{"id":1736,"date":"2026-07-31T19:43:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T19:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1736"},"modified":"2026-07-31T19:43:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T19:43:16","slug":"migration-is-splitting-europe-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1736","title":{"rendered":"Migration Is Splitting Europe Apart"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In the summer of 1985<\/span>, representatives from five Western European countries met aboard a riverboat in Schengen, a wine-making village in Luxembourg, to celebrate the removal of checkpoints at their borders. According to the document they approved, which became known as the Schengen Agreement, the signatory countries sought \u201csolidarity between their peoples by removing obstacles to free movement,\u201d forming a borderless zone that gave tangible expression to principles of liberal internationalism that were ascendant as the West glimpsed victory in the Cold War.<\/p>\n

Read more Kafka\u2019s Most Entertaining Stories<\/a><\/p>\n

Schengen has succeeded spectacularly, at least by certain metrics. It has grown to include 29 countries, from Portugal to Poland, and more than 450 million people. Four decades on, it remains one of Europe\u2019s most popular policies among people who benefit from it\u2014those who work, study, shop, date, and live across borders, able to cross multiple European states in a matter of hours, without ever stopping their car. But as a mechanism to build European solidarity, Schengen has been a failure.<\/p>\n

The latest evidence of that came this week, when as many as 60,000 migrants from Morocco rushed into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which sits on the North African coast of the Mediterranean. Ceuta has a population of only 83,000 and isn\u2019t even on the European continent. But because it is part of Spain, entering Ceuta, in theory, affords access to 29 countries. The migrants swam or climbed over fences to reach the tiny territory. Several dozen have died.<\/p>\n

Spain\u2019s prime minister, Pedro S\u00e1nchez, decried the situation as an \u201cattack\u201d and a violation of his country\u2019s territorial integrity, vowing that the migrants would be turned back; according to Spain\u2019s interior ministry, more than half of them already have been. S\u00e1nchez blamed trafficking gangs, and others pointed a finger at Moroccan authorities for possibly instigating or enabling the huge number of crossings into the Schengen Area, dwarfing equivalent single-day figures from the European migration crisis in 2015. Morocco\u2019s ambassador to Spain disputed such allegations.<\/p>\n

The political blowback for S\u00e1nchez, a leftist whose pro-immigrant position has differentiated him in an era of resurgent nationalism, was predictable. Criticism came from his domestic opposition in Madrid, as well as from the White House, where President Trump saw an opportunity to paint Europe as lax on immigration and identify an edge for his party as the midterms approach. \u201cThat\u2019s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,\u201d Trump told Fox News.<\/p>\n

The most notable reaction, however, came from other European capitals, which once committed themselves to freedom of movement as a basis for cross-border solidarity, an integral part of shared European Union membership that also includes a common trade policy and, in most cases, a shared currency. Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, called for the suspension of Spain\u2019s Schengen membership (for which there is no formal process), and her foreign minister blamed the Spanish government for the chaos, labeling its plans to grant legal status to more than half a million migrants \u201cprofoundly wrong.\u201d In response, Madrid summoned the Italian ambassador, accusing foreign leaders of \u201cpartisan demagoguery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other countries backed Meloni. Finland\u2019s interior minister argued that Spain had \u201ccompletely failed to protect the Schengen Area\u2019s external border from infiltration,\u201d adding in a post on social media, \u201cThis cannot continue.\u201d France increased checks at its border with Spain, and the chancellor of Austria, which is about 1,000 miles from the Iberian Peninsula, said his country was weighing whether to close its borders.<\/p>\n

Read more The Weird State of the Influencer<\/a><\/p>\n

There is no evidence<\/span> that any of the new arrivals in Ceuta have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland. Transiting the strait typically requires a ferry or plane, and involves border and identity checks that validate whether passengers have the relevant visas. Meanwhile, there aren\u2019t legal mechanisms to suspend a country\u2019s Schengen membership, especially unilaterally. What other countries can do is reintroduce controls at their borders. The authority to do so was written into an implementing convention approved by the signatory states in 1990, and they\u2019ve made liberal use of it. Italy had already reimposed checks at its land border with France because of the anticipated presence of \u201cradical activists\u201d at a festival in Piedmont, in northwestern Italy, and earlier today, Meloni\u2019s government halted passport-free travel at air and sea borders with Spain. Austria had already reintroduced controls at borders with four of its neighbors, citing irregular migration through the Balkans, the burden of migrants on its asylum system, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.<\/p>\n

But these piecemeal steps to police borders aren\u2019t grandiose enough when there\u2019s political hay to be made of immigration. Meloni can\u2019t be outdone by her deputy prime minister and coalition partner, Matteo Salvini, who has taken to social media in recent days to urge, vaguely yet repeatedly, \u201cSuspend Schengen.\u201d Marine Le Pen, the far-right firebrand in France and a candidate for president in next year\u2019s elections, vowed today to restrict the agreement if she came to power. Le Pen\u2019s party, now called National Rally, has expertly channeled anger about Schengen. Amid the 2015 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people crossed into Europe, mostly in flight from the Syrian civil war, party representatives performed death rites on the riverbank near where the agreement was signed 30 years earlier. They laid a wreath on a star-etched monument to the system of free movement created there.<\/p>\n

The corps of mid-level diplomats who created Schengen gave little consideration to its political consequences. \u201cWe did our job as junior ministers,\u201d the French representative, Catherine Lalumi\u00e8re, told me as part of research for my book on the history of the agreement. They thought that borderless travel would fulfill promises made by the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of European integration, and advance both the development of a common market and the cultivation of solidarity among member states. Perhaps they couldn\u2019t have foreseen today\u2019s incendiary debates over immigration.<\/p>\n

Except there were signs of a potent backlash already at that time. In 1983, the National Front, as Le Pen\u2019s far-right party was then known, came to power for the first time in French municipal elections, in a small town called Dreux. A year after Schengen\u2019s creation, the party entered the national Parliament for the first time, in elections held in 1986. As anti-immigrant populism gained influence in France, the government in Paris helped lead the drafting of Schengen\u2019s implementing convention, trying to pair internal freedom of movement with security at Europe\u2019s external borders. Language about \u201csolidarity\u201d present in the original agreement was nowhere to be found in the 1990 document. Instead, more than half of the convention\u2019s 142 articles dealt with security and the exchange of data necessary to crack down on unwanted immigration of the kind now seen in Spain\u2019s offshore exclave.<\/p>\n

The crisis in Ceuta is likely to be contained, and quickly. But if Europe\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Read more Galaxy Brain: Behind the Curtain at Google<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ceuta crisis is undermining an agreement designed to foster \u201csolidarity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1735,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nMigration Is Splitting Europe Apart - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1736\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Migration Is Splitting Europe Apart - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Ceuta crisis is undermining an agreement designed to foster \u201csolidarity.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1736\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-31T19:43:16+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1736#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1736\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"Migration Is Splitting Europe Apart\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-31T19:43:16+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1736\"},\"wordCount\":1222,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1736#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/36b8a33b408650abe2c2c527535b7eba.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1736#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1736\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1736\",\"name\":\"Migration Is Splitting Europe Apart - 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