Spanish authorities registered the illegal arrival of 1,457 migrants, all from sub-Saharan Africa, on the Canary Islands between Friday evening and Sunday morning. This continues a trend that up until October 15th of this year has witnessed over 23,500 illegal migrants make landfall on the islands, an increase of nearly 80% year over year.
The latest group of illegal arrivals comes only days after Spain’s migration minister José Luis Escrivá, an ally of the left-liberal prime minister, announced the central government was in the process of putting together a €50 million relief package to help the autonomous community’s government cope with what he described as an “extraordinary migration flow,” El Mundo reports.
Escrivá, during a visit to El Hierro, the archipelago’s smallest island that sits nearest to the West African coastline, on Thursday, October 19th, announced that the government would ensure that the new arrivals—most of whom are military-aged men per mainstream press reports and unconfirmed video footage circulating on social media—would promptly be transferred to the Spanish mainland.
“When we have lower arrivals, migrants stay on average a month and a half in the islands. Now with an average weekly arrival of 4,000, the average stay is a week and a half,” Escrivá said.
On a visit to the archipelago last week, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, for his part, chalked the steep uptick in illegal arrivals to the political “destabilization in the Sahel region,” referring to the countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Gabon, Mali, Niger, and Sudan, all of which are presently ruled by military governments.
Earlier this month, while speaking at the European Political Unity (EPC) summit in Granada, which saw more than 40 European leaders gather to discuss a whole host of pressing issues, Spain’s left-liberal prime minister Pedro Sánchez called on the European Union to help it cope with the massive influx of illegal immigrants.
“We cannot let some areas of our country, such as the south, the Canary or the Balearic Islands face and assume all this irregular migration without solidarity,” Sánchez said during a press briefing.
Just prior to the summit, the Italian island of Lampedusa, which sits just off the North African coast, had been witnessing its own unprecedented influx of illegal migrants. The island, home to around 5,000 native inhabitants, recorded an all-time high in illegal migrant arrivals, as more than a hundred boats, carrying some 5,000 people, landed on the island, as The European Conservative previously reported.
Similarly to Italy’s Lampedusa, which has a small local population of just 6,000, the Canary Islands El Hierro hosts a little more than 11,400 permanent residents.
It’s worth noting that the Atlantic route, which migrants departing from West Africa traverse on their way to the Canary Islands, is one of the most perilous. According to figures from the NGO Walking Borders, the death toll along the route this year has reached nearly 1,000 individuals.
