The Rest Is Politics - 559. Who Really Benefits from the Ceuta Migration Crisis?

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

Why did 50,000 people risk their lives in an attempt to cross the Morocco-Spain border? What do the pictures emerging from the enclave of Ceuta reveal about the bigger migration story? Why did right-wing figures across the world, from Donald Trump to Elon Musk and Giorgia Meloni, all weigh in? Alastair and Rory are joined by immigration expert Gerald Knaus as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Watch Rory and Alastair’s interview with Count Binface by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. We want to know what you think about the climate crisis! For a chance for your thoughts on the climate to be discussed in our Q&A with Caroline Lucas, fill in our survey HERE. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics. It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! _________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Bruno Di Castri Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green  Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Executive Producer: Emily Kent Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You've all no doubt been following events in Sayuta, as many as 50,000 people swing from Morocco into this small Spanish enclave in the space of a single day, and dozens dying on route. Immediately on seeing the pictures that we've all now seen, many of the world's politicians rushed in. It's an invasion. Let's blame weak borders, blame Spain, blame Morocco, blame the migrants, blame anyone. But there is another bigger question, I think, worth asking. Who actually gained from what happened here? Maybe the people smugglers that Spain blames for orchestrating it, but I'm not so sure. But there's a second set of winners, most of them far away from the waters around Sayuta.

The far right round the globe using this tragedy to further their agenda on immigration. Donald Trump using it to needle Spain over their stance on Gaza and Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu Ditto. Putin's disinformation network, which moved on this story so fast, and so hard, I just wondered if they knew what was coming. Italy's Prime Minister, Georgia Maloney, invoking it to push for tighter internal EU borders, despite this having nothing to do with European free movement. Back home, reform and the Conservatives both claiming that the Moroccan migrants were heading for Britain, the AFD in Germany saying they were heading for Germany,

and the Rassonement Nacional in France, they were heading for France. This is the three P's at work. Populism, polarization, post-truth. And if a rumor can move tens of thousands of people and reshape a continent's political dialogue in a single day, what does that say about the immigration debate, immigration policy, and what does it say about what politics has become? This episode is powered by fuse energy.

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our lives become more convenient, but they also become more exposed. And I remember you, I find it exhausting because you spend so much time worrying about spam calls, data tracking, you don't quite know to trust. That's, I think, why Nord's VPN app isn't just about hiding your IP address. It's now a broader digital defence with built-in next-gen anti-virus, anti-tracking, scam call filtering, and anti-mailware. And all quietly operating in the background, so we don't. all, even if we want to have to become cybersecurity experts, is the ultimate tool for navigating

the modern internet agreeably and safely. That's quite a tribute, Alice, from you, who we often see as a bit of a tribute act to the analogue world. To get the best discount of your NordVPN plan and go to NordvPN.com slash Restis Politics. The link is in the episode description. Welcome to the Restis Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. But quick introduction to who Gerald Canals is, who's joining us today. Gerald is one of my great heroes, and Alistible teased me about the eclectic nature of my heroes, but Gerald is a campaigner who has set up something much more than a think tank. He passionately advocates for issues and tries to bring change in the world.

Concretely, he started in the Balkans. He then worked on European Union enlargement, which he believes in profoundly. he's been fighting the far right across Europe and he's been trying to come up with a humane, workable asylum policy. He's somebody who knows so many cabinet ministers across Europe, knows the European Commission well,

but above all, he's somebody who never gets up. He has a clear idea of how he wants to change the world and despite all the things that might throw you off balance over 30 years, he remains incredibly energetic, incredibly good-humoured, incredibly passionate, and we're very lucky to have him with us today. And we wanted to get him on here because he's been following the immigration debate in Europe

and knows a lot about this Spanish enclave that suddenly has become perhaps the most talked about place on earth. Most people in the world will have followed this extraordinary story, but it is a confusing story. The first thing is that Theuta is a part of Spain, which is not connected to the European mainland. It's in North Africa. It's a tiny little peninsula across the Straits of Gibraltar. And that matters because it's a little enclave surrounded by Morocco. There's large Moroccan cities of half a million, one and a half million people, not far from this tiny Spanish territory. And you can, it's dangerous, but you can literally swim from Morocco just round the wall and get into Theuta. Theuta became part of the Iberian culture a very long time ago in 1415, originally conquered by Portugal, then becomes part of Spain.

In other words, it's been part of Iberia for longer than places like Granada. Before the Reconquista came down, when the Spanish monarchs came down and conquered the Muslim areas of southern Spain, Theta was already part of the Iberian set up. But from the Moroccan point of view, the presence of what they see as a European colonial power in this tiny northern tip of Morocco raises questions of decolonization, even though this was Spanish territory long before modern Morocco was formed. Now, on that, I'm going to hand over to Garald to try to give us a little bit of the recent history of what happened in the last week and what's happened in theater over the last few years. Well, what we all saw in the last week, I think it's worth underlining. It was completely extraordinary in terms of the numbers involved.

50,000 people crossing in one day a European Union border, in this case to this Spanish exclave. That is five times more than during the refugee crisis in the Greek Islands, when on average 10,000. thousand people crossed from Turkey to Greece and we remember the dramatic pictures. And what makes this even more striking is, as you said, theater is a small place, 85,000 people. So if 50 or even 60,000 people as the mayor of the town said, come in suddenly, I mean, it is an invasion. I mean, this is how people experience it.

There's no other way to describe this. It's also striking. It was all Moroccan. I mean, mainly, not all. Mainly Moroccans. Mainly young men. And it had built up for about 10 days before. So I was first contacted by.

journalists to talk about this when there were around 3,000 people in the city. A 1,500 had come in over a week. And to put that in context, those 50,000, that is more than the whole irregular migration to Spain last year, from all of Africa to all of its borders. Last year, from the Canary Islands route in the Atlantic, from Morocco to Spain, from Algeria to the Spanish islands in the Mediterranean, the total number of people who arrived in Spain in a year was less than 40,000. So the question that is raised here is how is this possible?

