The Atlantic makes the bizarre argument that conservatives are responsible for 60,000 people storming a peaceful beach in a Spanish territory in North Africa while completely ignoring the obvious role of lax immigration policies around the world.
Last week, much of America and the rest of the world was shocked by videos from Ceuta, a town in Northern Africa that is part of Spain which almost no one had ever heard of beforehand. Following a Spanish Supreme Court ruling on June 29 which held that authorities cannot “summarily deport migrants who arrive by sea without due process” to use CNN’s phrasing and a viral TikTok video announcing “the Spanish border is open and you can cross without papers,” close to 60,000 Moroccans, mostly young males, swam across an approximately three mile channel and landed on the Spanish beach in mass, prompting many to refer to their arrival as an “invasion.” As even the left-leaning The Atlantic put it, the arrivals were “Mostly young, mostly male Moroccans crawling onto beaches, climbing hills, scaling walls, jumping over fences, surging past police in order to get into Europe.” Needless to say, neither the residents of Ceuta nor the local authorities were prepared for this sort of surge, tens of thousands of people suddenly rising from a normally peaceful beach like something out of a zombie film, and the town was quickly overrun. While locals reported migrants stealing food, washing themselves in public fountains, and literally crapping on the sidewalk, the Spanish military was brought into restore order. Though there is reason to believe their claim that “most” of the arrivals have already been sent home – video footage appears to show far more than the less than a thousand they claim remain and around 90 including children died during the passage itself – order was largely restored over the course of the weekend, giving way to the political blame game on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
As many have pointed out, the invasion or whatever you call it, appears to have been at least partially motivated by outside forces. In addition to the viral TikTok video, The Atlantic reported on messages telling “people where to buy wet suits, flippers, goggles, floats, and even waterproof bags for documents and cellphones. Screenshots from Google Maps told them which sections of the Ceuta beach might have fewer police. Moroccan border guards were either unwilling or unable to stop them.” While no one knows where these messages originated, at least at this point, and apparently many have since disappeared somehow, some politicians in Ceuta itself are blaming the Moroccan government. “It’s an atrocity,” explained Juan Jesús Vivas, the long-serving conservative leader of the territory. “There are 88 bodies in the morgue, and there are more on the other side of the border.” “People see this as not as a migration crisis; it was fundamentally an attack, a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity,” he continued. “People felt that this, if not orchestrated, was at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco.” According to The Guardian, Spanish intelligence is leaning towards the same conclusion. As they described it, “The insinuation of Moroccan involvement appeared to be backed by the preliminary assessment of Spanish intelligence services, who cited suspicions that the influx had not been planned by Moroccan authorities but concluded that Morocco had failed to stem the tide of people rushing towards the border and in some cases had even facilitated their passage. Intelligence sources told El País that the roots of the influx probably lay in a hoax that had swiftly spread across social media after a Spanish supreme court ruling that migrants arriving by sea could not be summarily deported. As the hoax gained steam online, Moroccan border surveillance dwindled to a minimum until it was completely lifted late last week, allowing tens of thousands of people to stream through.”
This view appears to be backed by some of the migrants themselves. “You might see me smile a little but inside I’m shattered,” Ashraf described his harrowing experience reaching Ceuta. “There were so many people in the sea. Everyone was trying to grab on to you to save themselves, and you were trying to escape and move forward so they wouldn’t drag you down or drown you. The Moroccan police were pushing us toward the water and telling us ‘swim, swim’.” While Mr. Vivas saw a parallel to an incident in Europe during the pandemic which allowed 10,000 people to cross into Ceuta over two days after an independence leader from Western Sahara went to Spain for treatment for COVID-19, I was personally reminded of President Donald Trump’s frequent claim on the campaign trail in 2024 that Venezuela had opened their prisons and sent the inmates to the United States to reduce their own crime rates. “They’re taking their drug dealers and their people in jail, lots of people in jail, they’re taking their murderers, their killers, they’re taking them all and they’re sending them into the United States,” he noted in a video. “Venezuela was crime ridden,” he said on May 31, 2024. “Caracas, their cities, crime ridden two years ago, three years ago. They just reported a 72% drop in crime in the last year because all of their criminals, most of them, and the rest are coming in now, the ones that didn’t come in. In Venezuela, their prisons have been emptied into the United States. Their criminals and drug dealers have been taken out of the cities and brought into the United States, and that’s true with many other countries.”
Though experts have disputed this claim – or as FactCheck.org evaluated it, “Experts in and out of Venezuela told us there is no evidence to back up Trump’s claim. Reported crime is trending down in Venezuela — though not nearly as dramatically as Trump claims — but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that and they have nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S. Nonetheless, it’s hard to prove a negative, and those who follow Venezuelan politics say such a tactic is not beyond Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has been in power since 2013 and is seeking another six-year term. The FBI acknowledges some Venezuelan criminals have migrated to the U.S., but there’s no indication they were purposefully released from prison to come to this country” — the United States has faced its own version of this phenomena in recent years, when thousands or even tens of thousands of migrants would regularly arrived in caravans crossing from South and Central America, obviously organized and funded by someone. As early as 2018, the BBC asked, what is a migrant caravan and why does it matter? “Thousands of migrants have arrived at the US-Mexico border after travelling more than 4,000km (2,500 miles) from Central America. They say they are fleeing persecution, poverty and violence in their home countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Many of them say their goal is to settle in the US despite warnings by US officials that anyone found entering the country illegally will face arrest, prosecution and deportation.” Back then, President Trump similarly referred to the caravans as an “invasion,” claiming there were “many gang members and some very bad people are mixed into the caravan heading to our southern border” and warning that “our military is waiting for you” until he ultimately initiated a controversial “Remain in Mexico” policy to stop them before reaching the United States.
