In Morocco, tens of thousands of young people head north each summer—not to bask on sandy beaches, but to cross them to the other side: Europe. As the early morning sun in Fnideq, near Tangier, barely warms the sand, a group of twenty-something men gather for a football game, pausing often to chat about friends who vanished on 25 August—the day 1,500 people swam from Morocco’s Fnideq to Ceuta, a tiny Spanish enclave on the Mediterranean. The swim across the Strait of Gibraltar is only six kilometres, but not everyone makes it. “I keep checking my phone, hoping not to see news of one of my frie…