I mean, how so suddenly it didn't build up slowly. Last year, nothing like this happened. And Spain has, in the first half of this year, had 12,000 irregular arrivals, less than last year. The key must lie in Morocco. And that's the big debate in Spain, of course. Because when you see this large number of people, you know, it's like, well, large. It's the size of a Bundesliga football game or a concert, big concert. I mean, you can mobilize 50,000 people, especially when you have these big cities nearby,

but to have them move towards the beach, to then get into the water, not to be impeded. Moroccan authorities and the reports by journalists, many interviews, it's all anecdotal, but it's the best we have, have asked people and they say that Moroccan authorities have not stopped them, some have apparently encouraged them to go towards the beach. This information in the internet, hundreds of thousands of messages being sent out, But with this information that Spain is now open, if you go swimming, you can enter Spain or Europe. All of this together raises questions. Why did Morocco not stop this?

And one more point on this. In 2021, something very similar happened. At that time, 10,000 people went into theater. And at that time, it was very clearly a Moroccan pressure operation on Spain because of the politics surrounding West Sahara. A territory, I'm sure you can explain that, a territory that Morocco says is Moroccan. that used to be controlled by Spain until the 70s. And Spain was then treating a lead of the organization fighting for its independence in a hospital in Spain. And Morocco then put pressure on Spain through this migration crisis.

In both cases, most of the migrants disappeared very quickly, returned. Most of them returned and left Siltre into 21 and now. But the question is, really, was this just a spontaneous event? It doesn't seem plausible at all. Let's first of all, because this has been such a huge thing around the world. So many theories have been floated. Let's try to agree on so far as we can on some facts. The first is, I don't think there's any doubt the social media was key in this.

There were false rumours being spread on an industrial scale. And the trigger for them was probably the Spanish court decision that had said that you couldn't send people back summarily if they arrived by water. Okay. So that was definitely a trigger. You then had piling in on the back of that videos doing the rounds showing the easiest routes, showing where you to buy wetsuits, where to buy waterproof bags so that you keep your phone safe and all that stuff, thereby making people feel that the rumour may have some validity to it. Then as you've already said, it would appear that the Moroccan authorities were weaker than usual. These are people who can be pretty brutal when they want to be. that were weaker than usual.

We can also agree that Seuta was overwhelmed. As you said, it felt like an invasion. The guy who runs the place has been running it for over 20 years with a wonderful title of Mayor President. This is the dream title for you, Rory, Mayor President. I'm moving there. And he basically said, we were overwhelmed. But then I think we can also agree

that the exploitation of this was immediate and very, very strong. Trump was straight out of the traps, saying, It looks like an invasion of a country by hundreds of thousands of people. J.D. Vance posted a Fox News, utterly dishonest video, which said that they'd entered the European mainland. They were now in Spain and said, thank God we've got Trump, this could never happen here. Georgia Maloney, this is a fact, said we should very quickly adapt the Schengen rules

which allows free movement, in other words, strengthen the borders. And the Danes said something similar. And the reason why I think I related this in the introduction to my three P's, because I think it's the best example we've had in recent years, populism. Let's exploit problems rather than try to address them. Polarization, let's create divides where we should be trying to build people together. The divide, the them is the Spanish government, soft on immigration. It's the migrants trying to come to us.

And post-truth, the levels of misinformation, including after they've been returned, was off the scale. So I just think that's why this does say something much, much deeper. And of course, now that they have all gone back, the narrative is still the same. It's the narrative that enables the next day, Zia Yusuf, Reform UK, calls himself ludicrously the shadow home secretary, even though neither he nor Nigel Farage are actually MPs at the moment. He goes to Ceuta, he makes his little videos, they've all gone back, but he pretends that it's still in a state of chaos. Then he comes back the next day and announces with Farage, we're going to send the Royal Navy

and to stop the small boats in the channel. It's nuts. It's nuts. I want to add one thing to your three pieces, which is the eye, the images, the power of images to beat statistics. And that's a point that is actually a call to action also for parties in the center, for for Democrats in civil society, in academia, in the media. What we see here, and it happens again and again and again,

as I've said, we've had very little irregular migration from all of Africa and the Middle East to Europe in the last six months and in the last year. Numbers are falling everywhere. In Denmark, there are almost no asylum applications, you know, a thousand something last year. And yet, all these numbers are forgotten. Politicians don't.

When this crisis happens, very few politicians stand up and say, wait, don't panic. First of all, this is in North Africa. Nobody can just swim from theater. It's no closer to Spain than Morocco's coast. There is a control. You need to get on a boat. They will not quickly come to either Finland or Germany or France.

First, second, this happens against the background where it's just not true that Spain has not controlled irregular migration. Spain has had less irregular migration than Italy. And Greece. And this year and last year. So there's not a loss of control by an ideological government that wants to be a legal government that wants to be. government that wants migrants to arrive, right? I mean, this was a narrative that Trump and Vance have spread. This is an ideological response to government that doesn't want to stop migration. That's just not true. The facts are not true. But this is easy to check. This is not

ideology. You can be on the left, on the right anyway, just check the numbers. Third, the fundamental problem here is huge for theater. And let's not forget, 80 people or more died. I mean, this is a humanitarian catastrophe these 24 hours. This was really catastrophic. It was very serious. But in the bigger scale of things, you know, we don't have much African irregular migration to Europe. Yet this is the central myth. By overreacting, however, by treating this as if it could possibly suddenly trigger, and the image was 2015, remember, 2015, a million people crossed from Turkey to Greece. These were mainly Syrians because the biggest refugee crisis in the world then was Syria.

