Latvia said it found a tunnel under its border with Belarus and vowed to increase efforts against smuggling networks that help illegal migrant crossings, as EU migration policy hardened again into the language of security, control and territorial panic. The border apparatus never sleeps. It just changes slogans.
Fortress Europe Tightens Its Grip
Officials across the bloc stressed the need to protect the integrity of external borders and the security of the Union, while the political response to movement kept narrowing into the same old reflex: more surveillance, more checks, more force. In Spain, Meta and TikTok agreed to fact-check content about border crossings after a deadly rush to Ceuta, a private-sector response to misinformation around the border incident. The platforms moved fast enough when the border crisis threatened the information flow. The people crossing the border got a very different kind of speed.
At the end of July, tens of thousands of irregular migrants crossed into Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco, leaving around 100 dead. The episode pushed migration policy back to the centre of European politics and opened a deep diplomatic rift between Rome and Madrid over how migration should be managed. Spain's growing isolation became visible as right-wing political forces came to dominate the debate, and the so-called progressive model was left looking like an exception in Europe rather than a direction of travel.
Chiara Catelli, an advocacy officer at the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, said: "In the past years, there has been a progressive shift towards a more securitarian language from both traditionally conservative politicians and left-leaning ones." She added: "The result of treating migration as a security problem with ever more repressive measures is to foster social exclusion and marginalisation, while also criminalising solidarity towards migrants."
The Brussels Apparatus Speaks Security
The crackdown did not stop at national borders. The incident triggered a diplomatic fallout between Italy and Spain after Giorgia Meloni's government reinstated border controls for air and sea arrivals following the irregular inflows into Ceuta. Commissioner for Internal Affairs Magnus Brunner wrote on X: "I was in contact with both the Spanish and Italian interior ministers today. Both confirmed that the internal border controls are temporary." Temporary, of course, is how permanent emergency measures like to introduce themselves.
Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland also called for the swift restoration of control over the EU's external borders and floated reintroducing checks within Schengen. The free movement that Brussels likes to sell when it suits capital and labour markets suddenly looked negotiable again. The border regime always finds a way to reappear.
Italy and Denmark led an open letter, signed by 22 EU governments, addressed to the leaders of the EU institutions and calling for "addressing all policies that can serve as pull factors, such as the regularisation of very large numbers of irregular migrants." Ireland, which currently holds the rotating EU Council presidency, Portugal, Spain's historic ally, France, which has also criticised right-wing migration policy, and Luxembourg did not sign the letter. Even before the Ceuta influx, Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez had faced criticism from his EU peers at the last European Council over his plan to regularise around half a million migrants who entered the country illegally.
MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar, Spain/S&D and a former justice minister, said: "At the European scale, the right wing and the nationalist, reactionary attitude towards migration is the prevailing one." MEP Cecilia Strada, Italy/S&D, said the Spanish government is regularly attacked by right-wing parties in the European Parliament because Sánchez remains the last bastion of progressive migration policy at an EU level. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has worked closely with Meloni on the issue. The alignment is clear enough. The labels change; the border logic stays put.
Return Hubs and the New Normal
Sánchez said: "The Spanish government will use all the levers of the state, all the resources of the state, to guarantee the security of the citizens of Ceuta," and called the mass influx a "violation of Spain's territorial integrity." That is the language of sovereignty stripped bare: the state as armed manager of movement, territory and fear.
The right-wing turn in EU migration policy was cemented by new legislation endorsed by European governments and lawmakers in June, which includes stricter surveillance measures, restrictions on the freedom of movement and the possibility to establish "return hubs" in third countries. Return hubs are a controversial initiative spearheaded by Italy in Albania to establish facilities for processing asylum requests and repatriation orders outside EU borders. The Netherlands and Denmark are also outspoken supporters of the approach. The outsourcing is the point. Keep the violence at a distance, keep the paperwork moving, keep the border machine clean.
In an op-ed published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Monday, EPP leader Manfred Weber called for the swift establishment of return hubs in Africa, pointing to Morocco's cooperation during the Ceuta crisis, as the country immediately agreed to take back most of those who had crossed the border illegally. French President Emmanuel Macron has dismissed return hubs as ineffective and contrary to EU values. At the last EU summit, 19 leaders signed a joint declaration calling to make "full use" of Europe's new migration rules, an implicit nod to the establishment of return hubs.
Senior Commission officials have adopted a similarly securitarian approach. In a special committee meeting in the European Parliament, Brunner said: "we cannot accept such a breach of the integrity of our external borders and a violation also of the security of the Union." Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote in a letter to Sánchez: "From this incident, it is clear that we must do more to further strengthen our borders at critical points, both with vigilant monitoring and the use of physical barriers where needed."
The border regime keeps expanding, from tunnels and fences to surveillance and offshore processing, with governments, EU institutions and private platforms all doing their part. The dead in Ceuta are already being folded into the next round of controls.