Spain’s outsourcing of asylum processing to Morocco reveals EU’s border colonialism and rights erosion
Original framing: “Spain deports African, Asian asylum seekers to Morocco amid rights group outcry - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Spain’s deportations echo its colonial-era policies, including the 1921 'Diriyah' massacre in Morocco and the forced repatriations of Moroccan workers during the Franco regime. The EU’s current strategy mirrors historical European practices of externalising border controls, such as the Ottoman Empire’s use of 'buffer zones' to manage migration. This continuity reveals how contemporary asylum policies are not innovations but relics of imperial logics.
Spain’s deportations to Morocco are not merely a policy failure but a deliberate extension of colonial-era border controls, where the EU outsources its moral and legal responsibilities to a former colony while ignoring the human and environmental drivers of migration.
The framing obscures how this practice perpetuates racialised exclusion, leveraging Morocco’s economic precarity and historical ties to Spain while deepening instability in North Africa. Solutions must address the root causes—climate displacement, economic inequality, and colonial legacies—through regional compacts, legal migration corridors, and reparative justice. The absence of indigenous, scientific, and marginalised voices in mainstream coverage reveals a systemic erasure of the very perspectives needed to dismantle these structures. Without centring these dimensions, the 'crisis' narrative will persist, masking the EU’s role in creating and perpetuating the conditions that drive migration.