The crisis of the Senegalese cayucos that have arrived in the Canary Islands since last summer seems to have no end. Yesterday 170 migrants arrived in two boats to La Gomera and El Hierro. The day before yesterday, 248 people landed in the archipelago. More discreet numbers than in autumn – when days above 1,000 arrivals were recorded – but they show that the Canary Islands route is still at full capacity. And it is the activation of that journey from Senegal, one of the deadliest in the world, that caused irregular immigration in Spain to grow by 82% in 2023, according to data made public yesterday by the Ministry of the Interior.
From January 1 to December 31 of last year, 56,852 people arrived in Spain – both by sea and land; 25,633 more than in 2022, a year in which the statistics played in favor of the government's migration policy after Morocco promised greater border control in exchange for the turn of the Pedro Sánchez Government regarding the Sahara issue.
The curves of the graphs were favorable for the Government until the month of June, coinciding with the social and political outbreak in Senegal caused by the arrest of the opposition leader. Until May 31, 4,406 people had arrived in the Canary Islands in 99 boats – the vast majority of them boats from Moroccan coasts. These data meant that arrivals to the Canary Islands were reducing by 46%. However, irregular entries have skyrocketed since then until closing the year with an increase of 154%, with 39,910 migrants arriving in 610 boats – and now the majority of them cayucos from Senegalese coasts.
Not even in the first canoe crisis of 2006 did as many boats arrive in the Canary Islands as last year. 17 years ago, 31,678 migrants did so, so there is no precedent in terms of the magnitude of the recent wave that has not just subsided, as the Government expected after strengthening cooperation on migration matters with the Senegalese authorities. On Tuesday, the Canary Islands president, Fernando Clavijo, was “concerned” about what may happen in 2024.
In the peninsula and the Balearic Islands the data are not better either. 14,435 people arrived, almost 20% more than in 2022. According to police sources, many of them from Algeria, a country with which diplomatic relations were not normalized for much of 2023.
However, the head of the Interior, in a recent interview in La Vanguardia, flatly denied that Algiers has used immigration as a weapon of political protest. The same sources assure that the vast majority of vessels that arrived in the eastern part of Andalusia and the east in 2023 came from Morocco.
What does seem evident is that Morocco, after the reconciliation with Spain sealed in Rabat, is exercising strict border control at the fences of Ceuta and Melilla. Without going any further, last Friday the Moroccan authorities detained a thousand sub-Saharans in the attempt to massively jump over the Ceuta fence, with clashes that left 50 Moroccan agents and 30 migrants slightly injured. Irregular entries through autonomous cities have been reduced by 46%. 166 entered Melilla in 2023, compared to the 1,175 that did so in 2002, the year in which the traffic jump occurred that killed at least 23 people.
After the data was published, Interior sources defended that migration “is a phenomenon of enormous complexity”, but that thanks to the recent European migration pact reached, instruments will be given to partner countries to promote safe, orderly and regular migration.
