Arab News | Italy extends border controls on visitors from Spain as migration feud continues

ROME: Italy on Tuesday extended for another 15 days border checks on visitors from Spain that it imposed after more than 72,000 migrants poured into Spain’s North African territory of Ceuta from Morocco in late July.

Spain, which had responded to Rome’s sanctions with its own border checks on people coming from Italy, also extended its tit-for-tat measures for another 15 days, the Spanish foreign ministry said.

Although most of the migrants returned to Morocco, the government of Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni and other hawkish European leaders used the chaos in Ceuta in July to criticize the migration policies of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Months before the Ceuta crisis, his government had carried out a migrant legalization push.

Italy imposed the border controls – which amounted to random police checks at airports and seaports for passengers arriving from Spain – by claiming a threat to its internal security.

The Italian Interior Ministry used that same threat to justify extending the border checks Tuesday. In a statement it said it had informed the European Union and other European governments that “high risks to internal security persist, in addition to a potential threat related to possible terrorist infiltration.”

Spain, for its part, said it too was extending the retaliatory measures since the conditions that led to them – Italy’s original sanctions – remained in place.

Visa-free travel with a catch

The 27-member EU bloc has a visa-free travel area known as Schengen that allows citizens of most EU countries to travel easily across borders for work and pleasure.

According to the EU, member states are allowed to temporarily reintroduce controls at the EU’s so-called internal borders in case of a serious threat, such as one to internal security. But it also says border controls should be applied as a last resort in exceptional situations, and must be time-limited.

Even before Italy imposed the border checks, travelers leaving Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s other territory in North Africa, were already subject to EU border checks at ports and airports.

NGOs reported that more than 140 people died in the attempt to cross into the territory, including some who drowned or were trampled in a stampede to cross a breakwater barrier.

More than 5,000 migrants have remained in Ceuta, prolonging a humanitarian crisis that has become a political liability for Sánchez in Spain and beyond. His government had decided to carry out an amnesty for immigrants without residency permits who could prove they had been living in the country for at least five months and arrived before Jan. 1 this year. Over 1 million people applied before the window closed.