Although Europe and Africa are individual continents separated by the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, there are a couple of places on the African continent where a European country shares a land border with Africa. These are the Spanish enclave cities of Melilla and Ceuta, both bordering Morocco on the Mediterranean coast. As rare bastions of Europe on a continent bursting at the seams with refugees and would-be migrants, each is a tempting target for illegal migration and is consequently heavily fortified.
On Friday, those fortifications around Melilla, a Spanish city of about 86,000, proved insufficient to stop 2,000 migrants, armed with sticks, knives and acid, who were attempting to surge across an iron fence separating the city from the Moroccan city of Nador. The scene turned deadly when some of the mob, mostly from Chad, Niger, Sudan and South Sudan, began to fall while attempting to scale the fence, which rises in places to 30 feet. The falls and the ensuing stampede resulted in dozens of fatalities, estimates ranging from 23 to as many as 87. About 140 Moroccan police and 49 Spanish Civil Guardsmen were injured in the melee as well.
During the surge, around 500 of the illegals, all of them young males, made it into Spanish territory. Although there is some dispute about how many avoided capture (see tweet above), officials said most were rounded up and returned to Morocco; the remainder were transported to a local migrant center, where authorities were “evaluating their circumstances.”
The situation faced by Melilla and Ceuta as European outposts on a continent teeming with angry hordes clamoring to escape, exemplifies the precarious position the West finds itself in the modern world. A recent survey of young people in 15 African countries showed that more than half (52 percent) were considering leaving for Europe or the United States. A 2019 survey showed that perhaps a third of all Africans (1,404,211,145 at last count) would like to leave. Of those, 27 percent named Europe as their preferred destination and 22 percent named North America.
This won’t end anytime soon.
For more, see Breitbart.