Spain’s migration policy is no shining example | Immigration and asylum

María Ramírez underestimates the securitisation of migration at the Spanish borders (In Spain, we don’t share Britain’s migration panic – ‘stop the boats’ has few fans here, 18 December). It’s encouraging that political sentiment on migration is on the whole more positive in Spain than in the UK, but minimising the militarisation of Spain’s Mediterranean borders and the wider EU border operations fundamentally distorts the picture.

The result, as we detailed in a recent long read (‘Weapons of mass migration’: how states exploit the failure of migration policies, 14 December), is the deaths of thousands of people, the professionalisation of smuggling networks and an escalating political brinkmanship around the border.

Spanish politicians have been happy to play a part too. When Moroccan forces corralled migrants into a deadly crush at the border of Melilla in 2022, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, denounced an “attack on the territorial integrity of Spain” – the kind of language used by Suella Braverman, for instance. The Rwanda project, cited negatively next to EU deportation policies, is squalid, but hasn’t got off the ground. By contrast, the EU has for years trained and funded Libyan militias-cum-border-guards who violently push back, detain and torture migrants on the central Mediterranean route.

Spain’s operations along north and west African coasts have long set the model for outsourced border control, with violence conveniently left with north African forces. The rhetoric may be softer, but the pain in Spain is real.
Ruben Andersson and David Keen
Oxford