Europe encourages its neighbours to practise migration blackmail

IT WAS like a tide surging onto the beach and then ebbing, leaving wreckage behind. The vast majority of the tens of thousands of would-be migrants who began rushing into Ceuta, a small Spanish exclave on the north African coast, on July 30th returned to Morocco within 24 hours, having found nothing to eat and no prospect of reaching Europe. Discarded shoes and shirts still litter the bay. A few thousand migrants remain, mainly sub-Saharan Africans and minors, as does a heavy police presence. Yet though the immediate crisis is over, the clash it triggered in the European Union will leave scars.A migrant prays and other rest while waiting on the beach following mass crossings of migrants on foot and by sea from Morocco into Spanish territory, in Ceuta, Spain, August 4, 2026. (REUTERS)The su