At Tarajal, the end of an era floats on the water.
A 500-meter-long pneumatic barrier stretches from the coast of Ceuta toward the Mediterranean. It rises several dozen centimeters above the water, descends to a meter below the surface, and is accompanied by a first line of buoys. Around it are the Civil Guard, patrols, military assets. On the other side, Morocco guards its frontier. This is the response of Pedro Sánchez’s government to the crisis of July 30, when, according to Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, between 50,000 and 60,000 people entered the enclave irregularly in a single day.
Look at it carefully.
That barrier is not merely a security device. It is the involuntary monument to the failure of a dogma.
For more than a decade, a vast portion of Europe’s political and cultural establishment has explained to us that the phenomenon could only be managed, preferably after arrival; that making a border truly impermeable was morally suspect; that repatriations were almost a concession to the right; that agreements with countries of origin and transit were matters to apologize for; that every measure capable of making clandestine entry more difficult deserved excommunication before even being discussed.
This is immigrationism.
Not a policy on immigration, but the transformation of immigration into ideology. It is the paradigm that has accompanied more than a decade of mass immigration in Europe, too often transforming the inability to stop it into a moral virtue. A historical, economic, and demographic phenomenon that any serious state should govern has been loaded with its own inherent value: more movement meant more openness, more openness meant more progress. The border became something to be ashamed of. Sovereignty a suspect word. Those who asked to decide who enters their own country had first to prove they were decent people.
By dint of preaching the inevitable, Europe ended up renouncing even the idea of being able to choose.
There is no need to imagine shadowy control rooms. There has existed, and still exists, a recognizable political culture. The international left has made it one of its reference points; a portion of the NGO world has built its mission around it; broad sectors of the European establishment have translated it into institutional language. A post-national vision in which the nation tends to become an administrative shell, the border a friction to be reduced, sovereignty a residue to be overcome, and human beings mobile populations to be distributed.
It worked as long as the political, social, and material cost of that vision could be offloaded elsewhere.
Then reality arrived.
The uncouth kind, that enters without knocking and puts its feet on the table.
And today even the vocabulary of European institutions is beginning to contain words that until a few years ago would have been enough to warrant a summary political trial. On June 1, negotiators from the Council and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on the new returns system. It provides for faster procedures, more stringent obligations for those who have no right to remain, and above all the possibility of establishing return centers in third countries. The agreement must still complete its formal process, but the political taboo has already been broken.
Third countries.
The political direction is the one Giorgia Meloni has been indicating for years. The problem does not begin when an illegal immigrant has already reached Lampedusa, Pozzallo, or the coasts of Spain. Illegal immigration is countered beforehand; human trafficking is fought along the routes; relations with states of origin and transit serve to prevent departures and make repatriations possible.
The Mattei Plan, the agreements with Mediterranean countries, the battle over the external dimension, and the Italy-Albania Protocol belong to the same strategy. The Albanian model, despite the judicial and political battle accompanying it, is today part of the European debate on the externalization of illegal immigration management.
What yesterday was described as the fixation of the Italian right—and of Giorgia Meloni in particular—today is one of the terrains on which all of Europe is forced to reckon.
The Interior Ministry’s August Report meanwhile captures what has happened in Italy: in the first half of 2025, 30,060 sea arrivals were recorded; in the same period of 2026, there were 14,388. A decline of 52.1%. In the same timeframe, repatriations rose from 3,301 to 4,432, an increase of 34.3%. Expulsions climbed from 2,977 to 3,825.
At least one superstition those numbers bury: the idea that politics is condemned to impotence regarding flows.
Meanwhile, Berlin has rediscovered rigor. Naturally, when rigor consists of sending someone back to Italy.
Germany wants to reactivate transfers to our country of so-called “Dublin returnees”, and the first cases are scheduled from August 19. Rome, however, considers the backlog prior to June 12 to be zeroed out and, for subsequent entries, has made it known that it intends to factor into the discussion also the landings carried out in Italy by NGO ships flying the flags of other European countries, largely German.
