A Glimpse Into the Future

Ceuta and Melilla are tiny enclaves in Africa that belong to Spain. They are all that’s left to Spain of its imperial glory. They are also among the most tragic places in the world.

Every day there are reports of desperate immigrants trying to enter the enclaves. They know that Ceuta and Melilla are part of the EU and that the moment they manage to cross the border they will be protected by Spain’s immigration law and will not be deported.

Ceuta and Melilla are surrounding themselves with fences, border patrols do what they can to prevent the Africans from reaching the fences, the Spanish parliament is debating whether the Spanish border lies right before, right after or right at the fences, and immigrants have started to form crowds and storm the fences, hoping that the border patrols will not manage to stop all of them at once.

Almost nobody outside of the region knows about Ceuta and Melilla. But this tragic place offers us a glimpse of what the future might be like for all of us. Global warming will bring increasing shortages of resources and the scarcity will hit the poorest areas on the planet the hardest.

I read news about Ceuta and Melilla every day and can’t stop imagining the time when we find ourselves locked in small embattled bastions of prosperity among a sea of desperation and poverty.

3 thoughts on “A Glimpse Into the Future

  1. Almost nobody outside of the region knows about Ceuta and Melilla.
    Not quite, unless you mean Europe as the region. We hear lots of sad news from these places very often, as well as news about refugee boats in southern Italy/Greece/Malta, etc.

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  2. “I read news about Ceuta and Melilla every day and can’t stop imagining the time when we find ourselves locked in small embattled bastions of prosperity among a sea of desperation and poverty.”

    Then you may as well imagine Neil Blomkamp’s “Elysium”.

    “Oh look, most of humanity’s going to live in a massively crappy Los Angeles that went Full Johannesburg, and all of the upper-middle class decamped to orbital versions of Bryanston and Sandton!”

    All of the usual moral ambiguities were, of course, rendered even more ambiguous.

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