Ben Pawlowski
THE Canary Islands are set to benefit from a €14 million package of support from the European Commission aimed at providing increased capacity to welcome the thousands of irregular migrants who arrive on the archipelago each month.
The announcement was made last week following an official visit to the islands from Margaritis Schinas, the European Commission vice-president, who told a press conference alongside regional president Fernando Clavijo: “In the Canary Islands, you are not alone; Europe is at your side”.
In 2024 alone, over 26,000 migrants have so far arrived in Spain via the Canary Islands, an archipelago located 800 miles from the Spanish mainland in the Atlantic Ocean and just 67 miles off the African coast.
The route between the western coast of Africa and the Canary Islands is widely regarded as the world’s most dangerous migration route, where some 4,808 deaths were recorded in the first five months of 2024, equating to 33 deaths a day or one every 45 minutes.
According to the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid, dangerous small boat crossings have surged amid a wave of political and social instability in the Sahel region, where there have been ten coups in seven countries in just the last three years.
Announcing the package of support, which is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), Schinas insisted that the European Union ‘will continue to play an important role in the prevention of irregular arrivals by strengthening cooperation and partnership with countries of origin and transit, which are of particular interest for the migration management in the Canary Islands, such as Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia’.
The migrant crisis has become a political headache for prime minister Pedro Sanchez, with regional premier Clavijo, linked to the conservative Partido Popular (PP) opposition), claiming the Socialist leader has ‘abandoned’ the region.
Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, the PP leader, has previously blamed Sanchez for the crisis, accusing the prime minister of ‘not fulfilling his duties’ and stressing that ‘there is a migration crisis as a result of the absence of a migration policy’.
In July, Sanchez’s government lost a parliamentary vote that would have relocated thousands of unaccompanied migrant minors, relieving pressure on facilities in the Canaries which have been overwhelmed amid a startling rise in arrivals.
Over the summer, Sanchez visited his counterparts in the poverty-stricken west African nations of Mauritania, Senegal and the Gambia, the starting point for the tens of thousands of migrants who attempt to reach the Canaries by small boats each year, aiming to support the creation of local jobs which would dissuade migrants from making the perilous journey to Spain via sea.
