Originally published at The Crux
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European Union interior ministers held an emergency meeting on Tuesday to discuss the Ceuta crisis, which had raised tensions throughout the bloc last week and through the weekend, and saw the Spanish bishops condemning the use of migration as a “weapon.”
The emergency video conference followed the surge that saw more than 60 thousand migrants charge the frontier of the autonomous peninsular Spanish city on the North African side of the Strait of Gibraltar last week, and included a Spanish delegation and the European Commission.
At least 72 migrants perished during the surge between Thursday and Friday.
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Spain’s government has come under heavy fire from other countries in the EU, with Italy temporarily suspending its borderless travel arrangement with Spain under the EU’s Schengen Agreement.
Spain’s socialist government is widely seen as having a more open – even permissive – immigration policy than many other EU nations, and in January of this year announced plans to grant legal status to potentially hundreds of thousands of persons already living and working in the country without authorization.
Further, critics also pointed to a recent court ruling that Spain cannot immediately