And Turkey was the country with most refugees in the world. millions of Syrians had entered Turkey openly. It was opened the border for years. This time we're talking about Moroccan youth who lived nearby. Very few refugees, perhaps in that crowd, from other sub-Saharan African countries. And yet politicians don't have the confidence to say this will not end like 215. Instead, with panic reactions. And Georgia Maloney, I think, I fear that the main reason she suddenly, I mean, it's ridiculous,

talks about Schengen. Spain and Italy have no border. France is in between. So if Italy says we will now control Schengen arrivals, it's about the planes from Madrid or Barcelona that come in the summer. Now, both Italy and Spain are major tourist countries. They don't want this inconvenience to tourists. So this will be spot checks.

Yeah, it's ridiculous. There is no fence between Italy or France. Let me just develop a little bit something very important you said there, which is that the overall numbers are down. And this is something I think that we haven't talked about probably well enough in Britain. We don't understand this. We still have this idea very strongly that because partly of small boats, partly because of the very large numbers of legal migrants that came in under Boris Johnson

and after Boris Johnson, so Britain was taking hundreds of thousands of people a year, I think we have an idea that the migrant crisis in Europe is still where it was. And it isn't. There have been some very dramatic changes. You've talked about the fact that the numbers are down in the tens of thousands from the millions. And the big changes are, I think, threefold. And I, Gail, I'd love you to come in and develop this and explain this more clearly than I can. But the first big change is that a lot of refugees that used to come from places like Afghanistan can't, partly because the Iranians, on the land routes, to get from Afghanistan into Europe, you would have to cross Iran and Turkey and then get either across the Mediterranean or through the Balkans.

They can't do that anymore. The Iranians and the Pakistanis have driven Afghans back into Afghanistan. And the Turkish border is now a very, very rigid border. It may be not quite a Donald Trump fantasy wall, but it's very difficult to get into Turkey from either Syria or Iran or Iraq. Israel, it's impossible to enter Israel. That's a very, very heavily guarded border. So that's one big change. There are not huge numbers of people coming on a land route either from Iraq or Afghanistan

or South Asia into Turkey and across the Mediterranean anymore. So most of the people crossing, I think, are coming from North Africa. And there, deals have been done with Tunisia and with Libya and to some extent, even with Morocco, to lessen the number of people crossing. Now, a lot of this feels, and this is where I'm, Gerald, I'd like to hand back to you, This technique of managing migration feels in the Turkish case, maybe even when we're talking about Israeli borders or we're talking about what's happening in Libya, as though it's the sort of technique that's quite brutal.

Over to you, Garald. Well, you're completely right. It's become very hard. And there's one more factor that is very important, particularly for Germany and Austria, but Germany, of course, the big country that has given most protection in the last 10 years to refugees in Europe. Austria and Germany gave half of all the positive asylum decisions in 10 years. in the whole European Union, because they took 80% of the Syrians.

So the story in Austrian Germany has nothing to do with the migration story in Britain or Spain. These are separate stories, separate people, separate causes. We just mix them together. And now the Syrians don't come because Assach fell, end of 224, and there are very few Syrians leaving Turkey. They don't arrive in Greece. And so the biggest number of refugees arriving in Germany in the last 10 years no longer come. That's also important.

But it is true that there are basically two questions. What do you do at borders? And it's important to distinguish land and sea borders. It makes a huge practical difference. At land borders, if you don't care about human rights, you know, you just put soldiers there. You just say we should. You know, you build a wall.

You have soldiers there. There are no Syrian refugees in Israel. There are Syrian refugees in every other neighboring country of Syria. I mean, they went to Jordan, they went to Lebanon, they went to Turkey. They didn't go to Israel because they couldn't because there were soldiers there. It was clear that they wouldn't be able to enter. So that's an option. It's against the refugee convention, of course.

You're not supposed to by force, but you can build a wall. That's not against the refugee convention. But then you need to have soldiers there to guard people from scaling the wall. But you can have a border which you close by force. We know that because the Swiss did it in World War II for the Jewish refugees. I mean, I know from Vienna, 1938, 200,000 Jews wanted to flee. The Swiss just managed to stop them crossing into the only day. democracy that was safe, especially during World War II, German Jews couldn't get into Switzerland.

You can close the border like this. The second question is for the European Union that has all these conventions on human rights. The refugee convention, its laws, the torture convention, the child rights convention, you're not supposed to do certain things. We decided that. We ratified those conventions. One of the reasons we ratified that was that experience for the Second World War. I mean, to remind people, it was the inability of German and Austrian Jews to get into Switzerland, which was one of the big drivers of saying that people should have a right of asylum, they should be able to cross borders, and that actually creating a world of these very rigid borders was one of the reasons that hundreds of thousands more people died in the Holocaust.

Yes, I mean, there was a very basic intuition and a sense of shame after World War II, that democracies had denied access to people that after World War II, of course, knew what many should have known before and did, that were facing, you know, a threat to their life, be killed, to be taken to a camp. Now, the reality, however, is we've given ourselves these conventions. Now the question is how to be sustained public support. Democracies need public support, majorities, to live up to them. And I go to the channel. I mean, this is a world away from Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. You know, these are people coming from France. This is a management problem. It's not about human rights. You have no human right to come to Britain. How do we create,

and I've said images beat statistics. In this case, the image the center needs in the Mediterranean and in the channel, it's the same challenge, is the image that we have a policy, we announce it, and from a day X, people stop getting into boats. And in the case of the channel, it's between democracies. They are leaving a safe country, France, to come to another safe country, the UK. This would be easy to solve if we would just have the political focus. And the political focus in this case would be to say,

