Nearly 120 immigrants stormed the border fence that divides the Spanish city of Melilla with Morocco, resulting in five police officers being injured.
This North-African enclave city has a triple fence, over six metres high, around the land border but even so desperate illegal immigrants manage to climb over all three, thanks to their numbers in most attempts.
The group that hit the outer, border fence comprised of 200 immigrants at about 04.30h on Monday morning. Both the Spanish Guardia Civil and the Moroccan police mobilised to counter the breach. Despite their combined efforts 119, all males, managed to make it to the Spanish side
One of the immigrants suffered lacerations from the wire and had to be taken to the hospital, whilst five Guardia Civil officers were slightly injured with one of them now off sick.
The remaining 118 illegal immigrants were transferred to the city’s provisional, immigrant, holding facilities (CETI) whilst they are processed in order to be sent back.
They are also undergoing quarantine in case any of them are infected with the Covid virus.
Editorial comment: Spain should come to the conclusion that holding onto two cities on the North African Coast as some sort of imperial relic is only bringing greater headaches as migration grows.
Give each resident with a Spanish passport a suitable large amount of money to move to the Spanish mainland and hand the cities over to Morocco, who could contribute financially to such an arrangement. It won’t end illegal immigrants arriving but it will eliminate two badly hinged doorways to Spain.
(News: Melilla, North Africa)
Tomás: …And Las Malvinas, you should add, if ever there was case. 1,800 islanders with half a million each prior to 1982 to go and live elsewhere. The Brits didn’t want the Falkland Islands but were just content to kick the can down the road rather than admit that with the Empire long since gone, there was no need for some obscure ex-whaling station and coal-bunker station for the Royal Navy on the other side of the world and therefore just hand it over.
God knows how many dead or mutilated and millions spent since the war beefing up defences. Nobody wanted those islands and most of us woke up one morning wondering what hell the Argentineans were doing invading some obscure Scottish island… because nobody knew where they were.
I saw the headline on this article and expected this to be about the border with Gibraltar. The UK should come to the conclusion that holding onto a rock on the Southern European Coast as some sort of imperial relic is only bringing greater headaches as migration grows.
Give each resident with a British passport a suitable large amount of money to move to the UK mainland and hand the city over to Spain, who could contribute financially to such an arrangement.
Whilst the UK is at it why not do the same with Northern Ireland and hand it back to the people they stole it from.
Malcome: I agree, Europe needs immigrants and the character of countries will change, just as they continually have over the centuries. The England of Alfred the Great was completely different Richard the Lion Heart, as was Chaucer’s England to that of George I with waves of different peoples changing the course of society each time.
We’re not only talking about conquests but of immigrants pouring in spurred by persecution in their own countries, like the Huguenots fleeing religious persecution or Flemish cloth weavers seeking economic advantages; i.e., a better life.
England is a nation of immigrants and when the rising population grew too much, we exported our surplus population through imperialism, although even today we are careful not to call ourselves “immigrants”, but “expats.”
The world is fluid, after all, but that doesn’t mean that we have to leave the seacocks wide open.
The trouble is that immigrants are a good source of dog whistle politics, but it doesn’t solve any problems. War, climate change, poverty are all drivers much of which were created by our richer societies. Meanwhile Britain, Germany, France, Spain & Italy all have ageing populations & we need workers to pay our pensions.