- 3 days ago
Pedro Sánchez has emerged as one of Europe’s most visible leaders in the debate over migration, and his words have often carried symbolic weight far beyond Spain’s borders.
At different moments, he has projected an image of openness, humanitarian responsibility, and willingness to receive people seeking safety, work, or dignity.
Yet his recent criticism of Europe as “selfish” reflects a sharper and more confrontational tone that reveals the strain within the continent’s migration policy.
At different moments, he has projected an image of openness, humanitarian responsibility, and willingness to receive people seeking safety, work, or dignity.
Yet his recent criticism of Europe as “selfish” reflects a sharper and more confrontational tone that reveals the strain within the continent’s migration policy.
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00:00Pedro Sánchez had welcomed migrants, stopped the crisis, and returned almost everyone who crossed.
00:05Then Europe turned on him. France tightened its border. Italy put checkpoints back up.
00:0922 European leaders signed a letter condemning Spain. Now Spain's prime minister has accused
00:13his allies of selfishness and betrayal. What's even crazier is that the crisis that threatens
00:18to tear Europe apart began with nothing more than a rumor. The Open Door
00:22While almost every other leader in Europe was building walls, hiring border guards,
00:27and promising voters they would slam the gates shut. Spain's prime minister, Pedro Sánchez,
00:31looked at the same situation and decided to do the exact opposite. Now with Europe pointing fingers
00:36at him, Sánchez fired back with a word that shook Brussels. He called the reaction of his own
00:40European partners selfish, polarizing, and unlawful. How did we get here? How does a man go from writing
00:45love letters about migration in the New York Times to accusing Europe of turning its back on him
00:51just six months later? In late January 2026, his government approved a decree that would let
00:56hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants already living in Spain apply for legal residence
01:00and work permits. The government's own estimate was that around half a million people could benefit.
01:05Think about that for a second. Half a million people who had been living in the shadows,
01:08cleaning homes, picking fruit, caring for the elderly, all without papers. Sánchez was offering
01:13them a way out of the dark. Now this was not a free-for-all. The rules were strict and
01:16this detail
01:17matters a lot for what happens later so lock it in. To qualify a person had to prove they were
01:21already
01:22in Spain before January 1, 2026, show at least five months of continuous residence and have a clean
01:27criminal record. If you arrived after the cutoff, you got nothing. The door was open, but only for
01:32people who were already inside the house. So what did the winners actually get? An initial one-year
01:36residence and work permit, renewable, valid only in Spain, opening the door to formal jobs in any
01:41sector, social security, healthcare cards, and a longer path toward permanent status and even
01:46citizenship. Minors and dependents often received longer five-year permits, and many applicants got
01:51provisional work authorization the moment their file was admitted. For a farm worker who had spent
01:56years being paid in cash under the table, this was life-changing. A real contract, a real payslip,
02:01a bank account with their name on it. And the scale of the shadow population was bigger than most
02:06Spaniards realized. The government's estimate sat around 500,000 undocumented people, but independent
02:11researchers at Funkas put the real number closer to 840,000, with roughly 90% coming from Latin America,
02:18from countries like Colombia, Peru, Honduras, and Venezuela. By early 2026, immigrants of all
02:24statuses made up a record 20.3% of Spain's entire population. One in five people walking Spanish
02:30streets was born somewhere else. This was not a small experiment. This was Sanchez rewiring one of
02:35Europe's biggest countries. And here is something most people outside Spain never hear. This was not even a
02:40new idea. Spain had run big regularizations before, in 1986, the early 90s, 1996, 2000, 2001, and a massive
02:48one in 2005 that legalized roughly 576,000 people. Both left-wing and right-wing governments had done
02:54it. The 2026 version also did not start in some backroom. It grew out of a citizen campaign called
03:00Regularizaciona that gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures and had the backing of hundreds of
03:05NGOs, unions, business groups, and even the Catholic Church. Then Sanchez did something bold. He took his case
03:11straight to America's biggest newspaper. On February 4, 2026, the New York Times published his opinion piece
03:18with a title that told you everything. I'm the Prime Minister of Spain. This is why the West needs migrants.
