Before the Italian election in March of this year, the focus for Italian politicians was firmly on immigration. And since the new government formed, new Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, a populist and nativist who leads the party formerly known as the Northern League and now called the League, is still milking the issue to gain support outside his party.

The highest profile incident happened in early June, when Salvini refused to allow a boat of migrants to land in southern Italy. The boat would later dock in Spain. While Salvini’s policies may have had little impact on migration overall — migration was down under the last government, too — there’s no doubt that his extremist anti-immigrant rhetoric is having an impact on Italian society and many of the migrants coming from the Middle East.

Some migrants and refugees are now setting sail from Morocco with the intent of landing in Spain, a slight shift from the Libya-to-Italy path that became popular after the European Union cut a deal with Turkey to stop predominately Syrian refugees from entering Europe. Only around 23,000 migrants have traveled that route, according to the International Organization for Migration, and Libya is still the primary set-off point. But Middle Eastern migrants have been forced to adjust their paths to Europe before and may have to do so again.

“From North Africa's perspective, the ball is now in Morocco's court. … The question is whether Morocco can contain the growing migration flow to Europe,” Riccardo Fabiani, a geopolitical analyst at the research consultancy Energy Aspects, told Al-Monitor. “Its relationship with Spain could be tested over the next months, although I don't expect a crisis comparable to the Italian-Libyan issue.”