Ceuta

 The arrival earlier this week of tens of thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers in Ceuta (a Spanish territory in North Africa) obviously gave the global far-right an issue they could demagogue for days. Extreme rightists on both sides of the Atlantic (including, of course, people in and close to our own U.S. government), who have been framing nonwhite immigration as an "invasion" all along, could flaunt viral images of the desperate sea of humanity and say: "see!? this is what happens as soon as you elect a leftist government! They open the borders!"

That much—alas—is expected at this point. 

But as Natasha Lennard observed in a recent opinion piece for the Intercept, the more depressing thing is the way that seemingly liberal and left-wing voices in politics and the media helped reinforce the same narrative. Much of the liberal "fact-checking" response to far-right claims mostly just emphasized that few if any of the estimated 50,000-plus people who arrived in Ceuta ever reached the European mainland. What they didn't do—in other words—was to question the basic right-wing assumption that migrants and asylum-seekers are a threat to the West. 

Yet, it is the migrants and asylum-seekers in Ceuta—those supposed "threats"—who perished in the sea, or who were shoved and manhandled by Spanish authorities, and who were ultimately pushed back across the border in what human rights observers have characterized as summary expulsions. At least 72 people died tragically in the incident—and they were not the citizens of Spain; they were desperate people who drowned while trying to swim to Ceuta from Morocco or were reportedly crushed to death in the human stampede surrounding a border barrier. 

In other words, these were no "invaders" attacking a sovereign nation, but people so completely bereft of alternatives in their home countries that they chose to risk their lives merely to set foot on European soil. Some of them, according to Human Rights Watch, were refugees who had fled raging conflicts in Sudan and Yemen—some of the most egregious humanitarian catastrophes in the world. People escaping such conflicts have credible asylum cases if anyone does—but Spanish authorities seem to have denied them individual hearings, in a panicked effort to outpace the global bipartisan backlash against the migrants. 

Some have speculated that Morocco deliberately eased their border restrictions in order to send a message to Spain about Western Sahara. But regardless of any geopolitical motives on the part of the governments involved, the migrants and asylum-seekers themselves told media that they were just looking for work and safety—as any of us would do in their position. 

"I tried to work and have a job and make a living, but there is nothing for me here," as one of them reportedly said of Morocco. "Do you think if I had a job I would have gone?" another told the New York Times. People don't drown in the ocean or get crushed to death under the feet of other climbers if they have a wealth of other options. People do these things when going is the only alternative to starvation or death. 

In a sane world, Europe—which has an aging population and a desperate need for more working age adults in order to fiscally sustain its welfare states—would welcome the arrival of so many young people who ask for nothing more than a chance to labor and pay taxes. Just as our own government should welcome asylum-seekers at our southern border. Instead, Western governments across the political spectrum, and on both sides of the Atlantic, are doing all in their power to send them away empty-handed. 

See yonder poor, o'erlabour'd wight, 

So abject, mean, and vile, 

Who begs a brother of the earth 

To give him leave to toil; 

And see his lordly fellow-worm 

The poor petition spurn, 

Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife 

And helpless offspring mourn. (Robert Burns)

Indeed, if Europe or the United States had processed 50,000 to 60,000 people to enter their economies over a series of months and on a one-on-one basis, probably the incident never would have provoked the same level of backlash—and would not have lent itself so well to the demagogic purposes of the far-right. But there is something about the visual impression of so many people "surging in" at once that triggers some primal fear, seemingly across the political spectrum, and remains immune to any attempt to rationally weigh the benefits of freer immigration (which almost all come out positive). 

The same thing happened at the start of the Biden administration. The previous Trump government's legally-dubious pandemic-era Title 42 policy had artificially shut down the border and restricted any access to asylum proceedings. When the new Biden administration came in, then, there was already a massive backlog of people stranded at the border waiting to come in—just as there are evidently so many people desperate to cross the Moroccan border that the slightest release of pressure from the Moroccan border guards can lead to a massive influx. 

Given enough time, migration flows in a freer world would eventually stabilize and become more predictable. But the constant see-saw of policy makes people desperate for their one chance at life and safety risk everything to cross the border in the one moment when restrictions ease, since they don't know how long the window will remain open; and this then in turn prompts a right-wing backlash full of calls to "close the border," which causes another bottleneck and build up of pressure, and the cycle repeats indefinitely. 

