Barcelona, Spain – The morning he turned 18, the Spanish children’s centre that Ilyas* had been sheltering in for two years since he arrived across the border from Morocco unceremoniously kicked him out.

He wasn’t even permitted to stay for breakfast.

Now that he was an adult, the authorities said; he was on his own.

That was on January 30 this year and Ilyas – who doesn’t like to go by his real first name because of the shame he feels at being unemployed and homeless – left the centre for unaccompanied minors in the Spanish Ceuta enclave on the northern tip of Morocco and headed out in search of some other way to survive.

The small amount of pocket money a social worker gave him before he left Ceuta’s migrant minors’ centre paid for the ferry to the Spanish mainland port of Algeciras. There, he was approached by local social workers who recommended he travel 98km (61 miles) up to the city of Jerez where a place in a facility for young migrants was vacant, they said.

Six months later, Ilyas finally reached Barcelona where he still hopes to find work not just to support himself, but to help his sick father and family back home. But it hasn’t been an easy journey across Spain.

One month after arriving in Jerez, the facility staff told him he could not stay any more. That led to living on the streets for several months while he scoured fruitlessly for job opportunities – nobody there wanted to employ a teenage boy from Morocco.

He finally decided to travel north to the more multicultural Barcelona in the hopes of finding a more sympathetic setting.

But, now, Ilyas is broken after weeks of sleeping rough here too.

“I am tired of life. I hope, for once, something works out well for me,” he sobs as he steels himself in the morning for another day of searching for somewhere he might have a shower and change his dirty clothes before he goes to ask social services for a place to sleep tonight.

Ilyas has been sleeping rough for months now.

Despite all of it, though, Ilyas says he does not regret leaving his hometown of Fnideq in Morocco, close to the Spanish border, when he was only 15. “Living on the street is better than living under my parents’ roof knowing that I have no future,” he says.

Children and young men living in Morocco’s northern cities at the brink of economic collapse, he says, are born with a desire to migrate “inserted into their hearts”.

Fnideq and other border towns have been suffering particularly since Spain closed the border during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and then never renewed the permissions for people to cross daily into Ceuta to work – the main source of local employment for thousands of people in his hometown.

“From the second we are born, we know we need to leave this place.”

‘The worst night of my life’

At the same hour of the day, Ilyas’s mother, Aseya, 42, is partway through her shift as a cleaner at a restaurant by the sea in Fnideq. She is the holder of one of the remaining few jobs in the town. Aseya works 14 hours every day from 6am to 8pm for a salary of just 100 dirhams ($10.24).

Ilyas’s four siblings – Boushra, 17, Zakarya, 12, Adam, 11, and Chaymaa, 8 – sit at one of the restaurant tables for hours waiting for their mother to finish work.

They have little else to do. Boushra, the eldest since Ilyas left, takes care of the younger ones while Aseya is in the kitchen.

Next year, she will finish high school and dreams of studying engineering in nearby Tetouan. It’s an unlikely dream, however, because of the cost it would involve.

“Poor Ilyas,” her mother says softly as she washes dishes. “He used to see us, his parents, sometimes being able to work, sometimes not being able to work and put food on the table. So, he decided he had to do something to change this.”

The day Ilyas left home – May 17, 2021 – Aseya was on one of her long shifts at work. That day marked a rapid deterioration in diplomatic relations between Spain and Morocco when, in a matter of hours, approximately 8,000 Moroccans – mostly men and boys, but some women as well – managed to cross from Morocco to Spain. Thousands of them swam along the coast to Ceuta and walked in off the beach.

Ilyas was among the estimated 1,500 children who went.

Madrid sent 200 extra police officers to help the 1,200 guarding the border with Morocco, but in the end, only 2,700 people were returned to Morocco. Juan Jesus Vivas, the president of the Spanish territory and a member of the right-wing main opposition People’s Party, described the arrivals as an “invasion”.

Ilyas had jumped at the opportunity when he heard so many were crossing to Spain. But his mother was devastated and furious when she discovered that he had left.

“When he heard the news about the border, he went home fast to inform his dad, who did not object,” she says angrily. “When I came back home after work, Ilyas was not there any more. I felt my heart was ripped, it was the worst night of my life.” She sneezes as she grabs some tissue to dry her tears.

“I stayed awake in case he would come back later, but he never did.”

Indeed, Ilyas promised he would not go back until he found a way to help his family out of the situation they were in.

His father is very ill with a prostate condition that requires surgery the family cannot afford. He works intermittently, when he can, at small jobs such as woodwork, as and when they come up.

Ilyas wants to help pay for the surgery and for his younger siblings’ school and university fees. But if he saw that as difficult to achieve three years ago when he left, it doesn’t seem any easier now.

Thousands of jobs – gone in a flash

Once bustling with lines of people, the 8km (five-mile) land border that separates the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco’s Fnideq is now empty and lifeless on a normal weekday morning. Five years ago, it was the start of a bustling working season for residents of the small border town.

The town’s 278,000 inhabitants and those living in nearby towns in the Tangiers-Tetouan province were almost entirely reliant on work, trade and trans-border exchanges with Spain’s Ceuta until COVID-19 shut the border.

After that, as part of an EU-wide bid to stem migration from African countries, the Spanish government ended the agreements that once allowed Moroccans to cross daily to work in the enclave.

In the years since, the inhabitants of Fnideq have lost as much as 70 percent of their income according to the Spanish enclave’s main news local outlet, El Faro Ceuta. The dire economic situation triggered protests in 2021 calling for the Moroccan government to intervene to save the city with more economic support. Many people have since left.