Everybody arrives from the 1st of September in the UK. It doesn't leave the European Convention on rights. It doesn't need to. It doesn't need any troops. Anybody arrives will be detained and sent back to a European Union country. After two weeks, nobody will come. And the same, it's more complicated, but the same with safe third countries we can do in a Mediterranean. In a way, Spain and Morocco between them have shown to some extent that that can be done,

because that is what they have done. They have basically said, you come here under false pretenses, following a false. rumor, you can't stay, you're going back. On your images, because I like my three P's, we can make it four P's, but instead of talking about imagery, we talk about pictures. Yeah. Because you're absolutely right. So just to give you one example, you mentioned Syria. One of the big drivers of the Brexit vote was Nigel Farage standing in front of a poster and it said, breaking point. Okay. And these are actually pictures of Syrians, most of whom ended up in Germany, not in the UK. They've now released an updated version of that, which says Europe is at a breaking point. So the populists understand the power

of imagery. And let's be honest, even you, very liberal on these issues to some extent, or much more pragmatic and trying not to be ideological, and you say, when you see tens of thousands of people coming out of the sea and running and cheering and looking like they're happy. because they've met a goal, even though very quickly thereafter that goal is taken away from them, it looks and feels and looks like an invasion. And what the images do is supplement a political language that has been a steady drumbeat of this across Europe and in other parts of the world. Trump drives this all the time in America. And we shouldn't underestimate this.

Trump actually said this is a lesson for the midterms. J.D. Vance said, thank God as we go to the midterms that no Republican Party will ever allow this kind of invasion here. Farage is doing the same. Maloney's doing the same. She lost the referendum. She's been weakened. She needs a new thing to get her base going. So I think we have to understand that there are solutions, but those solutions can't be found and met within the way that this debate is being conducted right now. So how do we change that debate? Can I just make one addition to your pictures? The pictures, of course, need the story in the background that people already are willing to accept. Yeah. Remember, when we saw the picture of the little boy, Alan Kurdi, who died in Bodrum, the story, when people saw that picture, yes, they saw a little boy, but many, many, many, many refugees died in the 10 years later. This had an enormous impact because at that time people had some information about the war in Syria, the brutality. They saw him as a victim, somebody who had to flee, his family.

They had compassion, empathy. Now, the point about stories is that the biggest story in which something like Theota is plugged in, that it confirms now, is the story of the invasion from the third world, as Trump calls it, or from Africa, or from the non-white world, as Elon Musk constantly keeps tweeting. So the far right in Europe and the far right in America and powerful voices in the world of social media are constantly reinforcing this story, which is the story of this identitarian movement, that we are under attack, that this is bound to get worse. Now, that's why you can't ever accept the numbers actually go down because then the story falls apart, that Europe is facing an existential threat. And faced with this story, all these losses of dramatic control, which this was for 24 hours. look like confirmation. So the question is how do you respond? And you can't respond like governments in Germany and Britain and Austria and elsewhere have done.

And I've seen it in the last few days in the UK. The numbers of crossings in the channel have gone down by 40%. But you still see the boats last week. One day, 800 people come. You need to then show, and this is where politics has been lazy, not to think about fighting these images with images that you can have control without human rights violations. You know, Trump produces images and a story.

What is our story for the future of refugee protection in Europe and in the world? UNHCR is under attack. Donald Trump is trying to put people into UNHCR. Didn't happen, but in senior positions that want the US to leave the refugee convention, right? UNHCR needs supporters. There needs to be a vision of how the refugee convention will work five years now. What is our vision? We don't have one in the center.

What we've learned is that there is one way of managing borders, which is through brutality. And that's quite an important fact. It's an incredibly uncomfortable fact because clearly there has been a loss of talk over the last 20, 30 years of people saying you can't control borders. There's no point trying. The reality is you can, but you do it in a way that's illegal, cruel, and brutal. Donald Trump's control of the border between the United States and Latin America has led, I think, to a fall in migration to the United States for about 90%. It's only 10% of the people crossing. And we don't talk enough maybe about that, that there is an option. It's not an option that we want to pursue, but you can see it in the US.

You can see it in more dramatic forms in Israel. You can see it with the Turkish borders where people can control borders. It may also be the case that we can see versions of this with Hungary, with Serbia, with Greece. The question then is, can we find an alternative which demonstrates control, but also shows that we value our humanitarian, our legal obligations, that we genuinely care if there is a female judge in Afghanistan, for example, who needs to come, or people in Sudan, we don't talk enough about Sudan, who are suffering one of the most horrendous conflicts imaginable. What is the route to save the instincts that we took from Second World to be moral people

who care while also demonstrating control. Gerald, over to you. That's the key question that too many people who are for the right reasons and with the right motivation defending refugee rights at these conventions, they are not asking this question. You know, for them, and that is part of the problem, they are not addressing the fundamental point that that Afghan judge will not cross five borders, international borders, the mountains between Iran and Turkey and then get into a boat, usually, that the only way a lot of the people who need protection will ever come to a safe country is by resettlement, you know, a legal

route. Resettlement at the moment is at its lowest in decades. There's never been less resettlement in the world. So if the way to actually, in a humane way, help people who really need protection, resettlement has collapsed. That's not talked enough about in the refugee protection community. The refugee protection community, the human rights organizations, see things very much from the point of view of the asylum lawyers in the European countries. They will do a good job once people are here. They will give people their rights. But to be able to do that, they need to first be here.

So people who need to get protection need to come to Germany, need to come to Sweden, need to come to Italy first. The reality is that we need a system in the world that isn't as cruel as what we've had in the Mediterranean. 30,000 deaths, people crossing in 10 years. 30,000 deaths. We need to have a system that doesn't encourage people to get into the water, like in Ceuta, and risk their lives for a pointless, they arrive, they will not get refugee

status, they are not persecuted, they will not get any status. We need to discourage irregular migration humanely. And we need to then argue with the same force with which people now argue against. There's this academic term, which is really a terrible distraction and a big reason for our confusion, externalization, which basically means any attempt to stop people coming here. You know, some academics have said a visa regime is externalization because it prevents people reaching other countries. Any form of cooperation, whether it's with a country we give them money to help refugees,

or whether it's we give them weapons to beat up refugees. It's all externalization. That term should be struck out of the debate. We always need to cooperate with others externally. The question is how we do it. And if we open up legal routes, if we do what the Canadians have done for decades with political support that refugees who are already identified as needing protection can come without risking their lives, families, dissidents, women, children in a legal, lawful way, build up resettlement

again, which used to be very big in the past decades ago, and stop irregular migration and say our public, we have control. This is where the human rights movement, the refugee rights movement, and centrist political parties need to go. If we don't do that, if we don't come forward now with ideas and show that this is a more moral system and that control is a natural political necessity in democracies, we will lose everything because what we saw with Trump's election, the United States has stopped applying these treaties to asylum seekers. This, I think, goes back to the way that we do. We've allowed this political debate to develop.

