How Spain Invited the Invasion

"I’m the Prime Minister of Spain. This Is Why the West Needs Migrants.”

Aug 04, 2026

“I’m the Prime Minister of Spain. This Is Why the West Needs Migrants,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “Imagine you’re the leader of a nation, and you face a dilemma. Half a million or so people who are crucial to everyone’s daily lives inhabit your country.” His radical government’s solution was to legalize the half a million migrants.

Rather than the 500,000 migrants Sanchez was proposing to legalize, Spain received 1.2 million applications and a month after the application window closed, the invasion began.

“The invasion came after Sanchez’s legalization program and after the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that migrants entering by sea could not be deported and had to have their ‘asylum’ claims processed. Tens of thousands of Arab Muslims responded to the ruling by swimming around the border fence in Ceuta, a Spanish city in North Africa that shares a border with Morocco.

Ceuta, with a population of 85,000 covering 7 square miles, was swiftly overrun. The leftist Sanchez regime initially responded by refusing to declare a state of emergency because mass migration was not classified as an emergency. As the invasion grew from the thousands into the tens of thousands, Sanchez promised to dispatch military forces while emphasizing coexistence.

The mass invasion should not have been unexpected.

In 2021, 10,000 Muslim migrants from Morocco had entered Ceuta in 2 days. Morocco had been furious because Spain had treated the head of a breakaway Sahrawi state in the Sahara for COVID and applied leverage by shutting down its border patrols. Without those patrols, there was nothing keeping thousands of Moroccan Muslims from storming the border and invading Spain.

PM Sanchez had promised then that the invaders would be “immediately returned”, but some years later won headlines by proposing the ‘regularization’ of between 500,000 to 1,000,000 migrants.

Some have speculated over what triggered the invasion, but the numbers are fairly obvious.

The application window for ‘regularization’ had closed on June 30, 2026. A week later, the Spanish Supreme Court took up the case of minors who had invaded Spain in 2021. And the court ruled that migrants who climbed the border fence could be immediately deported, but those who swam around the border fence by sea would have to have their cases heard.

Finally, on July 20th, PM Sanchez visited Algiers. The Sanchez regime had previously secured an end to the invasions by supporting Morocco’s position on the Western Sahara. Algeria had responded by breaking off relations with Spain. Algeria had become Spain’s largest natural gas supplier and Sanchez had traveled to Algiers to discuss rebuilding ties and the Western Sahara.

Morocco apparently responded by removing border security and allowing a mass invasion.

Sanchez’s legalization proposal had prepared the ground and Spain was overwhelmed with twice as many applications as the leftist government had been expecting. When the application window closed on June 30th, many North African Muslims were bound to be disappointed.

Then the Supreme Court decision in early July created the expectation that anyone who made it around the sea barrier would not be immediately deported and would instead be allowed to stay.

The final missing ingredient came when PM Sanchez picked the worst timing in the world to try and repair relations with Algeria, a move that was bound to infuriate Morocco, and to which it would have only one way to make its anger felt, and that was by doing what it had done in 2021.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez had raised the expectations of Muslim migrants that they would be able to stay in Spain and if he hadn’t seen the possibility that history would repeat itself, he was a very a dumb man indeed. But it wasn’t all that long ago that Sanchez had been preaching the gospel of mass migration as the answer to the problems of not only Spain, but the West.

Migrants, Sanchez claimed, had given Spain a booming economy and urged Americans and Europeans to accept mass migration. “What is working for us can work for others. The time has come for leaders to speak clearly to their citizens about the dilemma we all face. We, as Western nations, must choose between becoming closed and impoverished societies or open and prosperous ones… Governments can buy into the zero-sum thinking of the far-right and retreat into isolation, scarcity, selfishness and decline.”

Or open their borders to the flood of invaders from the Muslim world.

Before long, Ceuta residents were desperately retreating into the ‘selfish far-right’ thinking of barricading themselves and their families in their homes as the invaders tried to break in.

This agenda was not Sanchez’s alone. Pope Leo, the first American pope, had skipped Independence Day celebrations in America and visited Spain, to prop up the Sanchez regime, which was in the midst of a corruption investigation, and migrant invasion points that were being used to invade Europe, describing them as a spiritual force that he felt moved to pay tribute to.

PM Sanchez claimed that the mass legalization of illegal aliens had been “endorsed by more than 900 nongovernmental organizations, including the Catholic Church”.

Tens of thousands of Moroccan Muslims would not have swarmed Ceuta if PM Sanchez and Spanish leaders had not given them the idea that they would be welcomed and allowed to stay.

Why would they think that? Because it worked last time around. And the time before that.

After the last mass invasion of Ceuta, PM Sanchez promoted the legalization of 500,000 migrants. In 2021, only 10,000 Muslims invaded Spanish territory. This time around some 50,000 did. The Moroccan government did its part, but it had no shortage of volunteers.

In the New York Times, Prime Minister Sanchez had urged the world to learn from Spain. After the whole world saw videos of tens of thousands of Muslim migrants overrunning Ceuta, it’s more urgent than ever that the world learn from the cautionary example of Spain.

Before Ceuta comes to their shores.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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