Reading through European reactions to the Ceuta-crossing, one issue stood out to me. There was a fundamental problem with much of the analysis and commentary on the situation; they were dominated by centralised, top-down, and Eurocentric explanations. There was, and is, a disproportionate focus on EU migration policy, and on the capacity of Europe (or lack thereof) to accommodate a new “wave” of migration. The European Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration, Magnus Brunner, exemplified the coldness of security language by arguing that the crossing was “a test of our European resilience and of the security of our external borders”.
Evidently and expectedly, the reactionary right could not be happier for this to happen for them to abuse and politicize the situation, to reconfigure the spatiality of the Ceuta-crossing. It also allowed them to figuratively relocate the crossers (reduced to an anonymous mass of single, sexual, unskilled, and radicalised men), from Ceuta to the gates of European capitals, evoking reality-detached metaphors of invasion and even prospects of great replacement. Reactionary forces such as Vox, AfD, Meloni and Trump and the MAGA movement, as well as conservative platforms and grifters worldwide, hijacked the discussion, demonstrating the ability to weave a narrative that fits their ideological commitments against ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender minorities (Salhi, 2025). It unfolded among Neo-Nazis too: extreme right actors showed nazi symbols and insignia during anti-migration protests in Spain.
Even in Morocco, the discourse has been equally cold and distant: the government remained silent for days before it took a line of argument that the Ceuta-Crossing was purely driven by a disinformation campaign and geopolitical influences. It showed little expression of condolences for those who lost their lives. Political commentators also evoked reductionist, elitist explanations: Ceuta as a result of the uncivility of the young masses, or their unwillingness to change their own professional and social misfortunes, or due to the erosion of paternal authority. The disconnect from the obvious is stellar: the Gen-Z protests were an expression of dissatisfaction with economic, political, and social exclusion that took place less than a year ago.
The whole picture is not about Europe. There is much more hidden behind the cold “security” language and behind the reactionary right’s propagandist, racist language. The dominance of security language and concepts does not, and will probably never, speak about why people flee or cross borders. On the contrary, this language justifies a fearful obsession with the other as inherently threatening, something core to the discursive work of the European migration discourses, which is radicalised in the language of the reactionary right. This also appears to punish attempts to exhibit solidarity with victims.
Furthermore, there is a problem of dishonesty and distance within the ivory tower of Eurocentrism with regards to the Ceuta-crossing, largely for presuming the homogeneity the group of crossers. It ignored how crossers included mothers with newborns, teenagers and young adults, employed and unemployed, people with disabilities, and civil war refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. Has anybody wondered what makes a 12-year old girl, a young adult with a job, young parents with a baby, or even a grandmother decide to forgo their lives in Morocco and start swimming towards Ceuta? Why were their stories never heard?
Under the hegemonic, cold, and distant language, and under the propagandist language of the far right, there are overlooked issues. Evidently, little to no attention was or is devoted to the social and psychological roots of the Ceuta-crossing, to the role of the “West” in perpetuating political, social, and economic misfortunes in neighbouring countries, or to the corpses floating on the doors of Europe (this time amounting to nearly a 100). Essentially, there are dimensions that are less European—less about processes of externalisation, securitisation and migration governance.
At a microsociological level, i.e., to have a better understanding Ceuta-crossing as an extension of a deeper structure and an established discourse, the concept of Harga (transliteration: the burning) comes to the fore to understand the decision of many that left, leave, or will leave everything behind and cross towards the Ceuta enclave or Europe.
Harga is a concept cemented in the collective psyche and colloquial vernacular language of the lower class in Morocco—from which I myself hail. Harga, a concept that emerged during the French colonial rule in the 1920s, refers to clandestine crossing towards Europe, to achieve the European dream, traditionally with boats, a response to prevalent feelings of helplessness and hopelessness tied to socio-economic exclusion. The prevalent migration discourses and politics tend to de-historicise migration and overlooks its colonial history.
The Moroccan political scientist Yazid Benhadda (2025) contends that early restrictive migratory positions did not prevent migration towards France. They opened routes to develop alternative ways supported by migrant networks, reflecting migrant agency, resilience and resistance to an unequal border regime between the coloniser and colonised nations. Such alternative routes have long been faced by a colonial punitive logic from both French and Moroccan authorities, which relied, and still rely, on criminalization, surveillance, propaganda, tighter passport controls, and repatriation.
Today, in the context of European migration governance and the externalisation of borders, Harga continues. It continues through traditional (boats across the Atlantic) and alternative routes towards Europe. It transformed into documented (and vlogged) stories of months-long hikes throughout the Balkan forests, despite imminent risks of deadly experiences with violence and with harsh winter.
With Harga as a response to economic misfortunes (Mnasri, 2023), and as a collective psyche and a vernacular as I argue here, there are deeper sociopsychological considerations that are buried under security language and reactionary propaganda. Psychologist and feminist activist Dr. Rim Akrache observes that the Harga of those coming from precarious backgrounds constitutes a gateway to restore self-worth against pent-up feelings of social humiliation at home. Such a gateway backfires due to the reality of clandestine travels and the associated exposure to racial discrimination and exploitation, leading to further psychological injury and to the prevalence of feelings of shame for failing to meet familial expectations and sacrifices. Many of the returnees from Ceuta expressed conflicted feelings of fear, anxiety, and torment after being subject to sexual and physical violence from authorities and from other crossers, and after traumatising walks through floating corpses of their compatriots.
