What's the problem?

Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish PM, was in Gambia this week, where he met with the country's president to discuss ways of reducing illegal migration flows to Spain's Canary Islands via the lethal Atlantic crossing

Mark Nayler

Malaga

Friday, 30 August 2024, 13:07

Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, was in Gambia this week, where he met with the country's president Adama Barrow to discuss ways of ... reducing illegal migration flows to Spain's Canary Islands via the lethal Atlantic crossing. No details of the talks were provided to journalists, although Sánchez did have time to put everyone's minds at rest by declaring that migration was 'not a problem'.

Sorry? So far this year, more than 22,000 people have arrived in the Canaries, a 126% increase on the same period in 2023. These include around 5,500 unaccompanied children, 3,500 more than the archipelago has resources to cope with.

The question of how to handle illegal migration from countries such as Senegal and Mauritania (both of which Sánchez also visited this week), via a sea crossing that has already claimed thousands of lives, has become intensely divisive in Spain. Last month, Vox quit several regional coalitions with the PP after the latter decided to back Sánchez's proposal to move 400 unaccompanied minors from the Canaries to destinations throughout the mainland.

How, then, can Sánchez think that illegal migration is 'not a problem'? Well, as it turns out, he might not actually believe that. The Socialist leader immediately followed that bizarre announcement by saying that the situation in the Canaries merely 'involves certain problems' - a wonderful example of shape-shifting politico-speak.

Illegal migration is a problem then - unless it's something that is problematic without actually being a problem itself (what would that look like?).

Taking Sánchez to task on this might seem like semantic pedantry, but his refusal to admit the severity of the situation is reflected in his government's haphazard, almost improvisatory attempts to handle it.

But maybe those are the only types of solution available to a problem that so far appears to be utterly intractable. Perhaps there is no grand, overarching way to resolve the migration issue as a whole; perhaps, instead, governments can only hope to deal with the situation as it develops on their borders and in their territories. Sánchez's proposal to relocate 400 unaccompanied minors throughout Spain last month was one such measure, as was his government's pledge to allocate an extra 50 million euros to the Canaries to help them cope with undocumented arrivals from West Africa.

Possibly because it doesn't want to appear embarrassingly utopian, the government never mentions its Focus Africa plan anymore. Unveiled in 2021, its aim, put simply, is to reduce illegal migration flows from Sub-Saharan Africa by making it a better place to live. It's a wildly ambitious plan that would take years, even decades, to make a difference; but in seeking to remove the domestic impetus for desperate journeys across the Atlantic, it's aimed at the right target. The question is, 'What do we do in the meantime?'

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