03:23In it,
03:23he painted a picture of half a million people already woven into Spanish life. And he laid out a choice
03:28for leaders.
03:29Some, he wrote, hunt them down and deport them through operations that are both unlawful and cruel.
03:33Spain, instead, chose a fast and simple path to regularize their immigration status.
03:39His argument stood on two legs. The first was moral. Spain, he reminded readers, was once a country of
03:44emigrants, with its own people leaving for the Americas and the rest of Europe in the 1950s and
03:4860s and again after the 2008 crash. Now that Spain was doing well, he argued, it had a duty to
03:53be the
03:54welcoming society its own grandparents would have prayed to find abroad. The second leg was cold, hard math.
03:59Western countries are aging fast, and without migrants, Sanchez warned, they face shrinking economies,
04:05strained public services and pension systems that cannot pay for themselves. Robots and AI, he said, cannot fix that
04:11anytime soon. And he had receipts. Spain had been the fastest growing large economy in Europe for three straight years,
04:17created nearly one in three new jobs in the whole EU, and pushed unemployment below 10% for the first
04:22time in almost two
04:23decades. Independent analyses from bodies like the Bank of Spain, the IMF, and the OECD linked much of
04:29that boom to migrant workers. He closed his essay with a warning about the zero-sum thinking of the
04:33far-right, leading to isolation, scarcity, selfishness and decline. Remember that word, selfishness, he would
04:39use it again. But not everyone was buying it. At home, the opposition popular party called the plan
04:44reckless and unsustainable, warning it would overwhelm housing, healthcare and schools. The far-right party
04:49Vox went much further, branding the whole thing an invasion and demanding mass deportations. Vox had
04:54been sounding alarms about a pull effect as early as February claiming Ceuta was already feeling the
04:59consequences of the announcement. Even the New York Times gave the other side a megaphone. A response
05:04essay by Christopher Caldwell called Spain's model, overrated and harmful, pointing to low-skill labor,
05:09unemployment still high by EU standards, and election losses for Sanchez's party. Spanish outlets also
05:14accused Sanchez of cherry-picking a poll in his essay, since the same survey showed the public cared a lot
05:19about controlling who gets in. Public opinion was genuinely split, with polls showing roughly 38%
05:24in favor of the regularization and 33% against. The government also kept hammering the money argument.
05:30Officials estimated the formalization could bring in around 2.5 billion euros a year in net fiscal
05:35benefits over time, or roughly 4,900 euros per person, as workers moved from cash-in-hand jobs
05:41to paying taxes and social security. Sanchez even warned that without immigration, Spain's GDP could end up
05:47about 19% lower by 2050, with closed businesses, empty classrooms and disappearing farms. In his
05:54telling this was not charity, it was survival math. The opposition was not just shouting from the
05:58sidelines, either. They went to court. Piper and regional governments in places like Valencia-Aragon
06:03and Madrid under Isabel Díaz Ayuso filed or threatened legal challenges, arguing the program
06:08would crush regional services and might clash with EU rules. Vox took its own fight all the way to the
06:12Supreme Court and pushed national priority policies favoring Spaniards for housing and services in
06:18regions where it shared power with the PP. Even the European Commission expressed reservations about
06:23whether the scheme fit the spirit of the EU's new migration and asylum pact. There was an awkward
06:27wrinkle in the PP's outrage, though. PP governments had run their own regularizations in the past,
06:32and the party had earlier supported considering the citizen initiative this whole thing grew from.
06:37Then came the number nobody saw coming. When the application window closed on June 30,
06:422026, the government's estimate of 500,000 turned out to be way, way off. More than 1 million people
06:48applied, with reports citing around 1.17 to 1.2 million applications. The system groaned under the
06:54weight. Immigration office workers had even threatened to strike over the workload back in April. And on the
06:59very day the window closed, Sanchez doubled down, unveiling an integration and citizenship plan backed by more
07:05than 500 million euros for job training, language classes, housing support, and public services.
