Communist China’s state-run Global Times on Sunday fretted that last week’s invasion of migrants from Morocco to Ceuta, Spain, might have “provided fresh ammunition for Europe’s rising right-wing parties, allowing them to further weaponize migration as a political issue.”
The Global Times gleefully quoted the harsh words flying between Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and other European leaders – notably including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – who felt it necessary to eject Spain from the European Union’s Schengen open-borders agreement after Spain demonstrated a troubling inability to control its own borders.
Sanchez railed that Meloni and other nervous Euro leaders were “driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance, or political interest.”
WATCH — Thousands of Migrants from Morocco Flood into Spanish Territory:
The Global Times pretended to be horrified by this threat to European unity and appalled by the possibility that the Ceuta incident could empower “far right” parties in France, Germany, and Spain itself, plus immigration restrictionists in the Trump administration.
“I saw Spain yesterday, and I watched the catastrophe that took place. It looks like an invasion of a country by hundreds of thousands of people, and that same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse, much bigger,” President Donald Trump himself said on Friday.
The Global Times never got around to explaining why it would be unreasonable or unfair for opponents of weak border security to believe their concerns were vindicated by the spectacle of 60,000 migrants stampeding into Ceuta.
Migrants return to Morocco from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, Friday, July 31, 2026. (Antonio Sempere/AP)
“The crisis demonstrates that when confronted with a sudden influx of migrants, longstanding disputes between frontline border states and inland member states over responsibility-sharing quickly resurfaced, with national interests once again outweighing collective European solidarity,” Beijing Foreign Studies University professor Cui Hongjian told the Global Times.
China, of course, is not exactly friendly to migration or refugees. People who live in small countries adjacent to China do have to worry about suddenly discovering they are ruled by Beijing – and their unique culture and language have been deemed troublesome by their new Han Chinese overlords. Even worse, they might learn that Beijing feels their internal organs would be put to better use inside the bodies of rich and powerful clients.
China also has nothing comparable to the Schengen problem, which is a bond of trust between member states of the European Union that presumes countries on the periphery of the EU will do a decent job of protecting their external borders.
The Atlantic noted on Friday that contrary to Meloni’s threats, there is no formal legal process for ejecting Spain from the Schengen Agreement – but concerned member states can implement tougher immigration checks or close their borders, which would effectively nullify Schengen.
“The crisis in Ceuta is likely to be contained, and quickly. But if Europe’s reaction to a surge of immigration is to isolate individual states, rather than to use the tools it created to protect freedom and manage human displacement in a globalized world, Schengen really is at risk,” the Atlantic lamented, much as the Global Times would do a few days later.
As China well knows, grappling with “human displacement in a globalized world” is a game that only the liberal democracies of the West have to play, while authoritarian countries with sealed borders jeer from the sidelines.