The devices deployed in the Canary Islands to serve the people who arrive through cayucos are “beginning to be exhausted,” in words reported yesterday by EFE from the spokesperson for the Government of the archipelago, Alfonso Cabello, in the press conference after the Government Council. If this trend continues, it is likely that 2023 will be the year in which the most immigrants enter the Canary Islands irregularly, even above 2006, when what is known as canoe crisis, which brought 31,678 people to Spain. In 2023, around 27,000 have done so, as of today and awaiting a new update from the Ministry of the Interior.
And the arrivals of boats from Africa they don’t stop This weekend almost 1,500 immigrants disembarked and, throughout yesterday, there were another five arrivals (three to Tenerife and two to The iron, especially saturated island) with 570 on board, including 46 minors. According to the executive, in the Canary Islands there are 4,000 unaccompanied migrant minors, a number that “continues to increase and so does concern”, since “there is no response according to their needs,” Cabello stated.
He also expressed his discomfort with the central government, considering that it is acting in an uncoordinated manner and is not giving immigration the priority it should, despite the visits to the Canary Islands last week by the acting Ministers of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaskaand Migrations, José Luis Escrivá. The spokesperson reported the sending of a letter by the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, to Pedro Sánchez, in which he asks the acting president of the Government to request the European Union the activation of the community Civil Protection Mechanism.
According to him, this action would allow more funds and resources to provide a better response to the worrying situation that has been occurring in the Canary Islands since a political and social crisis broke out in the summer in Senegal which has been the triggering factor for this massive arrival of cayucos to the Canary coasts. Cabello referred to the agreements with third countries and the deployment of Frontex (European Border and Coast Guard Agency) as some of the measures that could be applied to prevent departures of canoes from the African continent and that the people Traveling in them does not have to risk their lives at sea.
At the same time, the Superior Prosecutor of the Canary Islands, Maria Farnes, spoke along the same lines as the Government spokesperson, and requested more means, resources and a stable structure to care for immigrants. He has asked for an end to the “patches”, and pointed out that immigration in the Canary Islands is not a rare phenomenon, but rather that it “happens permanently” and stated that he does not understand why it is being improvised again when it comes to meeting the people after the cayucos crises of 2006 and the years 2020 and 2021 as a result of the pandemic. Farnés sees the immigration situation in the archipelago as “worrying” “on an organizational, legal and human level” and warned of the “generalization” in asylum requests, except among Moroccan immigrants, who are more “reluctant” to request them.