Here memory serves.
An official response from the federal government to the Bundestag certifies that in 2023 Berlin funded SOS Humanity with €746,828, Sea Eye with €365,000, and SOS Méditerranée with €400,000. In 2024, €500,000 went to SOS Humanity, €492,060 to SOS Méditerranée, €111,728 to Resqship, and €393,540 to Sea Eye. Approximately one and a half million euros per year.
The Merz government ended those funding arrangements after taking office in the spring of 2025. That should be noted.
But a state does not change its identity with every election.
Berlin cannot claim continuity of Italian obligations while demanding amnesia regarding German choices. For years the federal government funded organizations engaged in so-called civilian rescue in the central Mediterranean, while the geographic burden of landings fell on the countries of the southern frontier. Now that immigration has become a formidable political problem in Germany as well, they rediscover the responsibilities of first entry, the rigor of the rules, Dublin.
And the bill should come back to Rome.
Too convenient.
The confrontation between Italy and Germany goes well beyond a European procedure. It concerns who must bear the geographic, political, and social weight of the external border. Rome is right to refuse that Italy be treated as the terminal warehouse of the European asylum system while other states choose, depending on the political season, when to preach solidarity and when to scrupulously remember the country of first entry.
And it is here that Ceuta becomes something more than Ceuta.
The border is the first institution of politics.
Even before laws, there is a territory on which those laws apply. Citizenship acquires meaning because there exists a political community to which one belongs; public solidarity is possible because that community establishes rights and duties; democracy functions because a people can decide on the space in which it exercises its sovereignty.
The border is the threshold of all this.
If a state no longer possesses the concrete capacity to determine who may cross it and under what conditions, sovereignty, citizenship, security, and even welfare begin to be reduced to words written on paper.
A state that renounces control of its own border does not become more humane.
It becomes a refugee camp with ministries, stamps, and a public budget: it registers what happens, distributes places, chases emergencies decided by others.
Because the power to choose does not disappear. It passes into the hands of someone else. Of traffickers who sell crossings. Of foreign states that can use flows as an instrument of pressure. Of networks that organize and direct mass movements. The state arrives afterward, to count, assist, distribute, chase.
Ceuta showed this brutally. Tens of thousands of people move toward a border and, within a few hours, what someone had reduced to an unpleasant line on a map becomes again what it has always been: a question of sovereignty.
Pedro Sánchez sends the Civil Guard. He reinforces the deployment. Morocco fields its own forces. A barrier appears in the Mediterranean.
Immigrationism, however, remains powerful. It is deeply rooted in the international left and in the globalist vision that for decades has imagined the West as a progressively post-national space: capital, goods, labor, and human beings within the same grammar of circulation; belonging and identity as frictions; the nation relegated to the role of service administrator.
It is a vision that has ended up being congenial to very different interests: economies seeking abundant labor, a reception system that has become structural, ruling classes convinced that national identity was a residue of the past and not one of the conditions of democracy.
But peoples are not interchangeable material. A nation is not a logistics platform. And the state is not the administrative office tasked with registering movements decided elsewhere.
This is the illusion that is giving way.
The price paid by Europe remains before our eyes: weakened borders, reception systems subjected to gigantic pressures, political and social fractures, deaths along Mediterranean routes, human traffickers enriched by a market that Europe has failed to crush, and neighboring states that have understood how much migratory pressure can become a political lever.
For more than ten years, a portion of the European left has explained that the border was the problem.
Today Pedro Sánchez, one of its most recognizable symbols, sends men, the Civil Guard, and assets to defend it and lays 500 meters of barrier in the Mediterranean.
After demonizing the border, they rebuild it to defend themselves from the consequences of what they preached.
Immigrationism is not dead. But it has entered its terminal phase.
The diagnosis is there, in front of Tarajal: 500 meters of barrier that arrived at least ten years too late.
