Spain faced a record wave of migrants in the first two weeks of August: the Canary Islands saw a 126% increase in arrivals and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta saw a 143% increase in arrivals, according to the latest fortnightly report on illegal immigration published on Friday by the Interior Ministry.
Between 1 and 15 August, 1,033 people arrived on 72 boats to the shores of the Iberian Peninsula, while 1,698 people set foot in Spain in July, a significant increase compared to the previous months (January to August), according to a new report from the Spanish Interior Ministry.
Between January and August, 31,155 irregular migrants arrived in Spain, 66.2 per cent more than in the same period last year, when 18,745 managed to enter the Pyrenean country, the same study said. The majority arrived by sea: 29,512 people on 908 small boats.
Most of the irregular migrants come from Mauritania and the Sahel region, where the current escalation of violence is displacing thousands of people and posing serious security challenges for the EU.
Spain is a hotspot for migrant entry, mainly from the dangerous Atlantic route from West Africa to the Canary Islands and from the northern border between the Spanish autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla and Morocco, with which Madrid has had several recent diplomatic disagreements over the migration dossier.
The Spanish-Moroccan border is described by many experts as “the most unequal in the world,” with GDP per capita at opposite ends of the scale, with Spain at nearly $32,677 and Morocco at $3,672, according to the World Bank.
One of the biggest challenges currently facing the Canary Islands authorities is the problem of hosting unaccompanied migrant minors: there are currently almost 6,000 children in accommodation centres, almost three times the capacity of state-run centres.
Ceuta also sounded the alarm this summer, requesting urgent help from the government to deal with a situation they describe as “unsustainable” after the arrival of 416 unaccompanied minors in the last few days, when the maximum capacity of their public centres is 130.
The situation has become so serious that the leader of the centre-right opposition and head of the Spanish People’s Party (PP/EPP), Alberto Núñez Feijoo, recently called on the government to declare a “migration emergency” in the country.
Last July, one of the PP’s most prominent politicians, the party’s parliamentary representative Miguel Tellado, proposed that the Spanish government take drastic measures to curb illegal migration flows, including the use of the army.
