Re: Ceuta is what happens when you’re not serio us about migration

On 8/1/26 10:17 AM, Julian wrote:
> Ursula von der Leyen doesn’t seem to care about the tide of people 
> rushing the Spanish border. Voters in Britain will
> 
> 
> If any of us were in doubt about the scale of the problem facing our 
> borders, that ended in half an hour on Thursday. Thousands of topless 
> Moroccan men were filmed scrambling over rocks, pushing over walls and 
> setting things on fire as they rushed into Ceuta, the Spanish exclave in 
> north Africa.
> 
> To watch the footage was, simply, to be boggled. How many people were in 
> that frame? Why were they doing this? Who even were they?
> 
> And what about the people of Ceuta, a city with a population smaller 
> than Eastbourne on the coast near Tangier, long governed by Spain? What 
> would we do if Eastbourne was overrun by 60,000 foreign berserkers?
> 
> Some would argue it already has been.
> 
> I’ve written a lot about Nigel Farage, the movement of people and the 
> threat of small boats. And, to be honest, I’ve always been a bit 
> embarrassed doing it. You don’t have to have watched The Odyssey to know 
> that human decency says you must at least try to welcome refugees and 
> migrants, especially if you’re one of the richest countries in the world 
> and they’re victims of wars you’ve started or meddled in — which is, of 
> course, in the end, most of the wars. This has always been Europe’s 
> position.
> 
> Yet, looking at the surging crowds, I thought: hasn’t it gone a bit far 
> now? Europe wants us to do what?
> 
> They want us to just deal with thousands more illegals, on top of the 
> thousands who have already come here on boats this year — 752 on 
> Wednesday alone — because they simply can’t be bothered to stop them or, 
> worse, expect us to actually welcome them in, as they do? To give them 
> free houses, taxis, mobile phones, allow scores of dependants to also 
> come across — because: human rights — when there are barely enough 
> houses for the people who are already here, when taxes are this high, 
> when the NHS is messy, dysfunctional and killing people?
> 
> Are we just expected to take it?
> 
> For Ursula von der Leyen, the useless, robo-haired functionary at the 
> top of the European Commission, the answer is yes. She couldn’t have 
> cared less about the Ceuta stampede. At most, for her, thousands of 
> gleeful men romping up metal railings, raiding shops and then sleeping, 
> half-naked, out in the open, were a mere HR/health and safety issue.
> 
> “Dangerous crossings” must not happen, she tweeted on Friday. “I tasked 
> two commissioners to support to control the situation.”
> 
> I looked up the commissioners. One was a wet-looking Austrian ninth-tier 
> politician, a holder of the Grand Cross of Liechtenstein. The other was 
> a former mayor of Dubrovnik and recipient of the 2006 World Mayor Award. 
> Are they real people? It’s like sending Gareth and Dawn from The Office.
> 
> Europe has never been serious about stopping migration. Philosophically, 
> it’s not their thing. Effective returns of people who flood into Greece, 
> Spain, Italy, France and so on bump along at only 28 per cent. Spain’s 
> prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, whose recent policies made the rush on 
> Ceuta possible, could not, when he addressed the press on Friday, even 
> bring himself to use the word “border”. The police would put a “physical 
> containment barrier” in the sea, he said, to stop migrants swimming the 
> three miles from Morocco to Spain.
> 
> How about telling them they simply won’t be welcome? How about not 
> promising an amnesty, as he did this year, prompting the surge? How 
> about seeing a huge body of random people just over the border and not 
> automatically thinking, what can I do to make it even easier for these 
> people to enter my territory? What can I give them? Shall I pass them a 
> lifejacket, a cup of tea, a credit card, an SUV and a four-bedroom house 
> in Kilburn?
> 
> These people aren’t refugees, by the way, or asylum seekers. They’re 
> economic migrants, chancing it. As one of them put it, when the border’s 
> down they’ll try anything, because: “Salaries are very low in Morocco. 
> It’s dead, Morocco is dead.”
> 
> For them, Ceuta’s a jaunty day trip.
> 
> Any serious attempt to deal with the many millions who flood in is 
> resisted with psychotic anger in the European parliament. Its recent 
> plan to create “return hubs” was met with scorn. One commissioner, two 
> weeks ago, said  that  “extraterritorial centres” had bad human rights 
> records. Australia’s plans led to “years of arbitrary detention in 
> inhuman conditions”. Similar plans by Israel (it’s always Israel) left 
> asylum seekers in “legal limbo”.
> 
> Fear of legal limbo — is that a reason to desecrate an entire continent? 
> These politicians are consumed by madness and guilt. They are 
> embarrassed by Europe’s wealth, its global standing and its relative 
> ease of life. They feel it is their mission to tear this down by waving 
> in thousands of people who shouldn’t be here. And those people know 
> this, which is why thousands still tip up in Italy each month, to 
> Giorgia Meloni’s horror. Sánchez himself has said that Spain will 
> welcome 500,000  migrants. This will tear Europe apart.
> 
> Some of these arrivals will head out of Spain and go north, attracted by 
> our better healthcare, education system and free houses.
> 
> We pay the French £662 million to stop them coming here from Calais, 
> but, as Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, found out on Tuesday, 
> like every EU official with a lifejacket they don’t do the job.
> 
> Philp was mocked for running up and down the French coast, asking the 
> gendarmerie why they were doing “absolutely nothing” to stop people- 
> smugglers loading up hundreds on boats in front of them. “Our order is 
> to let them go like that,” shrugged one. “We just have to say to them, 
> don’t do that, it’s dangerous.”
> 
> As I said: mere health and safety.
> 
> The strange thing about migration is that it should be the easiest thing 
> in the world to manage. There is nothing more simple than securing the 
> borders of one’s country. Yet many politicians seem unable to speak on 
> this matter. Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary — all 
> tongue-tied.
> 
> On other subjects, the prime minister won’t shut up: poetry, tea, pubs, 
> education, bus fares, electricity, who he’s going tax, why he felt 
> Cambridge let him down. On Europe, he couldn’t be clearer: he wants an 
> “even closer” relationship. On immigration, though, nothing.
> 
> At some point, perhaps when he sees his TikToks falling off a cliff as 
> eyeballs race to the astonishing pictures of Moroccans marching in 
> relentless columns across Spanish soil, he may realise that however much 
> the EU tries to obfuscate the reality of what is happening, however much 
> they try to tidy it away (“50,000 have gone back now”),  however much 
> they pretend that what happened on Thursday wasn’t their Tiananmen 
> Square — an event we can never unsee — there are only two subjects that 
> will interest people at the next election. Money, and this.
> 
> The longer Burnham prevaricates and utters soundbites, the longer Labour 
> tries to pretend the matter is in hand when it isn’t, the more people 
> will come across, the more our seaside towns will be destroyed, the more 
> stories will leak out about migrants bringing over 18 members of their 
> families and/or raping people. Is he ready for it?
> 
> 
> Camilla Long

capitalists and crying about free association: name a more ironic duo

-- 
why are we god?
let's end war 🙃