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Amid the international clamour over Ceuta, the Spanish city invaded by 60,000 migrants from Morocco, there has been a noticeable hush from one quarter: the Left.

There have been no rallies in solidarity with the Moroccans, no celebratory tweets from the Greens' Zack Polanski. Labour backbenchers seldom silent on these matters can be heard on neither television nor radio.

It is as though socialists and other progressives recognise that events on the shores of the Mediterranean expose the grim reality that underlies their utopian worldview. Their dream, when put into practice, becomes a nightmare.

For the Ceuta incursion is 'open borders' in action, the truth behind the 'Migrants welcome here' banners.

Few could blame the young men who descended upon Ceuta, itself a city made up mostly of Christians and Muslims of Maghrebi origin.

While incidents of disorder have been reported, and ought to be condemned, many who entered will have been poor souls lured by promises of wealth and opportunity – lured, too, by the reckless actions of the Spanish authorities.

Pedro Sanchez, prime minister and head of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, opened the floodgates in April when his administration offered amnesty to what he assured voters were the 500,000 illegal migrants living in the country. Two months later, the programme was shuttered with applications for amnesty hitting 1.2 million.

The damage, however, had been done. Thousands of Moroccans saw that Spain was not only willing to tolerate illegal migration but prepared to reward it by granting lawful status to those who entered the nation unlawfully. Sanchez provided the incentive and the Ceuta immigrants took it.

Spanish forces escort migrants to the Ceuta-Morocco border gate in the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta on August 1, 2026

At least 67 people have died in a recent surge of migrant crossings from Morocco to Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta

While many of the 60,000 who took part in the latest incursion are said to be back on Moroccan soil, they have proved to the world that it can be done; that European borders are only as secure as the willingness of European leaders to defend them.

They will be back, and next time they won't go home so quickly.

Socialists are so blindly committed to their ideology that they cannot learn lessons of the past.

Angela Merkel is no socialist, but during her chancellorship she embraced all the Left's ideas on immigration and put them into force, absorbing migrants from the Middle East and North Africa on a scale never seen in Germany.

At the time, her government reassured the markets that this would be good for Germany's bottom line, filling in vacancies especially in the manual labour sector that educated Germans were unwilling to settle for.

A decade on, Berlin's economy is mired in stagnation and the social, cultural and security fallout from importing large numbers of unvetted foreign men includes spikes in violent crime, gang activity and Islamist terrorism.

These developments have helped shift a nation wary of political extremes in the direction of Alternative fur Deutschland, a Right-wing nationalist party that now consistently tops the opinion polls.

All this might seem a distant concern. Let the Europeans worry about European problems.

Except we all know that illegal migration is every bit as much a British problem – and if Britain does not get a handle on it soon, the scenes witnessed in Ceuta could be replicated on the streets of cities here.

Yet, chaotic as that would be, it is exactly what socialists want to see. When they speak about immigration, they conjure up imagines of desperate mothers cradling sickly infants, just pleading for a compassionate country like Britain to take them in.

Not only is this propaganda at odds with the actual demographics of illegal immigration – mainly young, male and unaccompanied – it occludes the human and financial costs of the Left's open-borders agenda.

Mass immigration is not the story of propping up the NHS or social care or the unskilled economy. It is a tale of net fiscal burdens introduced to the UK when migrants obtain leave to remain and bring over large families, including those with elderly and other welfare-dependent members. For more than two decades now, stretching back to Tony Blair's government, the Left's position has been that mass immigration is a moral good in and of itself, that anyone who thinks otherwise must be a racist, and without large influxes of foreigners Britain would suffer economically or culturally.

This lay behind the post-2004 increases in migration that came in the wake of central and eastern European nations' accession to the EU.

Most of the 60,000 migrants who entered Ceuta over the space of a few days from neighbouring Morocco have already returned

Today, however, after much bigger spikes, especially in the years after Covid-19, fears about Polish plumbers seem almost quaint with hindsight. What Britain has witnessed in recent times is dangerously out of proportion. But for the far-Left even this is not enough.

Pivotal to socialist doctrine is the conviction that wealth and opportunity must be redistributed as widely as possible. The average British worker might resent the notion of their hard-earned money being taken in tax and given to those freshly arrived in Blighty, preferring that public resources be spent on the public here in Britain. However, the Left considers this view outdated – even bigoted.

The Left believes in equality of outcomes and, since there is no way to guarantee this for Africa and the Middle East, they regard immigration as another way of delivering redistribution.

By dismantling Britain's borders, they hope to share Britain's wealth with those they consider more deserving of it.

This is not just about socialism but about an ideology that holds even more sway on the contemporary Left: post-colonialism.

Today's progressives regard Britain as one of the chief evil‑doers of history through its empire and colonies, and despite the considerable effort and resources British governments have invested in making amends, it will never be enough for the Left. They want to see Britain punished, and view mass immigration as a righteous cudgel.

Back in the New Labour era, there was a desire to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity'. This shows the sheer cynicism of the immigration ideologues. They might pose as supporters of migrants, but when they think no one is listening they boast about weaponising these people for partisan political purposes. It is a shameful, grubby business.

But what today's Left aims for is more than just demographic taunting. They seek the same disaster utopianism as the government in Madrid.

Spanish Civil Guard members stand guard as migrants sit on the ground in Ceuta, Spain, following recent mass crossings of migrants

They wish not only to confiscate the resources of the average Brit but to sacrifice his safety and that of his family by importing unvetted foreign populations on a scale that cannot be undone by a future government.

This latter point, incidentally, is what motivated agitation and litigation against the Rwanda scheme and other attempts to remove those here illegally. The harder the Left makes it for its opponents to change course once in power, the more enduring its victory. Mass immigration is the 21st century version of the Left's permanent revolution.

Ceuta is what a borderless world looks like in practice. Dismantling every control over immigration does not lead to harmonious, we-are-the-world egalitarianism, it leads to disarray, societal upheaval and political extremism.

What sounds like a utopia in the minds of the socialists is a dystopia for the rest of us who must live in it.