In Spain, immigration has been pushed to the centre of the political arena, as the number of undocumented arrivals surges and the country’s right-wing opposition toughens its stance on the issue.
A tour of West Africa this week by the Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has highlighted immigration’s status as a priority issue for his government while underlining the political division it generates.
The tour of Gambia, Mauritania and Senegal focused almost exclusively on migration, with Sánchez underlining the importance of tight controls to clamp down on people traffickers. He also acknowledged the work of the 100 or so Spanish police officers who have been deployed to West Africa to work with their counterparts there.
Sánchez also said migrants who reached Spain illegally should be sent back to their countries of origin, although repatriations are difficult to implement in practice and depend heavily on bilateral co-operation.
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However, the Spanish leader’s tone during his African trip was mostly upbeat as he advocated regulated migration.
“For Spain, migration is wealth, development and prosperity,” he said while in Mauritania. “The contribution of migrant workers to our economy is fundamental as is the sustainability of our social security system and pensions.”
His social security minister, Elma Saiz, said Spain needs up to 250,000 migrant workers each year to that end. Earlier this year, the Bank of Spain reported that the country needed 24 million more migrants by 2053.
Sánchez made his visit as numbers of undocumented arrivals to the country looked set to break records. About 31,000 migrants have reached Spain so far this year, with more than 23,000 of them making the crossing in boats from North and West Africa to the Canary Islands.
The Socialist leader’s African trip coincided with the 30th anniversary of the first registered arrival of a boat carrying migrants to the islands. It is a particularly hazardous route, which claimed the lives of 6,007 migrants in 2023, according to the NGO Caminando Fronteras.
This year’s arrival numbers are about double those of 2023, which itself was a record-breaking year.
Fernando Clavijo, the regional president of the Canary Islands, has warned that overflowing immigrant stay centres and lack of resources to manage the influx amounts to a “humanitarian drama” and that the archipelago needs more support because of its status as an “entry point to Europe”.
He has also called for the issue not to be infected by the rancour of Spanish politics, an appeal that appears not to have been heeded in Madrid.
The leader of the far-right Vox party, Santiago Abascal, warned that Sánchez, along with other mainstream parties and the European Union, was “promoting an invasion”. Abascal added that “Spaniards are going to have to defend themselves”, drawing accusations of inciting violence.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative Popular Party (PP), accused Sánchez of fomenting a “pull effect” for illegal migrants.
“Instead of going to Africa to fight the mafias, Sánchez promotes Spain as a destination,” he wrote on social media. “The opposite to the rest of the EU.”
Núñez Feijóo faced criticism from many on the left, who accused him of wilfully misinterpreting one of the main initiatives of Sánchez’s tour: to encourage regulated “circular migration” whereby migrants would work on a seasonal basis in Spain, for example in construction or agriculture, before returning to their countries of origin.
With the issue of Catalonia’s relationship with the rest of Spain subsiding, having dominated the country’s politics for several years, immigration has come to the fore. Between June and July, it went from ninth to fourth place on the list of concerns for Spaniards, according to the CIS national research council.
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