07:10To be fair to Sanchez, his approach was never just open doors. Spain had signed cooperation deals with
07:15African countries like Mauritania, Senegal, and the Gambia, deploying around 100 Spanish police officers for
07:21joint patrols against smuggling networks. And the numbers backed him up there too. Irregular arrivals to
07:27Spain fell by around 42.6% in 2025, driven by a 62% collapse on the Canary Islands route.
07:34And Frontex recorded
07:35a further drop of about 71% on that route in early 2026. So by mid-July 2026, Pedro Sanchez
07:42was standing
07:42tall. The economy was booming. Arrivals were falling. A million people were coming out of the shadows.
07:47His bet looked like it was paying off. He had no idea that a court ruling, a rumor, and a
07:52stretch of warm
07:53summer water. We're about to blow it all up. The flood. Every disaster has a spark. This one came
07:59from the most unlikely place imaginable. Not a smuggler's boat. Not a political speech. A courtroom.
08:04On June 29, 2026, Spain's Supreme Court issued Judgment 814-2026, a ruling that came from the case
08:12of a single Algerian man who had been intercepted at sea while swimming towards Ceuta back in November
08:162024, and immediately handed back to Morocco with no lawyer, no identification process, and no chance
08:23to ask for asylum. For years, Spain had used a fast-track system called, Hot Returns, to push
08:27people straight back across the border. The court looked at the law and drew a very precise line.
08:31Hot Returns could only apply to people caught climbing over physical border barriers, like the
08:35giant fences around Ceuta. The sea, the judges ruled, is not a fence. You cannot climb over water.
08:40So anyone intercepted while swimming had to go through the full, slow, ordinary legal process instead.
08:45To lawyers, this was a technical clarification. But the ruling became public around July 8,
08:50and out in the real world, on phones across northern Morocco, it mutated into something
08:54else entirely. Trafficking networks and social media spread a twisted version of the ruling,
08:58telling people that if you swam to Ceuta, Spain could not send you back.
09:01Sanchez would later say the traffickers pushed a self-serving reading of the judgment that spread
09:05like wildfire through their networks. The message racing through group chats was simple and false.
09:10The border is open. And that message landed on dry ground ready to burn. Youth unemployment in
09:15Morocco sat around 37%, with roughly one in three young people neither studying nor working.
09:20Young Moroccans had already taken to the streets in 2025 protests demanding jobs,
09:25schools and health care. For a generation staring at a wall, a rumor of an open door was gasoline.
09:30The pressure built quietly at first. Around 1,500 people crossed into Ceuta between July 20 and July 29.
09:36Ceuta's shelters for unaccompanied minors were already buckling, with children in care jumping from
09:41around 180 to over 570 in a short period. Then, on July 30 and 31, the dam broke. Somewhere between
09:4850,000 and 60,000 people, mostly young Moroccan men but also women, children and unaccompanied
09:54minors, surged into Ceuta in roughly 24 to 48 hours. They swam around the breakwaters with inner tubes
09:59and flotation devices. They climbed fences. They walked along the shoreline where the controls simply
10:04collapsed. At the peak, people were reportedly crossing at rates of hundreds per minute. For comparison,
10:08the crisis everyone remembered, the 2021 Ceuta surge, involved around 8,000 to 10,000 people and
10:14was considered a national emergency at the time. This was five to six times bigger. And the 2021
10:19comparison matters for another reason. Back then, the trigger was pure diplomacy. Morocco relaxed its
10:24border controls in retaliation after Spain quietly allowed a Western Sahara independence leader to
10:29receive medical treatment on Spanish soil. Morocco, in other words, had a proven history of using this
10:34border like a pressure valve. So when 2026 arrived, everyone was watching for fingerprints.
10:39Some migrants even reported something strange on the other side. People described Moroccan police
10:44waving them through or simply not stepping in the way they usually would. And analysts noted it would
10:49be very hard for tens of thousands of people to reach the border so fast without some easing of
10:53controls on the Moroccan side. Nobody could prove why. Some pointed to Sanchi's recent visit to Algeria,
10:59Morocco's rival, and to Morocco's long history of turning border pressure on and off during
11:04diplomatic disputes. Though Spain publicly rejected the idea of deliberate retaliation
11:08and stressed cooperation with Rabat. Now before you imagine 50,000 people marching on toward Madrid
11:14and Paris, you need to understand one crucial detail about Ceuta. It is a trap door, not a gateway.
