On Borders

Spain is no longer meaningfully sovereign in their North African exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. They’ve demonstrated that they are flatly unwilling to enforce a monopoly on violence to protect these exclaves against mass invasion.

Events over the past few days have demonstrated that the real sovereign in these territories is the King of Morocco. The Guardia Civil says its border cameras identified Moroccan intelligence officers moving among the crossers, guiding groups and observing the Spanish response, and that it has seen the same pattern in earlier surges. The King is continuing to allow the Spanish to pretend that these territories are under their control, but from now on we can expect that the Spanish will be, quietly, very accommodating of Moroccan demands regarding these territories, in order to avoid a repeat of this week’s events. The timing is not subtle: ten days before the crossing, Pedro Sánchez was in Algiers to court Algeria - Spain’s biggest gas supplier, and Morocco’s rival - and some analysts read the surge as Rabat’s answer. Don’t be surprised if this is ‘solved’ with a giant, ongoing bribe from Europe to Morocco, as payment for not repeating the invasion.

The Spanish Army has been deployed: Does anyone seriously believe that they have orders to shoot to kill in future invasions? I don’t. If they do, the Spanish should make that clear, publicly, and stand behind it – a small amount of ruthless violence as a deterrent is almost always a more humane answer, overall, than long, drawn-out violence at a lower level.

What are the Spanish doing to establish deterrence, either personal, or national, against future invasions? Seemingly nothing.

Is it a kind policy, to shoot desperate people seeking a better life? No, it’s not.

Would that we lived in a world where such measures were unnecessary. But we don’t live in that kind of world. Borders are defended for a reason – if they’re not, they cease to be borders. There are those who think a borderless world is an ideal toward which we should strive: I think such people are fools at best, and unapologetically evil at worst.

The fact that so many Moroccans were prepared to risk their lives to cross into Spanish territory is, frankly, a remarkable statement: Life in the liberal-democratic West is dramatically better than the alternatives. People aren’t stupid: The fact that they’re prepared to risk - and in many cases lose - their lives, en masse, when they see an opportunity to cross, is a great endorsement of Western distinctiveness. Life in Spain is just better than in Morocco - even trading life as a legal subject in Morocco for that of an illegal alien without status in Europe. And, as these things go, Morocco is well-run - compare it to Libya, Syria, Egypt or Iraq, and it looks like an oasis of stability and prosperity.

The sharpness of this socioeconomic gradient is tragic, and it breeds more tragedy. But the solution is not for the liberal-democratic states of the world to become less distinctive or to open our borders to uncontrolled immigration. Doing so would destroy us, since there are billions of people around the world who would rightly prefer to live in New York or Paris. There are some problems that cannot be solved, and where maintaining the status quo while trying to do incremental good is the best that can be hoped for.

The innovations that the West has produced over the past hundred years have dramatically improved people’s lives all over the world. To maintain this pace of innovation and our historically unusual level of freedom and liberty, stability and social solidarity are a necessity.

Legal, controlled immigration is critical. The United States gains incredible advantages from bringing in people who want to contribute rather than conquer, and who have critical skills and compatible values. From the perspective of the United States, immigration serves three purposes: One is reinforcing our values and our sense of national identity as a refuge for the oppressed by bringing in legitimate refugees. A second is to keep the cost of legal labor down, in a world where we aren’t having all that many children. (With embodied AI, it’s unclear how much longer this will be needed.) And the third is to bring in incredibly smart people who can help drive innovation forward - most of the best engineers and founders in Silicon Valley are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. None of those purposes are served by mass immigration of unskilled people, who by coming in illegally place themselves outside the ambit of the law.

Back to Spain: What’s been demonstrated over the past week is that a border on a map means nothing when not backed by a willingness to defend it. This is why the borders between even friendly states need to be patrolled, walled and defended, when there are major differences in values or a sharp socioeconomic gradient. The Spanish have shown that they’re unprepared and unwilling to use violence to keep military-aged men from crossing their border. And the Moroccans are prepared to hazard the lives of their subjects and weaponize their desperation to embarrass the Spanish.

So the border is a fiction. Time to relabel your maps.

What happens next time when 10 or 20 percent of the people crossing are armed? What would have happened if a fraction of the invaders were inspired by ISIS, the IRGC or Hamas, and came to repeat October 7th? This is not a hypothetical: two of the Paris attackers entered Europe posing as refugees, among more than 140 jihadists documented infiltrating Europe’s migrant flows between 2011 and 2018, and Spain’s Interior Ministry concedes a “real danger” that jihadists crossed into Ceuta among last week’s arrivals.

We’ve seen the answer in Israel. The Spanish were incredibly lucky this time. But now that they’ve demonstrated weakness, the next iteration may very well be much worse.

And, of course, I’ve written elsewhere about how the Schengen Zone is being fractured by the failure of some European states to protect their borders - Italy’s response, in suspending their Schengen open borders, was utterly predictable. Europe cannot keep both open internal borders and a wide dispersion of differing policies on mass migration.