BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Spain’s leader met with the regional president of the Canary Islands on Friday to discuss illegal migration as the archipelago struggles to care for thousands of people. unaccompanied minors who made it there.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, a Socialist, has been on holiday with his family in Lanzarote, one of the islands in the archipelago, since the beginning of the month. He is now back at work and has held talks with regional president Fernando Clavijo, who governs the Canary Islands in coalition with the conservative Partido Popular.
Overcrowded boats with migrants are constantly arriving in the Canary Islands, which are located in the Atlantic Ocean and are closer to the northwestern African coast than mainland Spain.
Sánchez’s meeting with Clavijo in La Palma, another island in the Canary Islands, came a few days before he travels to Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia to address the problem of irregular migration. The West African countries are the main launching pads for migrants who travel by boat.
Although Sánchez did not make any statements after the meeting, his Minister for Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Victor Torres, also a former regional leader of the Canary Islands, said that the talks with Clavijo had been fruitful.
On behalf of the Spanish government, Torres announced 50 million euros ($55.6 million) for the archipelago, additional aid that had been given in previous years but not allocated this year.
The archipelago has become one of the main entry points for irregular migrants entering the European Union. While adult migrants and refugees leave the islands for mainland Spain and other parts of Europe after arrival, unaccompanied minors fall under the responsibility of the regional government and remain stuck there.
The Canary Islands government says it has the capacity to care for 2,000 minors, but is currently caring for more than 5,500 child and teenage migrants who reached the archipelago on their own or who lost their parents during the perilous boat journey from the African coast. As a result, many of the children live in overcrowded reception centres with limited access to education, healthcare, legal services and other rights they are entitled to under EU and Spanish law.
Torres said Sánchez and Clavijo pledged to continue working on long-term solutions, but that would require a change in the law by parliament to make solidarity mandatory.
An attempt to do so failed at the end of July, when parliamentarians, including those from the Partido Popular, refused to even consider a proposal that would have required other regions of Spain to take in some of the unaccompanied minors trapped in the Canary Islands.
According to statistics from the Spanish Ministry of the Interior, more than 22,300 people arrived in the archipelago from January to mid-August this year, 126% more than in the same period last year.
On Friday, Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service said it had rescued 173 people, including six babies and eight women, and recovered two bodies from a boat found near the island of El Hierro.
The Atlantic route from West Africa to the Canary Islands is one of the deadliest in the worldAlthough an accurate death toll is not known due to the lack of information about the departures from West Africa, Spanish migrant rights group Walking Borders estimates the number of victims to be in the thousands.
Migrant boats that get lost or get into trouble often disappear into the Atlantic Ocean, while some drift across the ocean for months until they found in the Caribbean And Latin America containing only human remains.
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