Thus, every time a center-left government merely tries to do something as modest as restore access to ordinary asylum procedures, which are supposed to be guaranteed by international treaty already, they are accused of "opening the border" and inviting a "border crisis," and so on. 

The American and European far-right then says: "Aha! This is the invasion we've been warning against all along!" And then the left and center-left move to reintroduce all these unlawful restrictions on asylum procedures in part as a fire-wall against the far-right and to deny them a talking point. 

As one German speaker warns in Sven Lindqvist's 1992 book "Exterminate All the Brutes,"  in a conversation the author recorded about the rise of the continent's neo-fascists: "[T]his is just the beginning. The great mass of unemployed are on the other side of Europe's Rio Grande, in Asia and Africa. Just wait until they come flooding in [....] Wait until the border falls just like the Wall fell and everything will be one great labor market. Who will then win elections?" (As a matter of economics, I can't agree with the speaker that this is such a scary prospect; but as a matter of politics, his words have alas proved all too prophetic.)

This primal fear of a large group of unemployed, landless, propertyless masses is of course an old one; indeed, it is as old as the proletariat itself. Capitalist development often traps people in a catch-22 of this sort. On the one hand, it demands the displacement of vast human populations who previously secured their living through subsistence agriculture or traditional handcrafts, which become redundant under the "efficiency gains" of "mass production." 

People are thus thrown off their lands and are forced to become emigrants, in just the way Oliver Goldsmith depicts in his great poem about the impact of early capitalism on a traditional agrarian community, "The Deserted Village." 

And on the one hand, capitalist leaders claim to welcome this. They need workers for the new industries thrown up by modern development, after all, and they say that people who lose their livelihoods in traditional sectors can make it up by finding new and better jobs in factories, sweatshops, etc. 

But then, when the newly pauperized proletariat tries to take them up on this offer by migrating, they are attacked as a a menacing "horde" and an "invading" army. As Heine perfectly captured the dynamic, writing during the age of the 19th century industrial revolution, in his great poem about the "Wanderratten": 

The wander-rats, oh, dear! 

They are already near.

They're coming on, their whistling is mounting,

Their numbers are vast, too vast for counting. 

[...]

The citizens pick up their arms, 

The clerics start tolling alarms. 

Endangered is our morality,

In another word, our property. (Pollak trans.)

Heine draws the moral of his own satire at the end: the "rats"—the migrants, the displaced, pauperized proletarians—only "wander" because they have no food in their bellies. Instead of confronting them with arguments, guns, and sermons, then, the outraged fearful citizens should try offering them a meal. Only "soup-logic" and "dumpling-reason" (Suppenlogik and Knödelgründen), will work to soothe this crisis—in Heine's immortal phrase. 

So too, immigrants pressed into Ceuta by the tens of thousands because they had no food. Why do they have no food? Because they have no work. Why do they have no work? In part because capitalist methods have demanded the extinction of traditional industries around the globe that people once used to sustain life. In part too because the UAE is bankrolling a genocidal civil war in Sudan, and also Saudi Arabia and the United States and Israel have been fighting a brutal off-and-on war with the Houthis in Yemen for over a decade, displacing thousands. 

Oh, and the U.S. attack on Iran is driving up food and fuel and fertilizer prices around the globe, pushing millions more in the Global South into poverty and desperation. ("Nigerian children pay the price for the Iran war as malnutrition and poverty surge," to quote a recent Associated Press headline.)

The problem then, as always, is hunger. 

The Spanish authorities have responded to this problem by pushing people back across the border by hand. The videos show young men and women trying to return to Morocco while border guards shove them gratuitously and cause them to stumble. European leaders have erected new border barriers, in the hopes of containing the tide of humanity. 

These "arguments" from fear and force, these uses of military might to suppress inevitable human mobility  in the age of mass migration and displacement that our own political leaders have chosen to create, will not work. People have already shown they would rather risk death by drowning than simply stay in place and starve. Why not focus, then, on trying to figure out how people can find jobs and livelihoods in this world? Why not try meeting the problem with some "soup-logic" and "dumpling-reason," as Heine put it, instead?