We're scared of saying you are a victim here of the, we've now decided four piece, the three piece plus the pictures, that that is what is making you feel so angry, even as the numbers are falling. And I think you're right. I watched this morning, Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, did a very effective social media post, which we should put in the newsletter, where she was at the National Crime Agency, she was talking about how many more people were working on immigration crime, she was talking about how many more arrests had been, how many boats had been taken into custody, how many engines they'd got. And it was, I thought, oh, quite impressive. And then she went on to say,

But I know we cannot be complacent. We must vote further. What she didn't do and what I do think anybody has done enough, has actually said, the reason this debate is so dominant in all of our politics is because, frankly, the liars are winning. Elon Musk, every time he tweets as he's just done, as you say, this is about non-whites invade in the white countries.

He's getting tens of millions of people in support of that. The single most important statement that I think was made in the last week was by EU Commissioner Magnus Bonner. Quote, not a single person has crossed to mainland European Union. Now, where has that been in the debate? Absolutely nowhere. On the point about humanity, we three have followed this quite closely. Have we seen any account of any of the people who've died in the last few days? There is no humanity if we're actually, we only focus on the politics of this, not the fact that 80, whatever the number now is, and hundreds more missing still, by the way, have been led to their death. And my final point, there are enough conspiracy theories going around, but I'll tell you one thing I was really struck by.

It was an analysis by the Ukrainian foreign ministry about the extent to which the usual suspects in the Russian propaganda machine were onto this as, as soon as it happened on a scale that they very, very rarely get involved in. So you've got Russia, you've got Maga, you got Farage, you've got Le Pen, you've got Vidal in Germany. It's the same people coming together around the same agenda to pursue a narrative that I believe is broadly false. Final comment before we take a break. And then after the break, I would love Geryl to present the solution. What should Shabana Mahmoud be doing? What should the European Union be doing, which is both moral and effective. But just as we go into the break,

so many more things to talk about, when we come back, we will be talking about some of the drivers of migration. Is climate a big driver of migration or not? How should we think about that? We can return also some questions that Alistair asked. I mean, it's very, very odd

that suddenly 50,000 people cross a border instantly. We've very rarely seen this. And even stranger to me that those 50,000 people went back within 24 hours. Why is that strange? Well, normally when refugees cross the border, it takes a very, very long time before they're convinced that they're not going to be able to get asylum, that the stories they've heard aren't true. You would expect people to be around for weeks before they went back, which implies to me that there was a degree of coordination. I'm very interested in the fact that

the Moroccan police appear to have enabled this, that there appear to have been stories that were even choices of sending Moroccans forward rather than sending sub-Saharan Africans forward. And there's a very interesting backstory here around the relationships between Morocco and Spain. We talked about West Sahara, which is this large area, largely desert area, running along the Atlantic coastline, which was supposed to be an independent territory, which has claimed by Morocco, invaded by Morocco, which Donald Trump has now recognized as being part of Moroccan territory. and there have been strange connections going on here, and this we can get back to again after the break, where Morocco has become an ally of the United States. Spain is, of course, very unpopular with the US because it didn't sign up to the Iranian war and didn't allow the US to use its bases and has been extremely critical of Israel.

So there are many, many complicated political questions going on in the background of these 60,000 people moving. But let's take a break. And when we come back from the break, Gerald, tell us what the UK Home Secretary should be doing. and other Home Secretary across Europe. Thank you very much. Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alist Campbell, and joined today by Gail Kanous. And Rory set you up at half time there, Gailad, to give us the solutions. Let's imagine you're sitting down.

There's this meeting of European Union ministers today. Let's imagine that Shavana Mahmoud has joined them. What are you saying to these people about what they should do? They're the ones with the clout and the power. What should they do? Well, I would tell them that there is a huge opportunity because what this showed, Theodore showed, is that whatever happens anywhere at the European Union's borders, even in North Africa, shocks British, Finnish, Swedish, German publics and politicians.

So we are all concerned. We all have an interest in solving this. It doesn't matter which country is affected. What do we do? First, let's make three concrete examples. Theota, Central Mediterranean and the British Channel. It's the same problem. We need to make it. discourage people from taking these dangerous roots. We need to make it futile to cross.

And we need to do that without violating the right to access to asylum and the human rights to be treated with dignity. That's the challenge. Now, in those three cases, in two words, two sentences each, in the channel, the British government should ask the Danish, the Swedish, the Austrian, the German government, are you prepared to help us demonstrate to the British public? that Europe is the solution, not the problem, that we don't need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights at all to solve the small boat crisis, and that all these talk about military is,

of course, completely crazy. Let's solve it. From the 1st of September, are you willing to take back anyone who crosses? We are willing to detain people for the processing, and we will send them back to some European Union countries. You will not take many because after a very short period, people will stop getting into boats. That's the promise. In return, we will open, The far right in Britain will hate it. But I mean, that's, we don't because we are labor or we are in the center or we are in the Tories, you know, which took people from Syria at some stage. We will open legal roots and we will take in an orderly way.

