Nothing to carry: Moroccan youth, the Ceuta crossings, and the body as a political message

 

 

Before: nothing to carry
In the last days of July, the train stations in Morocco were crowded in a manner that belonged neither to rush hour nor to a national exam nor to a football match. What the passangers shared was their age; many of them very young, around sixteen or even less, standing on the platforms alone. Ouled Ziane bus station in Casablanca had the same scene the following day. So instead of taking the bus I drove north to my fieldwork site, expecting the ordinary congestion of late July, when families move towards the coastal cities. The motorway was indeed full, but what filled it was unfamiliar. Along both edges, where nothing resembling a pavement exists, people were walking beside a road built for speed. Around Kenitra, roughly three hundred kilometres from Sebta, they were still walking.

You might assume that people setting out for a border would carry a rucksack, a small case, or at the very least a bottle of water in that heat, however, there was nothing! They carried what they were wearing, and many had already removed their shirts because of the sun, so that the only thing accompanying them was the wish to leave. When someone walks three hundred kilometres and takes nothing with them, it tells us something about the place they are leaving. What remained was the body itself, the only asset in the calculation and the only thing worth saving.

 

Why the youth leave       
In April 2026, Morocco's High Commission for Planning reported, with the ILO and the European Union, that 2.9 million Moroccans aged fifteen to twenty-nine are neither working nor studying nor in training, a condition statisticians label NEET (not in education, employment, or training), and that this covers one in three young people in the country. Around three quarters hold no qualifying diploma, and youth unemployment stood at 37.7 per cent at the end of 2025. The sociologist Hakima Laala connects those figures to poverty, violence, and exclusion that produces what she calls a loss of hope.

 

Gen Z movement
It is also critical to remember the autumn of 2025, when the GenZ 212 movement brought young Moroccans onto the streets of a dozen cities, organising on online platform Discord, without leaders or political parties involved, asking for hospitals and schools rather than stadiums. Hundreds were arrested and at least two young men were killed. Ten months later, the same generation, organising on the same decentralised platforms, walked toward a border instead. What matters here is that they had already tried asking to be recognised as humans, and had been answered with force. So those young people do not experience any of this as a statistic; they experience it as a morning with nowhere to be, in a house where a cousin's remittance from Spain pays for what their own presence cannot.

 

The announcement & the counting
I learned the reason for all of this the way everyone else did, through Instagram. A border was announced as open on the platforms where sixteen-year-olds spend their evenings, and the choice of platform made the intended audience obvious. The explanations then arrived quickly, locating the event in diplomatic disputes and developments in Spanish law, as though conditions inside Morocco were insufficient reason for a body to want its humanity back. Whatever truth any of those readings holds, each one explains the event through the calculations of governments and leaves out the sixteen-year-old on the motorway entirely. Then came the counting! The totals reached around seventy thousand people converging on the same fence and shore. That is the first thing the border does, since it converts a subject who reasoned their way onto a motorway into a body, and then converts the body into a figure. I want to know what happens to dignity at the end of that sequence, when a person becomes a unit in a headline written in a language they hardly understand.

 

They arrived in two ways: Some swam around the breakwaters, and others walked in through the Tarajal area after passing checkpoints on the Moroccan side, which is a detail worth holding on to, because a checkpoint is a place where somebody decides whether a body continues or stops. In a survey conducted by NC Report for La Razón, 70.8 per cent of Spaniards described the mass entry into Sebta as an invasion. The vocabulary of invasion describes a body as having no business where it stands, yet, Sebta and Melilla are themselves the continuation of European colonial presence in Africa. Spain has held both cities for more than five centuries without calling that an occupation, whereas a Moroccan teenager who swims a bay for one night becomes an invader within the hour.

 

‘Engineers and doctors’
Then came the sarcastic comments: ‘The engineers and doctors are on their way’. The mockery was aimed at those who defend migration by insisting that arrivals bring qualifications and contribute economically. Yet both sides of that argument end up accepting the same premise: that a person from the South becomes admissible once they demonstrate profitability. That is a thoroughly capitalist accounting of a human life, and it produces a ranking in which one body is worth admitting and another is worth deterring.
 

The body as message
A question was asked on the Moroccan side of the water: what might a body be worth as a message? I have never seen a movement of that scale with no visible convener, which makes the question of who set it moving so hard to avoid. Tens of thousands put themselves on the road within days on the strength of a signal on a screen, and their bodies became the material through which a message was delivered to Madrid, to Brussels, and even to Rabat. Their worth in that exchange had nothing to do with what any of them could do or make, but lay entirely in the fact of their bodies appearing somewhere inconvenient, at a moment when inconvenience was useful. The image that keeps returning to me is the marionette. A marionette is moved without being consulted, performs a scene written elsewhere, and is put away once the scene ends. But it is the wrong image; these young people decided for themselves, walked for themselves, swam for themselves, and several of them said afterwards that they would do it again. Nobody had to persuade them of anything, because the wish had been in place for years and only the opening was new. That wish, to make a family's life better, is exactly what made their movement usable as a message, and it needed no coordination. Their agency was not taken away, it was put to work.

 

Those who crossed understood this quickly. One of the questions they asked journalists on the Moroccan side, while buses waited to carry them home, was: ‘I want to know why they opened it if they were planning to bring us back’. The people who gave the signal are the only ones in possession of a reply, and they have offered none.