It is rapidly getting worse on the Spanish-Moroccan border. Three times in the past week, mobs of ?refugees? have assaulted the fences that surround Ceuta and Melilla in an attempt to break into the European Union, and at least eight of them have died. Organized groups of up to 500 young African men have been storming the three-metre-high border fences by night with ladders, hoping that in the confusion most will get across.

Several hundred did, though not without damage: Ceuta?s hospitals reported at least fifty refugees with broken limbs or deep cuts. Some didn?t make it: one bled to death after his neck was caught on the razor-wire, another was trampled in the crowd, others were allegedly killed by rubber bullets fired by the Spanish police.

They aren?t really refugees, of course; they are economic migrants. They are not Moroccans, either. The vast majority comes from sub-Saharan Africa, where the poverty is much worse and some people are willing to risk their lives to make it into Europe. One young man set out from Gui-nea more than two years ago and travelled through Senegal, Mali and Algeria to reach Morocco and a chance to crash the border into Ceuta or Melilla.

Stop the wave

What does this spectacle of human misery and desperation remind you of? Why, the only other place where a developed country has a land frontier with a poor country: the border between the United States of America and Mexico.

That border is hundreds of times longer than the twin fences that surround Ceuta and Melilla, so the bands of economic migrants from Mexico and central America have no need for scaling ladders. They just have to avoid US border patrols and not die of heat and thirst in the desert.

Just as the US is strengthening the border defences in the thickly-populated western section between San Diego and Tijuana, so Spain is planning to double the height of its border fences. But nobody believes that the new US fence will cut illegal immigration seriously; it will just push it further inland. Same for the higher Spa-nish fences: as a local aid worker said, it is like ?putting fences in the sea?.

Except that this pose of helplessness is a heap of nonsense. If you put a fence in the sea, as they are now doing off San Diego, it won?t stop water, but it will stop people in small boats. And if you build a really serious barrier on land, like the one between East Germany and West Germany, or the one that Israel is building in the occupied West Bank, it will stop 99.99 per cent of the people who want to cross.

Second home

The US government could build and man an effective physical barrier along the whole of the Mexican border, allowing only legal immigrants to pass through, for a tenth of what it is spending this year in Iraq. Why does it not do so? Sheer hypocrisy and cynicism: US business and agriculture want the ultra-cheap workers that only illegal immigration provides, but the government must make a show of trying to protect the border. So potential illegal immigrants know that those who survive the crossing will find work, and they keep coming.

At the moment, much the same applies in Spain, where the current law says that the police can only deport illegal immigrants if it proves their identity and nationality before a court within forty days. So the illegals, knowing this, destroy their documents, and after forty days they are free to go anywhere in the ?Schengen zone?, including France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries and much of Scandinavia.

Spain will probably change that stupid law one of these days, because its economy does not actually depend heavily on below-minimum-wage illegal immigrants. It will take a lot longer in the US.