Some people also who are already in the European Union who want to go to Britain and we will check that. And we will demonstrate in September that this can work between democracies. Second step, we then go and talk to countries in East Africa. You know, Randa has been talked about a lot in Britain. Randa is already allowing UNHCR to process asylum seekers that are brought from Libya. Since 2019, I went to that center, and that has been working for years. People get out of Libya where there's a risk of torture.

The infrastructure in Randa is there. What wasn't there is why the Tories failed was a credible access to asylum. You get UNHCR involved. You ask UNHCR in Rwanda to agree on ways to guarantee that there is quality asylum access to that in Randa. And then you say, anybody who leaves Libya from 1st of October and arrives in Italy or Greece will be detained and sent to Rwanda for if they want to apply for asylum. Now, the access to asylum is key. Otherwise, our courts will stop it.

And that's a good thing. So it's not a free four. It's not a pushback. It's not outside of the legal framework. But we demonstrate that we can control irregular migration. And most importantly, also, we save lives. And not just Runder. You know, if it works with one country, we discuss with others.

And we make it very attractive for these countries. And again, the idea is they will not take many people. The number of people getting to votes will stop. So you're making a point which I think is incredibly important, but nobody seems to get. As far as I understand, what you're saying is that every time somebody crosses the channel from France to Britain, you simply say, listen, France is a democratic safe country, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the safe democratic countries, we're going to send you back there. And that's not breaking your human rights. That's not putting you in any danger. We're just sending you back.

And for some reason, we never get there. What we got to with France was this very strange model called one in, one out. Now, can you explain why that doesn't work? And try to help me understand why people struggle to understand that if you start returning people in an orderly legal way, they will stop crossing. Why can't politicians on either side understand

that the phenomenon will disembate, appear if you start returning people. Yes. I mean, so what is there is something that is half a step in the right direction, but it doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? Because there was never a cutoff date when in terms of public communication, the world changed. From now on, it's pointless to get into a boat that was publicly announced. You know, the start of the cooperation between Britain and France, you find it on the website

of the French ministry somewhere in Britain, somewhere in August, I think. From now on, they said we will return people. There was never preparation in the UK to then detain everyone who arrives after that cut-off date. They couldn't because the numbers actually didn't slow down. Nobody believed they would be sent back, so people keep coming in the same numbers. When there was the same announced in the Aegean in 2016 with Turkey, there was a huge media focus. On the 18th of March, everything changes. And from that day on, you will be kept on the islands and returned to Turkey.

This didn't happen. Then basically the result is that a few percent of those who cross from France to Britain might be detained and of those a few percent might be returned and then a few, depending on this is not an attractive offer, might be resettled. The communication of this was the technical, you know, it was a technocratic vision, but the core bit which I understand, the communication, now everything changes, don't go, your rights will not be violated, you will be returned to a safe country, but you will not stay in Britain, it's pointless to pay the smugglers.

That communication in this clarity didn't come. And now I get to a real problem. Why didn't come? France didn't, I wouldn't allow that at the moment. Because the French think, well, we would look bad if we take people from Britain, but we have more refugees or more asylum seekers in France than in Britain. How do we sell this to our public? And this is where it gets really, really worrying.

The same governments that want North African states, or in the case of Denmark negotiating with Rwanda, to take people who cross to Europe are then saying, yeah, but we can't help Britain. So they don't seem to believe themselves in their idea. What I've been telling the Germans, the Danes, the Swedes and others, is if you show that you can solve it with Britain, and it's to your advantage.

By the way, Britain being a key ally in everything, from trade to defense, then you can go to African countries and say this is not about north and south, rich and poor. It's about managing together in an interest of both sides deadly and politically toxic irregular migration. But Garel, Gerole, let me just jump in there. I completely agree with you, and you and I've talked about this many, many times, and I think it requires a level of political courage

that could pay strong dividends in a fairly short period of time. But just look at the way the debate has gone in the last few days. Why is the Rassemblement Nacional looking like it might well form the next administration in France because they so successfully exploit this argument. Does that make the French less willing to do what you've just said? Does the fact of Brexit, which by the way, this issue played such a big part in, even though it has not solved it in the way that the Brexiteers said that it would, does that make the French less willing? So how do we inject this political courage at a time when in Britain, even though I think Farage has peaked, he remains a threat, and they're exploiting

this issue to the full, and in France and in Germany, the three biggest, most powerful countries in Europe, at least they were until 2016. How do you win that political argument without actually taking steps that in the short term benefit politically your opponents? Yes. There is what I mean by lack of rational courage. What we are now doing is not going to work because it's we reduce numbers a little bit. It doesn't look impressive. The myth remains, you know, we see a radicalization of the debate. Centrist parties lose everywhere.

You know who actually managed to win an election after a million people entered her country, Angela Merkel. How did she do that? She went to a party congress of her party, the CDU at the end of 2015 in Kalswur and gave a 10-minute speech. You speak German. Watch it. And if it's not available in English, it should be translated. That was at the height of losing control in Europe. People arrived by the tens of thousands each week in Germany.

She gave a speech and she said, you know, and she quoted the big names in German history, Adenauer, Kohl and Ludwig Erhard and others. And she said, they didn't say, let's dare a little freedom. They say, let's dare freedom. They didn't say, let's have some prosperity in parts of East Germany. They said, let's have East Germany prosper. I tell you, we will manage this. And then she said, but we will control migration.

And if she wouldn't have got the EU-Turkey statement that the numbers would have fallen dramatically, she wouldn't have won the elections. But what she never did is lose her confidence. Now, I never understood why the human rights lawyer Kirstama didn't get up and say, I will totally defend the European Convention Human Rights. It has nothing to do with this problem.

But of course, he can only do that if he has another solution. Gail, I've seen that speech, and it's a great speech. but I would also make the case, playing devil's advocate here, one of the reasons the AFD have got the sniff of power is because they have used the consequences of that policy with a greater confidence than the successes of Merkel have followed through on her vision. And so that is one of the reasons Germany is in such a mess.