Since then, those who have remained in what has become a ghost town, devoid of any work opportunities or prospects for the future, continue to struggle and say they feel desperate.

Several of Aseya’s co-workers, such as Youssef, 30, are former trans-border workers who used to cross to work in restaurants in the Spanish city every day.

Youssef is not from Fnideq like most, but from a village near Tetouan, and he says the border restrictions have affected all of those living in nearby towns. Like him, they all lost their jobs on the other side of the border in a matter of days.

While he can usually find some work during the summer – Morocco’s peak tourism season – finding work during the winter has become a constant struggle for him and his friends.

“Every time, fewer of us remain in the area. Everyone my age has either already left or is thinking of ways to leave,” he sighs as he watches a group of young men fixated on the restaurant’s TV screen. Spain’s football team is playing against Morocco and the young men eye the players’ t-shirts, hoping they might one day cross the sea to the land they can see from the shore, and even wear one of the Spanish shirts themselves.

The other side of the European dream

Across the water on mainland Spain, however, life is not as rosy as these young men might dream.

Ilyas is at his fourth appointment with social services today.

He has gone from organisation to organisation recommended to him by other Moroccan men living in the Spanish city. He is desperate for help getting off the streets: Barcelona at night is frightening and dangerous for an 18-year-old – more so than in any of the smaller cities he has stayed in before.

A representative at the local Arrels Foundation, a charity which helps homeless people in the city, is sorry to inform Ilyas that all housing programmes for vulnerable people are full in Barcelona, with a waiting list of up to one year.

The worker there confesses to feeling powerless and angry about the state of the Spanish migration system. “It is a complete shame what they are doing to you, you are not the first young adult we have received, all being left to the streets without any guidance the very day of their 18th birthday,” he says.

“I am deeply sorry.”

As of December 31, 2023, the Spanish Central Registry of Foreigners listed a total of 15,045 young people between the ages of 16 and 23. The Arrels Foundation worker explains, however, that many more are believed not to have been registered at all.

The vulnerability of these young people is a major concern for charities in Spain, as they have support withdrawn at the age of 18.

“We are asking people to be completely autonomous at an age when the rest of society is not,” Miguel Tortajada, coordinator at Tomillo Foundation, told the Spanish news outlet El Plural in 2020.

By contrast, the average age that Spanish young people become completely independent – no longer relying on parents or family support, for example – is 30 according to Eurostat data.

Young migrants, on the other hand “are being asked to do this with more than 10 years fewer and circumstances surrounding them that are not even remotely similar to those of any young person with a family and minimum resources”, the Spanish publication argues.

Ilyas sits on a bench looking at a map that a worker at the social services office has given him. It shows where he can take a shower and eat during the nights he is sleeping on the streets until he finds a job that allows him to pay for a room.

He watches people walk by smiling and relaxed and fears they might be laughing at him. “Since I started living on the street, I’ve had this trauma. I feel everyone that laughs close to me is making fun of me,” he says.

After examining the map, Ilyas will walk to find a quiet park where he can spend the night. Missed calls from his mum pile up on his phone screen but Ilyas does not want to answer and be forced to tell her just how dire his situation has become; he does not want to worry her more, he says.

The fear of Fnideq’s mothers – waking up to find their sons gone

On the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, Aseya is worrying regardless.

She has finished her shift and immediately goes to check if Ilyas has called back or responded to any of her messages.

“Whenever he calls I feel a huge relief inside, but those periods when he is struggling and finds it hard to communicate with us, I get very scared and do not stop crying,” she says as she grabs her phone impatiently, a picture of Ilyas on her locked screen background.

She recalls Ilyas’s days at Ceuta’s juvenile centre for migrants, when his phone would sometimes be taken away by the youth centre staff, she does not know why, and they would be unable to speak for several days. The periods of silence are something she has never grown accustomed to.

Now, having spent more than one day without hearing back from her son while he wanders the streets of Barcelona, Aseya calls different acquaintances and family members who also have children in Spain and might have heard if he is well.

“Even within our own family, there are many other young men who fled to Ceuta at the same time as Ilyas,” Aseya explains. “We mothers, we sometimes call and talk about our children. We share our pain of being away from them.”

Late in the evening, she returns home with her younger children, makes dinner and counts the money earned during the day. Her son Zakarya, who enjoys maths at school, helps his mother ensure her boss has paid her the correct amount and that the taxi driver has not taken more than the agreed price. In this house, every penny counts.

Through it all, Aseya longs for Ilyas to return.

“We tried tirelessly to convince Ilyas to come back but he would not,” Aseya cries as she looks at photos of him as a child. “He sees that even if he goes through hard circumstances out there, if he comes back he will only go through the same hard circumstances with us here besides having fewer opportunities to change anything about it.”

Aseya kisses Ilyas’s picture and prays he will soon find a place off the streets.

Then she looks across at his younger brothers with fear. They are still at school, but they say they want to be like their brother and cross the sea when they are older. Her fear now is that, one day, she will return from work to find them gone, as well.

It is a nightmare that haunts her and many other mothers in the Moroccan border town of Fnideq every night.

For his part, Ilyas is acutely aware of this fear his mother lives with. But he will not try to dissuade his brothers from taking the same step, he says.

“Every kid in Fnideq dreams about crossing,” he says helplessly as he watches people passing him down the street.

“Nothing I say will make them change their mind; nothing will make them give up on the possibility of having a better life.”

*Name has been changed