Therefore, it wasn’t the least bit surprising that Vice President JD Vance would view the events in Ceuta from the perspective of the United States itself. “Thank God,” he wrote on social media stating the obvious while retweeting a Fox News segment that admittedly labeled the location as Northern Spain instead of Northern Africa, “@POTUS was elected and our country’s border no longer looks like this.” President Trump himself said, “the same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse, much bigger.” For what I would argue are equally obvious reasons, many conservative commentators have said much the same, pointing out that the open borders philosophy inherent in the ideology of many progressives – whether the Democratic Socialists of America’s absolutism or the softer version of a kindlier, more welcoming border popular in more establishment circles – almost inevitably leads to unsustainable mass migration – whether through caravans, some other dramatic means, or simply more and people arriving individually – which should rightly be seen as a threat to the countries being migrated to – whether you call it an actual invasion and whether or not that threat is economic, cultural, internal security, external security, or some combination. Given the history of the last three presidential terms, a massive slowdown in border encounters during President Trump the first time around, a massive increase of some 20 million after President Biden promised the world we would be more welcoming, and an almost complete shutdown approaching two years into President Trump’s second effort, the outcome of stricter border policies or the lack of them should not be in dispute. While you might personally think otherwise and desire a more welcoming country, and it remains your right to do so, pretending it will not lead to more migrants is either ignorance or mendaciousness at this point, and yet that appears to be exactly what some in the progressive movement plan to continue doing.
The Atlantic, for example, chose to rather bizarrely blame the far right for the situation in Ceuta, claiming it is being distorted and we’ve seen this sort of distortion before. As Anne Applebaum described, or should I say decried it, almost conspiratorially, “The photographs and videos that emerged from Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, on July 29 and 30 looked very much like migrant-terror videos, deliberately designed to be broadcast by the international far right. So closely did this incident resemble the ‘invasion’ that MAGA and its European friends have long said is under way that it was hard not to suspect that it had been orchestrated.” Though she doesn’t actually say “orchestrated by Donald Trump” given such a thing is almost impossible for even the most Trump-deranged to believe and she readily admits that “much is still not known about the 60,000-odd people who swam from Morocco to Ceuta last week,” she proceeded to claim fears at least some of these migrants will make it to mainland Europe are outright lies. “These were lies. The Moroccans who swam to Ceuta were never going to make it to Britain, Germany, or anywhere else in Europe. Once again: Access to Ceuta does not give anyone automatic access to the rest of Europe.” Sadly, it is Ms. Appelbaum herself who is being intentionally obtuse to the point of practically lying, and she noted it herself by inserting the word “automatic.” Though there is no means for someone who arrived in Ceuta to immediately access Europe, should they be given asylum, they would be entitled to do so. Given that the EU as a whole ultimately grants asylum to around 30% of all seekers – to be sure, the Moroccan figure was only 3% before the Supreme Court ruling – some 20,000 or so of these migrants could be admitted to Europe proper, at least in principle, a not insignificant figure over the course of a single day. If you consider that 437,700 people in 2024 and another 361,325 people in 2025 alone were admitted, the fear is not unfounded and is, in fact, quite rational based on recent history.
After completely ignoring these facts and dismissing these fears, Ms. Applebaum goes on to reveal that she is also concerned people have been misled into believing the Spanish government didn’t do enough to return the migrants to Morocco, claiming “many people, perhaps millions of people, will believe that the ‘invasion’ succeeded. They are wrong. Whatever you think of Sánchez or his government, he did not open Spain’s borders to this wave of Moroccans. Instead, he spoke of an ‘attack on Spain’s territorial integrity.’ Spanish police recovered the dead, put the injured in hospitals, and appear to have sent almost everyone home.” As I mentioned earlier, there’s reason to question the “almost everyone” claim, but ultimately what difference does it make? Whatever became of the migrants, 60,000 of them showed up on a beach in a single day. Can you imagine if you and your family were on that beach? Pointing out that advocates for open borders are making these situations more likely instead of less likely – especially as we have seen caravans ourselves in the US – isn’t some nefarious political argument, anymore than it has been nefarious for progressives to take isolated issues with Immigrations and Custom Enforcement in the United States to claim that both ICE and Border Patrol officers are violent thugs as a whole and insist the entire department should be abolished, as they have done repeatedly. Thus, the problem with the migrant invasion isn’t that “real, fake, enhanced, or context-free pictures of migrants jumping fences will immediately create a wave reaction” and that “far-right and MAGA politicians, influencers, and podcasters will immediately use the most divisive language possible in order to make voters as angry as possible, as fast as possible.” The problem is that these situations happen in the first place and Ms. Applebaum and others cover for them, rather than calling them out until they stop. Nobody should be subject to what happened in Ceuta in the civilized world. It’s really that simple.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 