But what went wrong? The IFD lost votes between the elections 217 and 221. It lost votes. There wasn't a steady rise. As refugee numbers collapsed, as the issues changed, 2019, Germany talked about climate change, Fridays for future. The refugee issue was no longer number one concern. Then the EU-Turkey statement collapsed.

In 2021, after COVID, numbers started rising again. And then there was no story anymore. People, there were 850,000 asylum applications in Germany in 22, 23, 24. Then you add to this 1.3 million Ukrainians. The year with most refugees in German history was 2022. So it is not actually just a story of the IFD. It was true. In 2002, Germany was overwhelmed, large numbers of asylum seekers plus the Ukrainians.

And at that moment, you needed a clarity of Angela Merkel, a clear story. But the point is that she never really used the Turkey example elsewhere. And that's, I mean, what do we have to lose? Merz, Macron, if they now say, we have a vision for a system where we stop in Europe to Europe, and then we believe this is worthwhile everywhere, deadly irregular migration, but we will do so without violating human rights. We want to see resettlement as the way for people who need protection to get protection, but we will stop the smugglers, destroy their model, and not see people die.

We want to have control. And here is how we do it. And then they do it. And in 2007, the promise is, in 2007, we will have zero irregular migration across the Mediterranean because we work to have four such agreements. Now, that's a vision that would capture the imagination of publics, but it's implementable. The Shabana Mahmoud and other interior ministers

are basically trying to cut the incentives, not getting benefits as soon as you arrive, taking longer to get refugee status and residential status, etc. So why are they taking, why, in your view, do they think that will work? I think one needs to have a non-ideological, factual approach to what works and what doesn't. And one thing I would always underline is there is one country in Europe that has had most refugee asylum applications in the 10, in the decade we talk about per capita.

And that's not Germany. That's Austria. And a lot of what other governments have done in recent years existed in Austria. It's extremely hard to get citizenship in Austria. You know, if you are rejected for, if you are rejected asylum seekers, there are very few benefits. People don't stay around because it's not very comfortable. if you are rejected asylum seeker. And yet Austria had the highest number of asylum applications

and gave per capita most protection. So I would then ask, why do ministers think that what hasn't worked in Austria will work in the UK? And I think the answer is they think it's about messaging. But the strongest message is the image of the boats arriving. You know, people don't know the details of the fine print of what they will get in France or in Denmark or in Austria and Germany. But the image of boats arriving and the news, you know,

I know people who've been in, you know, Afghans or Gambians, who arrive in Germany and I interviewed them for the research and then I follow them on social media. And I see the pictures, they then show standing in front of the Bruntonburg gate on their Facebook page. That communicates. I've made it, right? And this is, of course, what smugglers use. So whatever the details of the benefits are, Britain will always be a humane society. You know, that's all people need to know. You will not end up, like in Donald Trump's America. What was his image? the Seacot Center in El Salvador. You know, the image Donald Trump created in the first few months of his presidency

was that you could just be seized, put on a plane, in chains, and then we make lots of pictures, and we send you to a torture prison. Now, Britain will not do that. That's great. That's important. No European country will do that. And that's what people know. So I think the details of the benefits, it's not a coincidence that Syrians go to Germany

and Austria because there are many Syrians. Very few Moroccans go there. You know, Moroccans don't call to Syria. Bangladeshis, they arrive large number in Italy, the largest group in the last few years, many years was Bangladeshis. They don't appear in the German-Austrian statistics. There are networks. There are people they know. There are images they've seen from people they know.

That's where they go. So, you know, I'm not against these reforms. I mean, one has to evaluate them each one by one and say, do they make sense or not. But they are not a deterrent for people who have other stronger reasons. The only deterrent is to see the image. If you cross, you are returned. It doesn't work. And that can be achieved.

And that's why I don't understand. It's not actually courageous to do it. It's wise. It's strategic. And it will work within two weeks. And yes, Nigel Farage will make fun of it. Ah, we're taking people. But then when the boat stop, the image will be very, very, very clear.

And it could even help parties in the center win elections. Yeah, and Roy, you said before the break that, you know, how this all happened. And I just want to, before we go to the issue of climate, which I think is important, I just want to drill down on the attitude and the role, if there has been any, of the United States and Russia. If we go back to one of the most significant immigration stories with pictures was back in 2021, when the Belarusians, very close to Putin, had plain loads of people coming in from the Middle East, they took them to the border of Poland, and they sent them over.

And Morocco has been accused of doing that in relation to Spain, as you mentioned earlier. And likewise, when it came to Syria, in which Russia played a massive role, that immigration wave into Western Europe was ventilated, encouraged through the, the use of pictures right across social media around the world by Russia. And as I said earlier, the Ukrainians have monitored the social media activity pumped out by the Kremlin and their friends over the last few days, and it's been industrial. And meanwhile, America, Trump was told by the king of Morocco last week that he's having an highway named after him. And we know how much Trump loves to have things named after him.

There was a bill going through Congress recently where the Republican Party were pushing for greater financial support for Morocco and also for lesser tariff regime on Morocco, particularly in relation to fertilizer. So do we think that there are actually some bigger geopolitical games being played here? I don't want to speculate on things we can't know. But what I would add to this, I was in Moscow in 2015. I was a fellow at the Carnegie Institute. And I remember when the refugee crisis started in a big way in the summer of 2015, how the people surrounding the Kremlin had, you know, their eyes were gleaming. They saw the potential immediately.

They saw immediately that this would help their allies. And then there was a very strange story. I don't know if you remember, 2015, suddenly Syrians appeared at the border of Norway. You know, and they ended with bikes. And there was an interesting documentary made by German public television. They all looked like military men. They all arrived there and stayed in a good hotel. And then they all took bikes and then they went to the Norwegian border.