11:19Under a special regime unique in all of Europe, identity and document checks apply when anyone leaves
11:23Ceuta by ferry or plane for the Spanish mainland, creating what officials call a double filter.
11:28The European Commission has confirmed for years that a regular entry into Ceuta gives you no
11:33right to stay, no right to travel to the mainland, and no free pass into the rest of Europe. So
11:37the
11:37tens of thousands who swam in were not entering Europe's living room. They were stuck in a locked
11:42porch, on a crowded peninsula with nowhere to go. Inside Ceuta it was chaos. Shops shuttered.
11:47Residents locked their doors. Reception centers overflowed. Spain rushed in army units,
11:51divers, support vessels, around 200 specialized police and extra civil guard officers,
11:56after the local government pleaded for help and even sought a national emergency declaration,
12:00which Madrid rejected. On the Moroccan side, forces used water cannons, tear gas,
12:04and batons to disperse the crowds still pressing toward the border near Efnitic. A smaller wave of
12:09pressure hit Spain's other enclave, Melilla, at the same time. Sanche himself flew to Ceuta,
12:14and called the surge a violation of Spain's territorial integrity, blaming the trafficking networks for
12:19weaponizing the court ruling. And then there was the cost that no press release could soften.
12:23At least 67 people died, most by drowning as they tried to swim around the breakwaters,
12:28others crushed in stampedes near the Terragil crossing. Some provisional local counts ran
12:31even higher, with figures of 77 or more circulating in early reports, and the weeks before the surge had
12:37already seen a rise in deaths at sea. Rescue crews pulled exhausted, hypothermic people from the water
12:42for hours. Bodies washed up mainly on the Spanish side. At least 67 human beings chased a rumor into the
12:48sea and never came out. And spare a thought for the people who actually made it across.
12:52Because for most of them, the dream died on the beach. Migrants described finding no food,
12:56no water, no shelter, closed shops and soldiers and police directing or pressuring them to leave.
13:01Some reported poor treatment or racism from locals. Others spoke of crushing disappointment
13:05after social media had promised them easy entry and work. They had risked their lives for a rumor,
13:10and the rumor was a lie. Rescue services spent those days treating exhaustion, hypothermia,
13:15and injuries pulled straight from the water. What happened next was almost as stunning as the surge
13:20itself. The tide reversed. By 6 pm on July 31, Spanish figures showed around 48,300 people had
13:28already gone back to Morocco. Many voluntarily, others through returns coordinated with Moroccan
13:33authorities. Some of the returning migrants even warned others not to attempt the crossing. The same
13:37social networks that had pumped out the open border. Rumor now carried a very different message home.
13:42Do not come. There is nothing here for you. Spanish authorities said virtually every irregular
13:46entrant was returned, and critically, that not one of them slipped onward to mainland Spain
13:51or deeper into Europe. Then Spain got clever with the court ruling itself. Remember,
13:55the judges had said hot returns only apply where there is a physical barrier to overcome.
13:59So on August 1 and 2, Spain began installing a roughly 500-meter floating sea barrier at the
14:04Terregel breakwater, rising 30 to 70 centimeters above the water, and reaching about a meter below the
14:09surface, reinforced with anchored naval buoys and a patrol channel for civil guard boats.
14:14The government's logic was simple. If the sea now had a physical containment barrier,
14:18the fast-track return rules could legally apply to anyone who crossed it.
14:21Crossings largely stopped overnight after the barrier went in. By Saturday, a handful of late
14:26swimmers who still tried their luck were promptly escorted back, and local officials spoke of normality
14:31slowly returning. The hardest cases left behind were the children. Unaccompanied minors cannot
14:36simply be deported under Spanish and international protections, so Ceuta's overwhelmed shelters became
14:41the crisis that stayed after the crowds left. In under 48 hours, Spain had taken back control of
14:47Ceuta. By any practical measure, the crisis was contained. Sanchez had every reason to expect a pat on the
14:53back from his European family. Instead, Europe reached for a knife. The Fight
14:59While Spanish soldiers were still handing out water bottles in Ceuta, the political storm was already
15:04forming a thousand miles away, and to understand why it hit so hard, you need the backdrop.
