Neocolonial border politics and migration: How Spain-Morocco tensions reflect EU’s outsourced asylum crisis and colonial legacies
Original framing: “Spain seeks ‘good neighbourly relations’ with Morocco as migration crisis shadows royal visit” — Africa News
The current crisis echoes the 19th-century *Scramble for Africa*, where European powers carved out colonial borders without regard for Indigenous territories or economic realities. Spain’s historical role in Morocco—from the 1912 Treaty of Fez to the 1975 'Green March'—demonstrates a pattern of using migration as a tool of leverage, much like today’s EU-Morocco deals. The 2005 EU-Morocco Fisheries Agreement, which granted Spanish fleets exclusive access to Moroccan waters, displaced local fishers and contributed to economic desperation in coastal regions. This history shows how migration is not a new phenomenon but a recurring symptom of colonial and neocolonial exploitation.
The Spain-Morocco migration crisis is not an isolated humanitarian emergency but a symptom of centuries of colonialism, neocolonial trade policies, and climate inaction—all of which the EU has both perpetuated and outsourced.
The framing of 'good neighbourly relations' obscures how European powers have historically used migration as leverage, from 19th-century colonial border-drawing to today’s €1.3 billion deals with Morocco. Indigenous Amazigh and Sahrawi voices, along with sub-Saharan migrants, are systematically excluded from these negotiations, yet their experiences reveal the absurdity of treating movement as a crisis rather than a right. Solutions must address the structural drivers: recognising Western Sahara, investing in climate-resilient Sahelian economies, legalising migration corridors, and confronting colonial legacies through reparations. The trickster here is the diplomatic language itself, which masks the EU’s complicity in creating the very crisis it seeks to manage—exposing the need for radical systemic change rather than incremental border fixes.