As a vernacular, Harga entails the awareness of clandestine migrants of what lies ahead, and the hope to escape a world of social and economic precarity into an imagined paradise. This paradise that has long been mediated by social performances of success by those who actually “made it”, ignoring those who did not. This awareness unfolds in expressions such as n’riski and n’ghamer (I risk) and n’sauvi darna (I save family from poverty), recurrent among the youth of precarious social spheres, even among children.
Music, traditionally Raï and Moroccan Folk (Chaabi), has long made the vehicle that has romanticised and thematised the Harga, and the associated feelings of hopelessness and later homesickness (Ghorba, or the feeling of estrangement). Singers such as Reda Taliani (Algerian Rai) and Abdelaziz Settati (Moroccan Folk) have long artistically imagined and sung about the boat that takes us across, about making it abroad, and about homesickness. Reda Taliani captures (and romanticises) the experience of perpetual attempts to sneak into Europe through ships or trucks singing “And myself, keep wandering, sleeping everywhere, I roam between posts, leaving it to God, wherever it (l’Harga) happens”. Reda Taliani, elsewhere, sings:
Take me to the land of light
Here, all I do is wander around
I have no income, no place to call mine
I pay in Euros and Dinar, oh my,
Oh Sailor! Take me with you”
Music has also long lamented the loss of lives in the sea, expressing the collective feelings of the families of the Harraga. The poem “The Sea of Storms” by the Algerian poet Mohamed El Badji, written during the Algerian war of independence, later turned into a famous Rai song, reads: “Oh sea of storms, what have you done to men and boys, young women and girls? Those whom you took aboard their ship have disappeared from sight. O sea, you have become a raging flood!” Cheb Khaled, in his song Harraga (clandestine immigrants), laments the loss of youth in sea; on his tongue the youth sing: “we leave, mother and father, the future is doomed; life is tasteless—Fish is better than worms”. Fish and worms here refer to dying at sea rather than at home.
A favourite band of mine, Labess, besides singing about estrangement (Ghorba) and identity struggles of immigrants, also laments the continuity of boats and the perpetual loss of lives. The song, Chaal Mazal (How much more), asks:
“How many more seas must we cross
To strike deals with the captain?
Oh! And how long will death keep on circling
Before our homelands could live in safety
And how many graves must we dig
And how much long must humanity weep”
Moroccan (and broadly, North African) rap has also made a central theme of l’harga. Perhaps what sets rap apart from Rai and Chaabi is not only its prominence among youth, but also its merging of Harga with expressions of felt exclusion and loss. Several rap songs explicitly speak about l’harga in the context of l’hogra (the Moroccan word for feelings of injustice) due to economic exclusion, unemployment, and drug abuse, as well as about the ultimate desire to turn things around. Such songs reflect a real vernacular, reflected in expressions about wasted time and life, and as mentioned above, n’sauvi la famille, n’riski, etc.
Such rap songs express a pent-up anger about such conditions, but also apologize to parents for taking a risk with deadly roads, often without any heads-up. Moroccan rapper 7ari, alongside an expressive music video, captures this:
“4AM, I do not answer,
Has he died, is he dead?
I waited my land to get fixed, they said it would!
The ship sailed away, I followed swimming
Mom, do not fear”
Even in songs critical of the politics and economy in the country, references to inevitable migration are imminent: amid angry lyrics, Moroccan rapper Raid sings: “Just one chance and the youth would escape in masses”. l’Morphine, in an equally angry song, takes a dig at a growing overzealous nationalistic rhetoric reflecting a state of collective narcissism, and sings:
“A woman took her kids and boarded a boat,
Raised their hands in prayer: Europe or death!
Lived a bitter life, smells like ammonia,
Because life is not only about Zellij, Jelaleb, and cuisine (reference to nationalist obsession with cultural tokens)”
If the Ceuta-crossing and reactions to it tell us anything, they tell us a story about the obsession with securitised, sterile approaches to keeping people at bay, and equally importantly about the immediate resort to languages and metaphors of doors, locks, walls, and even of pests and hordes. This language punishes attempts to exhibit solidarity. It is not curious about why people would rather die to cross borders, than not attempt to cross. Contrarily, it justifies a fearful obsession with the migrant as presumably homogenous (in the language of the reactionary right: young, male, sexual, radicalised) inherently threatening, and ignores the struggles of a heterogenous group of parents with newborns, teenagers, seniors, people with disabilities, and civil war refugees from Sudan and elsewhere who have already crossed dangerous routes.
Bibliography
Benhadda, Y. (2025). Rooting lhrig: Burning borders in colonial Morocco (1919–1955). Migration Studies, 13(3). doi:doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnaf035
Mnasri, C. (2023). Tunisian harga: facts, theories, and conclusions. The Journal of North African Studies. doi:10.1080/13629387.2023.2229166
Salhi, M. (2025). Surprises, symbols, and mainstreaming: Symbolic politics in AfD’s European elections campaign. Journal of Language and Politics. doi:doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24202.sal
Dr Mohamed Salhi is an early-career researcher and lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt, working at the intersection of political science, sociology, and linguistics. He is currently working on his first book, Crisis Discourse of the Radical Right, for the Cambridge University Press Series in Critical Discourse Studies. His research interests include critical discourse analysis, crisis discourse, far-right populism, visual populism, and the mainstreaming of the far right.
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