What we lose when migrants become illegals-
Faten Ben Omar El Azizi drowned last month while trying to cross into Spanish exclave of Ceuta. Playing in women's league in Morocco while working part-time at cemetery — where she is now buried — offered little prospect of better future, and so she decided crossing was worth risk. El Azizi was among nearly 150 who died at Morocco-Ceuta border last month. This was no anomaly: In 2025, at least 3,400 people died or went missing while trying to reach Europe.
What is natural human response to tragedy like Ceuta? Grief, surely? Shock, perhaps even anger, at circumstances that could make thousands decide that risking death was preferable to remaining where they were. But listen to reaction of much of Western political establishment and you encounter vocabulary so impoverished that there appears little to say beyond "security" and "legality", writes Saptarshi Basak.
Obvious claim is crossing a border illegally is, in fact, illegal. But an illegal act does not make human being illegal. There is, as migration scholar Nicholas De Genova argues, no thing matter-of-fact about "illegality" of migrant; it is not inherent characteristic of person but status produced through state's immigration law and enforcement.
Natural rights of that person — which John Locke would describe as pre-political rights that exist independently of any government — are same as yours and mine, so-called "legals". Second common counterargument is that "illegals" make host countries dangerous to live in. Empirically, however, evidence does not support relationship between immigration and violent crime in Europe. And in US, research finds immigrants, including undocumented ones, generally commit crimes at lower rates than US-born people.
Why have we come to treat migration as aberration, and not as force that has shaped course of history and society?
People have been moving for thousands of years, transforming linguistic and cultural landscapes of entire continents, long before modern nation-state started insisting that everyone belongs somewhere and therefore requires permission to enter somewhere else.
Migration is ancient human phenomenon, but discourse around it today is confined within remarkably narrow and young framework of borders. Irony is that for much of modern history, it was Europeans who were moving. Their mobility was framed as exploration, opportunity or empire-building, even as colonial expansion wiped out indigenous peoples across world. And are we going to gloss over fact that European colonialism, disease, wars, and financial and foreign-policy decisions created many of conditions from which 21st-century migration emerges? Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians and Libyans, among others, did not simply appear at Europe's borders. Their journeys cannot be separated entirely from history of Western intervention and extraction.
Language we use to describe migration shapes how we see migrants. Talking about borders cannot mean switching off ability to see human on other side. So, one keeps returning to El Azizi. Our response to her death cannot begin and end with whether she was legally entitled to cross a line on a map.