El Campamento de los Santos?

National Review, July 31, 2026

The executive offers amnesty to illegal aliens who’ve been in the country as little as a few months, and the judiciary says it’s illegal to control your borders.

The Biden years are back?

No. This time it’s Spain.

Tens of thousands of Moroccans swam into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on the African coast within days of the Spanish Supreme Court’s ruling that no one entering by sea could be pushed back. This comes in the wake of the launch of a unilateral illegal-alien amnesty by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez that has generated more than a million applicants, over double the original estimate.

Two other factors have driven this crisis. The immediate one is that Morocco likely allowed this to happen to pressure Spain on some matter, perhaps in an attempt to get the territories back (taken long ago as part of the Reconquista, Spain’s centuries-long war of liberation against its Muslim occupiers). This may have gotten out of hand from Morocco’s perspective (a smaller migrant rush was apparently shut down at Melilla, Spain’s other Africa foothold), but this kind of weaponization of migration has long been practiced as a form of asymmetrical warfare by weaker powers, e.g. Turkey, Belarus, Cuba, and others.

The other, overarching factor is the reason migrant weaponization is effective against Western countries in the first place: the dysfunctional and anachronistic asylum policies left over from the Cold War. A system put in place to deal with a handful of defecting Russian ballerinas has morphed into a vehicle facilitating mass illegal immigration. These illegal aliens will request asylum and be supported by the Spanish taxpayer until their asylum cases are decided, and even among those who are rejected, few will be sent back.

The EU’s recent migration pact was sold as a tightening of border controls, but all it will likely do is require other EU members to take their “fair share” of the illegals Spain has allowed in. This is why Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has threatened to suspend the Schengen Agreement. It will be interesting to see if Hungary’s new Brussels-compliant Prime Minister Péter Magyar will accept its share of Moroccan illegals. (Viktor Orbán: “Miss me yet?”)

My colleague Andrew Arthur notes the contrast between the Spanish Supreme Court’s open-borders ruling and our own Supreme Court’s decision just days before that allowed the president to physically prevent foreigners from crossing the border. The three Democratic justices in dissent shared the suicidal view of their Spanish colleagues, that asylum law in effect applies to foreigners who aren’t even in your country yet.

These judicial rulings inevitably recall The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian French novel about migrants storming the French Riviera. (The title is from the Book of Revelation.) While the novel is ostensibly about a migrant flotilla from India, they are essentially a plot device — the real targets of the book are the leadership classes of France, and the West generally, which prove incapable of preserving the civilization they’ve been called to lead.

The silver lining around this latest crisis may be that the enemies of Western sovereignty may have turned up the heat too fast and caused the proverbial frog to jump out of the pot. Spain is sending the military to Ceuta to restore order, though it remains to be seen whether their mission is to force back the invaders or merely ensure an “orderly” process, à la the Biden/Mayorkas border policies. But there’s reason for hope, given the EU’s blessing of Poland’s muscular efforts to prevent Belarus (read: Russia) from forcing third-world migrants across its border into Europe.

Will Europe’s (and America’s) elite heed the warning of The Camp of the Saints, or treat it as an instruction manual? Stay tuned.