TIME magazine reports that Spain's foreign minister Josep Borrell claimed during a luncheon that President Donald Trump proposed a border wall across the Sahara to stop the tide of economic migrants from continuing to flow into Europe.
President Trump is theorized to have made this suggestion last June when Josep Borrell accompanied Spanish King Felipe and Queen Letizia on an official White House trip.
The wall's feasibility would be questionable, being approximately 1000 miles longer than even the wall President Trump wishes to build for America's approximately 2,000 mile border.
However mass migration from sub-saharan Africa is a major concern for an already overloaded immigration system in Western Europe. Spain has already received at least 33,600 migrants in 2018 alone, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Between terror/cultural conflict concerns as well as logistical strain, the chaos has already galvanized the rise of anti-immigration politicians critical of the open-border policy much like what has been happening in other parts of Europe.
One part of why the Refugee crisis has been such a geopolitical power-keg is the sheer amount of mistrust between European citizens and their political representatives. Many refugees come entirely without documentation, claiming to be seeking asylum from places like Syria when they are clearly from sub-Saharan Africa or other regions where there are no wars taking place, merely being economic migrants.
The unprecedented nature and scale of this crisis has altered the course of mainstream politics as well, resurrecting conservative and right-wing politics in progressive nations where it previously seemed to be a lost cause. Even the Dalai Lama has expressed concern over the future implications of this wave of migration. Many European countries that struggle with the homelessness of their own native-European populations are increasingly struggling to justify and nonstop flow of people from unfamiliar cultures.