15:09Europe had spent years drifting right on migration, with the new pact on migration and asylum becoming
15:14fully applicable in June 2026, a new return regulation in the works, and governments across
15:19the continent racing to promise deterrence, faster returns, and harder external borders.
15:23Sanchez was the odd man out, and tensions had already flared at the June 2026 European Council,
15:28where Meloni and others criticized Spain's regularization to his face.
15:31The gunpowder was dry, Ceuta was the match, and the first lightning strike came from Rome.
15:37Italy's Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, called the images from Ceuta shocking, and warned that
15:41Italy was ready to take extraordinary measures. Within a day, she made good on it. On July 31,
15:46Italy reimposed temporary border checks on arrivals from Spain, a one-month suspension of free movement
15:51rules on air and sea links, targeting mainly non-EU nationals landing at Italian ports and airports.
15:56Think about what that means. Two EU countries, partners in the Schengen
16:00zone where borders are supposed to be invisible, and one just put up a checkpoint against the other.
16:04Critics inside Italy called the move largely symbolic, since there was no evidence anyone
16:09from Ceuta was heading to Italy at all. But symbols are powerful things.
16:13France moved next. President Macron ordered strengthened controls on the land border with
16:17Spain, and Interior Minister Laurent Nunez activated a rapid intervention border
16:21force with extra police and gendarmes. Finland and Denmark backed tougher measures,
16:25and the Czech leadership went even further, floating the idea of temporarily suspending
16:29Spain from Schengen entirely, kicking Spain out of Europe's free travel club. That idea was now on
16:34the table. And it was not just governments acting. Big political names lined up to take their shots.
16:40Manfred Weber, leader of the center-right European People's Party, called the Ceuta images a direct
16:44consequence of the pull factor of massive regularization. France's far-right leader Jordan
16:49Bardella said Sanchi had opened the doors of Europe by regularizing hundreds of thousands.
16:52Italy's Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani argued that granting status to over 500,000 irregular
16:58immigrants encourages human trafficking. The story writing itself across Europe was simple.
17:03Sanchi rang the dinner bell, and Ceuta was the result. Then came the hammer blow.
17:07On August 1, leaders of 22 EU countries, in a letter organized by Italy and Denmark and signed by
17:13heavyweights like Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Denmark's Met Frederiksen, wrote to European
17:17Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President Antonio Costa,
17:22and Irish Taoiseach Michiel Martin, 22 out of 27 member states. The letter expressed serious
17:27concern about the EU's external border, warned against creating any perception that illegal entry
17:32could lead to legal stay, and called for a duty to deter illegal migration by addressing pull factors,
17:37explicitly pointing at the regularization of a very large number of irregular migrants.
17:41They did not name Sanchi. They did not have to. Everyone in Europe knew exactly whose policy that
17:45sentence was aimed at. To be fair, the letter was not pure attack. It welcomed the Spain-Morocco cooperation on
17:51swift returns, admitted that no secondary movements had actually been recorded, and acknowledged that
17:55the Supreme Court ruling had been used by smugglers to trigger the crossings. But it also warned that
18:00the signatory stood ready to reinforce or reintroduce internal border controls. France, Portugal,
18:05Luxembourg, Ireland, and Spain itself did not sign. The EU's top brass tried to walk a tightrope.
18:11Von der Leyen called the Ceuta scenes unacceptable, demanded swift returns, and later spoke of a
18:16lessons learned process. While the commission offered Frontex support and Council President
18:20Costa expressed solidarity with Spain, both stressing the special status of Ceuta and the
18:24absence of onward movement. And from across the Atlantic, the Trump White House piled on,
18:28criticizing Spain's policies, with Trump comparing the scenes to an invasion.
18:32Here is the thing though. On the pull factor charge, the facts were awkward for the accusers.
