00:00Caroline Gray is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Aston in Birmingham in the UK.
00:07Caroline, welcome, good to see you. I guess maybe we don't really know the answer, but who are these people
00:12and why are they crossing?
00:15Well, this is a massive influx coming from Morocco and Northern Africa through into Theota.
00:22A much bigger influx than we've seen before. The last biggest crossing was sort of 2021, was about 8,000
00:28people.
00:28We don't quite know why they're coming just now. There has recently been, the Spain's Supreme Court said that, you
00:35know,
00:36any of those coming by sea couldn't just be immediately returned, so it could be related to that.
00:41But this is obviously huge, huge numbers that are coming and the reasons are not exactly clear as to exactly
00:46why now.
00:47But 60,000 people takes an extraordinary amount of organisation. I mean, who organises this?
00:55Well, you've got mafias organising crossings. And obviously there's a big question about whether Morocco's authorities have allowed this in
01:05a way
01:06and not, you know, exercise enough controls on their own borders, because often Morocco does use border disputes like this,
01:14migration issues as part of its kind of broader political disputes with Spain.
01:19So there are those questions there as to whether Morocco has sort of allowed this to happen, which has happened
01:27on occasion in the past,
01:28albeit not as badly as this previously.
01:31And what obligations does Spain have towards these people who've crossed the border? What is their status now?
01:39Well, this is one of the things since Spain actually, its Supreme Court recently ruled that it can't just turn
01:45them back immediately if they've come via sea.
01:48That actually means, you know, they need to be processed under Spain's law on foreigners.
01:52They need to be processed via official procedures. They have a right to have their case heard.
01:57They have a right to legal assistance, potentially to interpreters.
02:00So Spain does actually have does have to provide for these citizens through these from coming from Morocco into Spain
02:09illegally,
02:10does have to provide through them through a formal kind of asylum seeking procedures rather than just being able to
02:16turn them back.
02:16So obviously, that's a huge, huge numbers that will need to go through this.
02:20But I think we need to see how many actually stay, because according to the recent headlines from Spain,
02:24already about half of those who've come in have actually left again.
02:27So I think, you know, it's very unpredictable at the moment.
02:30It also depends how much Morocco cooperates with helping to take some of those back.
02:34So there's a lot of unpredictable factors here at the moment, I would say.
02:38What about Italy's demands that Spain should now be excluded from the borderless Schengen zone?
02:46And this is quite difficult to understand if you're watching this outside Europe.
02:50But just just talk us through that.
02:52Well, I think the key issue here is that within the EU, you've got very different attitudes on how to
02:57handle the migration crisis.
03:00Spain is one of the countries that's been most liberal on this matter.
03:03I mean, you know, just a few months back, the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez introduced a law to allow illegal
03:11migrants within Spain to to go through a regularization procedure.
03:15So basically a whole this is something that, you know, is the most liberal move that we have seen towards
03:22the migration crisis within the EU.
03:24And obviously this is contested by a number of other EU countries, particularly those with with right wing or far
03:31right leaders who want a much stricter controls on migration.
03:35So all of this is feeding into that dispute. And that's where Italy's position comes from there.
03:40A country like Italy, their government was very critical of Spain's decision to allow lots of illegal migrants to become
03:48legal a few months back.
03:49And that's so a lot of those disputes are now feeding into the issues that we're seeing playing out today.
03:56Caroline, thank you for your time. Caroline Gray, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Aston
04:02in Birmingham.
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