Spain’s pro-immigration, socialist government has formally declared a migration emergency across the Canary Islands after a sudden surge in migrants arriving by boat from West Africa. Regional leaders say local services can no longer cope.
Counting from October 1, when daily rescues restarted after a quieter spell, more than 12,000 people arrived in six weeks—over three times the total for the entire first half of the year. Canary Islands President Fernando Clavijo put the figure for the first ten days of this month at roughly 7,500, the large majority landing on El Hierro.
El Hierro at Breaking Point.
El Hierro is home to only about 12,000 residents and has roughly 30 hospital beds. Its island council declared a social emergency on November 6 after more than 8,000 people arrived in five weeks and estimated that over 2,000 were still on the island. Clavijo has described conditions as “absolutely unsustainable.” Local officials say the ability to move people onward to Tenerife has already been exhausted. Hospital staff have been forced to perform triage on the dock at La Restinga and at the temporary reception center in San Andrés.
The fishing village of La Restinga, population 673, which depends on fishing, diving and tourism, has been particularly hard hit. Local representatives say the constant arrival of migrant boats has made it difficult for fishing boats to enter and leave port. The number of diving centers has dropped from 11 to four, with clear effects on hotels and related businesses.
Madrid Responds.
Spain’s Interministerial Commission on Immigration activated the emergency on November 10. The central government committed an additional €15.18 million to expand places in state-run reception centers and to fund transfers between the islands and to the Spanish mainland. A separate €1 million was earmarked for the Red Cross to strengthen initial medical care on El Hierro. Officials said they would increase medical and police personnel, speed up processing, and move unaccompanied minors elsewhere in Spain.
Clavijo welcomed the package but said it had arrived too late. Significantly, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party have encouraged illegal immigration by authorizing a mass amnesty for hundreds of thousands of migrants in recent months, which was subject to widespread abuse and fraud.
European Dimension and Origins.
The European Commission, the European Union’s unelected central executive, is monitoring the emergency. A Commission spokesman told EFE that the Canary Islands have already received about €90 million of the €144 million in emergency assistance allocated to Spain for the 2021–2027 period. Spain can also apply to the EU Solidarity Fund as a country under migratory pressure. Frontex, the EU’s central border and coast guard agency, currently has 250 officers deployed in Spain, including in the Canaries, though Clavijo has called for a larger presence.
The Sánchez government dramatically increasing legal immigration, legalizing illegal immigrants through amnesty, and a previous migrant surge into Ceuta, a Spanish exclave on the coast of North Africa, have strained relations with other EU governments, with the bloc being largely free of internal borders under the Schengen Agreement, exposing the wider continent to the consequences of Spanish border mismanagement.
