������Ƶ

The migration dynamics between Algeria and Spain are a brutal convergence of geopolitical bargaining, externalized border controls, and human desperation. Once a champion of pan-African solidarity, Algeria has undergone a radical transformation into a primary enforcer of Europe’s southern frontier, detaining and expelling over 31,000 people to Niger in 2024 alone through a network of formal and informal sites before abandoning them at the border without sustenance. This is no mere change in policy but a calculated strategic alignment, driven by European pressure and domestic political expediency, evidenced by its new cooperation with the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex, the International Organization for Migration, and Italy on police training and border management.

The consequences are a humanitarian catastrophe characterized by lethal maritime routes — a record 11,455 Algerians risked the journey by sea to Spain in a single year, a number that has since drastically increased — and abandonment in the desert, with children, women, and men forced to march kilometers to the nearest village. This manufactured crisis, fueled by Algeria’s use of migration as a “bargaining chip” with the global north, creates a cycle of exploitation and instability for migrants who survive the journey, reducing human beings to mere instruments in a transaction of power between continents.

The human cost of this manufactured corridor is both staggering and deliberately obscured. The 225 documented deaths on the central Mediterranean route and 123 on the western Mediterranean route in just the first few months of 2025 are a direct outcome of deliberate policy choices. At present, the rate at which fatalities are climbing is set to pass the previous year’s grim record of more than 500. It is pure carnage funded by and funding a sophisticated and mercenary economy where desperation is the sole commodity. Migrants are often coerced into mortgaging their futures for up to €10,000 ($11,721) — a sum more than 32 times the average Algerian monthly wage — for a one-way passage on an overcrowded death trap, financing criminal networks that invest millions in logistics and high-speed boats.

Meanwhile, the Algerian state’s contribution to this economy of cruelty is not intervention but predation, criminalizing the very act of flight with prison sentences of two to six months, and fines under a penal code that perversely equates seeking a future with a criminal act. The entire architecture — from the smuggler’s fee to the state’s fine — is built on the systematic monetization of despair, a closed loop where every actor profits from the cycle of movement and repression except the human being at its center.

On interception or arrival, the migrant’s ordeal is transformed rather than ended.

Spain’s reception system operates in a state of deliberate abdication or dysfunction, chronically underfunded and outsourced to NGOs that scramble to meet the needs of thousands with minimal state support. For the 4,119 Algerians who arrived in the first half of 2025, a temporary reprieve exists not by design but by diplomatic rupture; the 2022 suspension of the Spain-Algeria friendship treaty effectively neutered a functional readmission protocol, leaving Madrid able to issue 9,995 orders for Algerians to leave the country, but politically incapable of executing them.

This is no mere change in policy but a calculated strategic alignment, driven by European pressure.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

However, forced liminality is not protection but state-sanctioned misery, channeling individuals into an economy of exploitation where contracts promise €1,300, but deliver €800, with employers extorting additional daily fees simply for transportation to where their labor is needed. This state-sponsored system is further enforced by constant police harassment and the rising specter of far-right vigilantism, where groups linked to political parties such as Vox organize patrols targeting North Africans, transforming cities like Murcia into theaters of social tension where young Algerians can be assaulted with impunity and told, even by a homeless Spanish national, to understand their place.

The Algerian state’s role is particularly worrisome. Domestically, it performs a pantomime of control for European audiences, wielding Law 09-01 to imprison its own citizens for the “crime” of seeking a future, sentencing them to months of detention and fines of up to €430 for the act of departure — a legislative framework enacted in 2009 under direct EU pressure. Such internal repression is merely the prelude to its externalized brutality. Beyond its borders, Algeria has industrialized human disposal, perfecting the practice of “desert dumps,” where over 31,400 people in 2024, and a further 2,222 in just 21 days during April this year, were transported in unofficial convoys to the Nigerian border and abandoned at the “zero point” without food, water, or shelter, forcing a 15 km march through the desert to Assamaka.

It is far from effective border management, but a deliberate policy of dehydration and exposure, a fact so systematized that the International Organization for Migration and Nigerian authorities have been compelled to erect signposts along the route. This forms one link in a “chain deportation” corridor, a regionally integrated machinery of repression where migrants are first apprehended in Tunisia, violently pushed into Algeria, detained again, and then transported south for expulsion — all coordinated through high-level summits and interior minister meetings with Italy. Algeria has thus commodified its sovereignty, transforming its territory into a transit zone for state-sanctioned suffering and using the very bodies of the dispossessed as its primary bargaining chip in relations with the global north.

A fundamental contradiction lies in the absolute closure of legal pathways. Algerian citizens face the highest visa refusal rates in the Schengen area, with 34 percent of applications rejected in 2024. This policy, engineered by Europe, deliberately funnels migration into irregular channels, ensuring a constant supply of people to be intercepted, criminalized, and used as bargaining chips. The EU avoids direct funding to Algiers, instead channeling resources through international agencies for training and “capacity building,” thus maintaining a veneer of deniability while financing the architecture of repression.

The outcome is a perfectly engineered crisis. Europe achieves its political objective of reduced arrivals by outsourcing violence. Algeria leverages its border enforcement for diplomatic capital and police cooperation agreements. Meanwhile, the migrant is caught in a loop: fleeing unemployment that officially affects 29.3 percent of Algerian youth, risking death at sea, surviving exploitation in Spain, and facing the constant threat of a violent expulsion back to the very deserts he or she crossed.

This system is not a failure of policy, but a success of design — a design where human life is the cheapest variable in the cold calculus of money, power, and borders.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington DC and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. X: @HafedAlGhwell