Ben Pawlowski
PEDRO Sanchez is today embarking on a tour of three west African countries in an effort to stem the tide of irregular migrants who attempt to reach the Canary Islands, widely regarded as the world’s most dangerous migration route.
The Spanish Prime Minister will meet his counterparts in Mauritania, Senegal and the Gambia over the coming week, the starting point for the tens of thousands of migrants who attempt to reach the Canaries by small boat each year.
In 2024 alone, over 31,000 migrants have arrived in Spain, 22,300 of whom arrived 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.
The conservative Partido Popular (PP) opposition have accused Sanchez, the socialist prime minister, of inaction amid calls to declare an official state of ‘migratory emergency’ across Spain.
Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, the leader of the PP, said last weekend that ‘there is a migration crisis as a a result of the absence of a migration policy’ and accused Sanchez of ‘not fulfilling his duties’ by only meeting the Canarian regional premier at the end of his 11-day summer holiday in Lanzarote.
In July, Sanchez’s government lost a vote in parliament that would have relocated thousands of unaccompanied migrant minors housed in the Canaries to centres in mainland Spain.
Sanchez last visited Mauritania, the country that produces around 80% of the migrants who arrive in Spain, seven months ago alongside the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Luyen, after the EU promised to deliver hundreds of millions of euros worth of investment for local development and security co-operation in the poverty-torn African nation.
According to the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid, dangerous small boat crossings to the Canaries 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.
Sanchez’s African visit comes just days after hundreds of migrants took advantage of dense fog to attempt to swim to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, located on the north African coast.
This year, there have been 1,622 migrant arrivals into Ceuta so far, a significant increase from the 620 who arrived in the same period in 2023.
