Locked Outside the Gates of Europe

Mohammed was twenty-six and working at a clothing store in a working-class satellite of Algiers when a friend suggested they try to reach Europe together. He decided to go for a few reasons. One was to avoid compulsory military service, as Mohammed, who has a narrow face, slight frame, and neatly trimmed beard, told me. But he also left for the same reasons most young people seized by wanderlust decide to pick up and go: a desire for adventure, self-knowledge, and freedom. He imagined a better quality of life too, of course. He wanted to finally see the Europe he’d long glimpsed on TV and social media; there was a woman in England he’d been chatting with online; and he hoped to finally meet his father, who’d immigrated to Belgium when Mohammed was still an infant. His life at home was bearable, he said. But he wanted something more.

That was four years before I met him in Melilla, a five-square-mile speck of Spanish territory located along the northeast coast of Morocco, where Mohammed had been stranded ever since, trying to navigate the administrative maze of the Spanish migration system. Most afternoons, he and a half dozen other young men sat in a loose circle of mismatched camping chairs or flattened milk cartons outside a “temporary” migrant housing center. Behind them, beyond a golf course, stood a towering, twenty-foot-high fence topped with razor wire, separating them from Morocco.

As part of Spain, Melilla is in the EU but not in its Schengen zone of hassle-free travel. I went there first in March of 2021 — to escape and return to their home countries.