And this was 215. And it was very clearly an operation. It was organized. We saw that also in Poland when suddenly people appeared at the Polish-Belarus border. You know, the people were misled from Iraq. They were told that this is an easy way to get to Germany. but it was organized by the state institutions of Belarus. So Russia knows that this issue is at Achilles' heel of European democracies.

And I don't know if there's any involvement in this case in theater, but what we do know is they will have watched this with the same attention with which we watch it. And they will be thinking today, how can we do something like this before the next important elections? And so it's bizarre that Europeans at the moment, moment are trying to rely on Libya, Italy, Greece, rely on Libya, which is a state that is very difficult. You know, Italians are proud. They know Libya very well. They have many relations. But in eastern Libya, there is a general in control, Haftar. You know, there's lots

of links to Moscow. And it's very easy to imagine a crisis like this happening that suddenly again, boats with hundreds of people. We had a boat with 800 people sink. Terrible tragedy a few years ago, coming from eastern Libya. It's very easy to imagine this. So what I don't understand is that European, the people in charge of European security, the people in charge of defending our democracies, the interior ministries that deal with irregular migration,

and the foreign ministries that deal with external relations, they should all come together and think, what can we do in advance? And you end up with the idea that relying on 100% on Morocco or Libya or indeed Turkey, just on one country is not a good idea, that you want to have a policy where you have control with more partners, if the one thing to exclude

is a policy where you just start shooting at people. You know, people have recommended this, and it's, of course, the end of our civilization if we start doing that. So there must be an alternative, a humane way that we are not so vulnerable. We're getting a lot of questions from listeners saying, how long do you think it will be

until the climate crisis is going to exacerbate and accelerate migration movements. How do you think about the relationship between climate change and migration movement? I think it's very clear that what we saw in the last 15 years was related to the oldest. We've just probably all seen the Odyssey,

in a war, the oldest cause of mass displacement and destruction. You know, Germany had gave protection to more than a million Syrians. It gave protection of 1.3 million Ukrainians. This was the refugee crisis. It was two big wars. one in Europe, one on the doorsteps of Europe, Putin was involved in both of them.

That is the explanation for what we saw in the last few years. When we look at the central Mediterranean route, the largest number of people coming are, and they are small. We are talking Italy all year, 70,000, 60,000. But the largest group in the last few years was Bangladeshis. But, you know, if 20,000 Bangladeshis come from Bangladesh via Egypt or Libya to Italy, you know, that's not climate migration of any significant extent. And we have almost nobody from sub-Saharanica in recent years coming to Europe.

I think there was a strategy, I understand it, but I think it is dangerous by people who want to draw attention to climate change to say, we need to deal with climate change because it will help us stop irregular migration. The danger is that we can stop irregular migration the brutal way, and does that mean we don't need to care about climate change? Climate change is not going, I mean, the World Bank does serious assessments regularly. I'm not making this up. They are looking with experts on scenarios.

And they have these assessments that until the year 2050, I don't know what the latest number is, 250 million people in the world might be displaced because of climate. These are huge numbers. But the World Bank also says most of them will be in their own countries or in their own region. And actually over 25 years, 250 million, you know, compared that with the internal movement, we have every year now in places like China or Nigeria or India. moving in huge places. The fact that we will have these

movements and we will have them and they will be dramatic and they're important. We'll not mean that more people come to Europe. There is an attempt to link issues which often backfires. The number one cause why we had an exceptional 10 years was two wars around and in Europe.

Vladimir Putin kept them going well he caused the big displacement in Ukraine and he backed Assad until he no longer could. That is the story why we had an unprecedented number of asylum seekers in Germany in the last 10 years. And that's the story we should tell. And we should worry about climate change for a thousand good reasons,

but not because it will make something like Theuta less likely because it won't. Okay. We've done over an hour, Gerald, and we're very grateful to your time. Just mildly pushing back on that. I did hear from some of the Moroccans who were part of this, these events in the It's in Utah, that one of the reasons that they'd been driven there was where they came from. There was a collapse in agriculture. There was very little work for them.

And they were driven from a rural area to a city. And they found there was even less work for them there. They were arguing that they were actually, that climate was one of the reasons for them going. But anyway, that's for a whole separate episode. And I should just tell you and anybody else listening that Caroline Lucas, the brilliant former leader of the Green Party, has been doing this mini-series for the rest is politics, and she's back this week with a debate on climate migration, asking actually whether the term climate refugee is held for one or not, Gerald thinks not, and whether on this, as she goes

through all these different issues, whether the politicians, who we criticise for not taking this part of the migration debate seriously, what we've seen in recent days, seriously enough, come up with solutions, whether they're doing that in relation to the climate as well. And Roy and I are going to be back next week to do a Q&A with Caroline on the whole series. So any questions, you just plug them for that. And for our Sunday read on the newsletter, we've got one of Caroline's interviews, Arthur Snell, who is fascinating, slightly terrifying. And I recommend everybody to read that.

To listen to the episode with Arthur to read his piece this weekend, become a member of the rest is politics. go to the rest is politics.com. Also, we want to hear your opinions on the climate crisis. We'll be sharing a poll in our newsletter this week on that very topic, and you can fill it out by going to the episode description. Gerold, thank you. Thank you. Gerald, thank you.

And can I just quickly, just as we finish, this is maybe embarrassed, Gerald, but agree or disagree with him, and I tend to agree with him passionately. He is the most remarkable individual. or if we're looking, you know, people often ask, Alistair asked, but what can I do? What Gerald has done over more than 30 years of his life is to take really naughty public policy issues. He's started in the Balkans, then he did European Union accession, it's now working on migration,

he's working on the far right, and he just keeps going. Months after month, year after year, he never ever gives up. If he believes an idea is a good idea, he keeps trying to make it work. and for his energy, his intellect and commitment, I think people can do a lot worse in their lives than trying to model themselves on Gerald Canals. Thank you so much for joining us.