A cross-national study of 19 democracies found that immigration-generated diversity could reduce social trust, organizational membership and political engagement in some conditions, although strong institutions could mitigate or reverse those effects.

That qualification supports a controlled-immigration argument rather than an open-border one. Integration becomes harder when migration is rapid, concentrated and unauthorized. Governments cannot manufacture shared language, loyalty, historical memory or civic obligation at the same speed that they can issue residency documents. A state may process applications by the million. It cannot bureaucratically produce national cohesion.

The political backlash is therefore predictable. Citizens who are told that borders are obsolete eventually support parties promising to restore them. Governments then condemn the resulting anger without acknowledging the policies that created it. By refusing moderate enforcement for years, the political class makes harsher reactions more likely.

A Nation Must Retain the Power to Refuse

The lesson from Ceuta is not that every migrant is an enemy. The lesson is that a government cannot preserve civilization by making admission the default and enforcement the exception.

A functioning system requires secure physical borders, rapid asylum decisions, detention when compliance cannot otherwise be assured, enforceable return agreements and an end to recurring mass amnesties. Legal immigration should occur at a level selected by the existing citizenry and compatible with housing, wages, public services and cultural assimilation. Humanitarian protection should remain available to people with valid claims, but it cannot become a permanent alternative immigration system for anyone capable of reaching the border.

Left-wing governments become threats to national survival when they treat borders as moral embarrassments, enforcement as cruelty and demographic transformation as an economic management tool. Their policies invite movements they cannot control, transfer costs to local communities and weaken the trust that allows democratic states to function.

Ceuta lost effective control of its border within hours. The Biden administration allowed an enforcement system to become a release-and-wait system over several years. Europe has spent twenty-six years turning supposedly temporary migration emergencies into a permanent feature of political life.

A country may choose to welcome newcomers. It ceases to be fully sovereign when it loses the power to say no.