18:36The regularization only applied to people who were in Spain before January 1,
18:402026, with five months of proven residence, and the application window had slammed shut on June 30,
18:45a full month before the surge. Fact-checkers confirmed that not a single person who swam
18:50into Ceuta in late July could benefit from it. Spain's foreign ministry, flatly stated the crisis
18:55had nothing to do with the regularization. And Sanchez, the man who had written about the far
19:00right's path of selfishness and decline back in February now watched Europe walk that exact path
19:05against him. He did not stay quiet. On July 31, he posted on X. Solidarity and empathy are optional.
19:11Respect for European treaties and the facts is not. Backing it up with Frontex numbers showing
19:15irregular entries from 2021 to 2026 of roughly 478,600, for Italy against about 234,760 for Spain.
19:24Read between the lines. Meloni, you are lecturing me about borders while your country lets in twice as
19:29many people as mine. Madrid even summoned the Italian ambassador over statements, tying the
19:35crisis to Spain's regularization policy. Then came his own letter, the mirror image of the one
19:39signed against him. Around August 1, Sanchez wrote to von der Leyen, Costa and Martin and he did not
19:44hold back. He laid out the record. In under 48 hours, Spain had fully restored border control,
19:49provided humanitarian aid, returned virtually everyone who crossed, and prevented any unauthorized
19:54movement to continental Europe, all in close coordination with Morocco and with very little
19:58help from other European states. He reminded them that Ceuta sits outside the core Schengen-free
20:03movement rules, with identity checks required before anyone can travel onto the Spanish mainland,
20:08a special double-filter regime confirmed by the European Commission itself. He argued that Spain's
20:12policies had made it one of the least porous external borders in the EU, the second most secure by
20:17Frontex data, despite being the only member state with a land border with Africa, and he reminded them
20:22of something personal. Spain had shown solidarity when others were in trouble, helping during the
20:27Belarus border crisis in 2021, and the Lampedusa surge in 2023. Then he delivered the line that
20:33gave this whole saga its name. The reaction of some governments, he wrote, was driven by prejudice,
20:37fake news, ignorance or political interest. And in the current international moment, the EU cannot afford
20:42this kind of selfish, polarizing and unlawful reaction. There it was, selfish. The same word he
20:47once aimed at the far right, now aimed at almost two dozen fellow EU leaders. His Interior Minister,
20:52Fernando Gran Marleska, poured fuel on it, calling the attitude of certain partners,
20:57selfish, unsolidary and irresponsible, even unforgivable, and pointedly recalling that
21:02Spain had shared the burden during Italy's own Lampedusa crisis. He accused some partners of using
21:07the crisis for political point scoring, rejected any suggestion that Morocco was a threat, and warned
21:12that the very values and pillars of the EU were being undermined by partisan use of a tragedy.
21:17Translation. When your house was on fire, Italy, we brought water. Now mine sparked for two days,
21:22and you tried to lock me out of the neighborhood. Both sides, funnily enough,
21:25demanded the same thing. An emergency video conference of EU Interior Ministers was scheduled
21:30for the following Tuesday. And as of early August 2026, that is where this story sits.
21:35The physical crisis in Ceuta has faded, the barrier floats in the water, and nearly everyone
21:39has returned to Morocco. But the political wound is wide open. So who is right? That depends on which
21:44Europe you believe in. The 22 leaders see a continent that must guard its doors or lose control of its
21:49future, and they see Sanchez's million-person amnesty as a flashing welcome sign. Whatever
21:53the eligibility rules say on paper, Sanchez sees a man who bet on openness, got results,
21:58handled a 48-hour disaster almost alone, and was rewarded with checkpoints and threats of exile
22:03from his own family. 67 people died in that water, and within hours, their deaths had become ammunition
22:09in a fight between capitals. Pedro Sanchez welcomed migrants with open arms. Now he says Europe is selfish.
22:15Maybe the hardest truth in this whole story is that both of those things can be true at the same
22:20time.
22:20If this story gripped you, hit subscribe because the emergency EU meeting is coming, and this fight
22:25is far from over. Drop your take in the comments. Is Sanchez a visionary or a liability? See you in
22:30the
22:31next one. If you enjoyed this video, click on the boxes playing on your screen to watch similar content.
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