From this perspective, the truly important question is not whether Morocco instrumentalizes migration against Spain and the European Union, but why this strategy is so effective. These days, much of the public debate revolves around Morocco’s use of migration as an instrument of diplomatic pressure on Spain. A debate with multiple implications, which focuses, among other aspects, on the alleged complicity of the United States and Israel, Morocco’s ambitions regarding Ceuta and Melilla, the divisions within the European Union concerning Spanish migration policy, and other geopolitical elements.
Essentially, and without prejudice to the other concurrent factors, it is a claim that is hard to refute. For years, Rabat —like Ankara or Minsk— has shown that controlling migratory flows is part of its foreign policy and that it can modulate its cooperation with Spain and with the European Union according to broader interests: the bilateral relations between Spain and Algeria, the international recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara, economic cooperation, or financial support.
“The truly important question is not whether Morocco instrumentalizes migration against Spain and the European Union, but why this strategy is so effective”
But this diagnosis, while correct, is not enough. There is a paradox that scarcely gets space in public debate: a state whose geostrategic weight would be considered lower than that of Spain —not to mention the entire European Union— has succeeded in turning migration management into a bargaining tool capable of extracting significant political concessions. From this perspective, the truly important question is not whether Morocco instrumentalizes migration against Spain and the European Union, but why this strategy is so effective. In this sense, Morocco’s influence capacity cannot be understood solely from its own actions. It is also, and above all, the result of a migratory management model that has turned its cooperation into an indispensable element for the European border-control policy.
The externalization of migratory control
During the last decades, and especially after the so‑called 2015 migratory crisis, the European Union has moved toward a simple premise: to prevent irregular arrivals at all costs. To a large extent, this evolution responds to member states’ difficulties in reaching an internal agreement on the distribution of responsibilities and the protection standards. While those negotiations remained blocked for years, cooperation with third countries became one of the few areas of political consensus, gaining prominence until it consolidated as one of the pillars of the European Pact on Immigration and Asylum (PEMA). Within this policy framework, the Union has progressively shifted border control to third states through funding, police cooperation, political agreements, and material support, with the aim of stopping migratory movements before they reach European territory and facilitating the return of those who nonetheless manage to arrive. To do so, it has increasingly linked development cooperation and other external action tools to migratory cooperation.
In this way, numerous origin and transit countries with which the EU and its member states have signed agreements of this kind — including Morocco — have become indispensable to the day‑to‑day functioning of the European migratory control system. As a result, their capacity and willingness to contain —or facilitate— migratory flows has become a politically valuable asset. Paradoxically, this model, often presented as a demonstration of firmness and efficiency in the face of uncontrolled immigration, has ended up yielding, in practice, a growing dependence. In other words, the European Union itself has decisively contributed to making migratory control a bargaining chip in its relations with third states.
“The more the European Union hardens its policies to contain migratory flows, the more indispensable is the cooperation of origin and transit countries”
The result is a
The Spanish government’s reaction to the tragic events in Ceuta provides a clear illustration of this dynamic. Instead of publicly questioning Morocco’s openly hostile and reckless behavior, the Prime Minister chose to emphasize the importance of bilateral cooperation and to attribute primary responsibility to the mafias. This is not merely a political move for the moment. It expresses a deeper reality: when the functioning of such a high‑stakes public policy hinges on the cooperation of a third party, the ability to confront it publicly is significantly diminished.
Nevertheless, the paradigm of instrumentalization of migration tends to shift this dependency away from the center of analysis. The state that claims to be the object of instrumentalization appears, above all, as the victim of an external aggression, while the aggressor state concentrates political and legal reproach. The crisis seems to always come from the outside, as if European system vulnerability were solely the result of an external threat and not also of the decisions that have helped build that dependency.
The other side of instrumentalization
There are also a number of less obvious effects, of which it is worth highlighting at least two. First, the instrumentalization framework tends to reduce the debate to a conflict between states and to push those who bear the most serious consequences to the background. Attention concentrates on the diplomatic tug‑of‑war between Morocco and Spain, or between Morocco and the European Union, while migrants are relegated to the role of instruments in a dispute that is not theirs. From this vantage point, it is not surprising that the deaths of at least 72 people — converting the Ceuta crisis into one of the deadliest episodes on a Spanish border — have occupied a secondary place in much of the media coverage. Yet it is precisely these deaths that constitute the main evidence of the failure of a migratory policy that has made border management a security issue rather than a matter of protection of life and human rights.
“The instrumentalization is not only a category of analysis; it also triggers an exceptional legal regime that preys especially on migrants used as instruments of pressure”
Secondly, instrumentalization is not only a category of analysis; it also triggers an exceptional legal regime that preys especially on migrants used as instruments of pressure. The Crisis Regulation of the European Migration and Asylum Pact allows derogating or restricting numerous procedural guarantees and reception standards provided for in the ordinary regime when there is a situation of instrumentalization. Simultaneously, several states have called for a reinterpretation of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights to widen their room for action in such cases, in a series of cases awaiting resolution. The Spanish political debate points in the same direction. Following the recent Ceuta events, there have been proposals to tighten Spanish legislation and facilitate summary returns also for maritime arrivals, even from circles traditionally seen as progressive. Instrumentalization thus ceases to be merely a strategy deployed by third states and becomes also a legal category that reconfigures the balance between migratory control and the rights of migrants in Spanish and European migration law.
For the sake of clarity, none of the above implies that what has come to be known as migration instrumentalization does not exist or that the responsibility of those who promote it should be minimized. It simply means that its effects cannot be explained solely by the will of the state that exercises it. Morocco’s current bargaining power also depends on a prior decision by the European Union itself: having made the containment of migratory flows the main indicator of the success of its migration policy and having designed a legal and institutional framework oriented primarily toward that objective.
“A system that needs third states to perform essential border-control functions cannot reasonably be presented as a fully autonomous or sovereign system”
Ceuta’s events precisely reveal that fragility. They not only expose the vulnerability of those who wish to cross a deeply unequal border and end up losing their lives in the attempt, but also the vulnerability of a European Union that has built a migratory-control system whose viability increasingly depends on decisions taken outside its own borders. Contrary to the majority narrative, a system that needs third states to perform essential border-control functions cannot be presented as fully autonomous or sovereign.
In short, the problem is not only that Morocco has discovered the enormous strategic value of migration. The problem is that the European Union itself has designed a system in which that strategy is extraordinarily profitable. Likewise, as long as the debate remains focused exclusively on Morocco’s conduct, we will continue discussing the symptoms of the crisis without addressing the institutional design that makes it possible.
