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More than 15,000 migrants by boat have arrived in the Canary Islands so far this year. Some locals are overwhelmed.
Migrants in a Spanish lifeboat near Gran Canaria.
Ndeye Sagna is exhausted but happy. Two weeks ago, the 28-year-old Senegalese arrived on the Canary Island of Fuerteventura. The last leg of his journey was on a boat with a dozen migrants that left the Moroccan coast. She is one of the few women who dares to cross the river; the vast majority of migrants remain men. How he got on the ship, how much the tugs paid, he does not want to give any information. He prefers to talk about his six-year-old son, whom he left with his aunt in the Casamance region.
The dry Fuerteventura should only be a stopover. Ndeye, who is expecting her second child, is one of more than 15,000 migrants who have arrived in the Canary Islands this year. Like most of them, Ndeye wants to continue to continental Europe. His destination is the port city of Marseille, in southern France, where he has relatives.
But first of all, he ended up in a reception center of the humanitarian organization Misión Cristiana Moderna. The organization was launched two decades ago by the evangelical community of Fuerteventura. Pastor Ángel Hernández takes care of the newcomers with dozens of volunteers.
The government has given the organization a 3,000 square meter room in an industrial zone. There, Ndeye and the other migrants spend ten days in quarantine; then they move to the premises of the Protestant Church. “Covid-19 has complicated everything, but we take the time to teach them Spanish and so that they know their rights,” says Pastor Hernández.
Smugglers charge between 1000 and 2000 euros
Evangelical pastor Ángel Hernández has already welcomed 1,000 migrants this year.
The pastor has never been as busy as this year; It has already hosted more than 1,000 migrants. The Canary Islands have become the new gateway to immigration from Africa. This has to do with the fact that the migration route from West Africa through the Sahara via the Mediterranean has become practically impassable. Much more restrictive controls, often funded by the EU in transit countries like Niger and Algeria, are one reason for this. The other is the crown crisis: several Sahel countries closed their land borders after the outbreak of the pandemic in spring.
Spanish newspapers speak of the largest migratory movement to the Canary Islands since 2006, when almost 32,000 people attended. In the Peninsula and the Balearic Islands, the number of newcomers has fallen by 30 percent this year, while in the Canary Islands it has increased almost eightfold. The Canarian Prime Minister, Ángel Víctor Torres, warned that soon it will not be possible to welcome all the migrants.
Recently, the situation has worsened again: in October around 200 boats with more than 5000 migrants landed on the Canary coast. The trend also continued in November, with more than 2,000 people arriving on the second weekend in November. Some ships depart from Western Sahara, which is annexed by Morocco, but most of them depart from Morocco. From the coastal city of Tarfaya, in southern Morocco, it is only 100 kilometers to Puerto del Rosario, the capital of Fuerteventura.
Dr. Tamar Luis attends to migrants upon arrival.
Conditions on crowded wooden or fishing boats are often catastrophic. She is known by Dr. Tamar Luis from the state rescue service Maritime Salvage. The 41-year-old woman volunteers to care for the migrants after they arrive, and this year she has already looked after 33 ships with around a dozen passengers each. “Newcomers are literally left empty-handed,” he says. They barely wore their clothes. Their condition was devastating, and some suffered chemical burns when the fuel mixed with the seawater in the boat. On the go, they feed on dates and nuts, which take up little space but provide energy. According to the police, smugglers charge between 1,000 and 2,000 euros per person from migrants.
An assistant measures the fever in migrants coming from Morocco.
There are many Moroccans among the newcomers, unlike the first wave 14 years ago. In the past, Moroccans had to await immediate deportation; Spain and Morocco have a repatriation agreement. But due to the corona pandemic, Morocco has closed its borders. No one can return.
Not even Salim, 50, who has lived in the Modern Christian Mission for ten days. He is a fisherman, he comes from Agadir and awaits a new opportunity in Spain. He left his wife and three nearly adult children in Morocco. “There is no work, there is no money, only poverty,” he says in Spanish. When tourists in Morocco stayed away due to the Crown crisis, he was no longer able to sell his catch to restaurants. He decided to emigrate and wants the family to join them later. He shows a sheet of paper with the address of relatives in Guadix, Andalusia, not far from Granada. The paper is wrapped in plastic along with your identity card so that it is protected from water during the journey.
The Moroccan fisherman Salim wants to try his luck in Spain.
The four Africans from Senegal, Gambia and Guinea, on the other hand, with whom Salim is staying in the room, have thrown away their passports to make repatriation difficult. “Some of these people have been traveling for three years and have had to keep earning money to make the leap to Europe. They don’t want to risk anything, ”says Father Hernández.
It was particularly tough in Morocco, the men say. “There the police beat us, they treated us like subhumans,” says the young Guinean, who does not want to reveal his name for self-protection. He hopes for a future in France, where he wants to study sociology.
“You are forcing our hospitality”
The four young Africans, the fisherman Salim and the Senegalese Ndeye, will only be able to stay in the Christian mission for a few weeks. So space is necessary for those who came after them. The housing situation is difficult. At the Arguineguín pier, in the south of Gran Canaria, for example, the authorities had a tent town built in which up to 1,400 migrants were temporarily housed during the first days after their arrival. After human rights organizations denounced the precariousness of the houses, the government promised to close the town of tents and establish new accommodation in an empty military barracks.
Some of the migrants are also staying in hotels that are empty because there are no tourists this year. One of them is the four-star Hotel Pocillos Playa in Lanzarote. Around 160 migrants spend the day on the balconies or on the hotel grounds, and at night they go for walks in small groups.
Not everyone welcomes new neighbors. She feels sorry for the young people, says María, a 69-year-old Spanish woman who lives in front of the hotel. But they put our hospitality to the test. We don’t have much, I live on a widow’s pension of 650 euros a month, ”he says, pointing to the empty beach. In the past, everything here was full of life and tourists, “now we have migrants.”
The Hotel Pocillos Playa in Lanzarote serves as accommodation for 160 migrants.
Antonio, 59, who has worked as a caretaker in a nearby apartment block for more than 30 years, also struggles with migrants. “We don’t have tourists or jobs. But migrants stay in luxury hotels, ”he complains. Even Ángel Hernández, the parish priest, thinks that lodging in a hotel is not a good idea. This conveys an incorrect image, to the islanders and also to the relatives of the migrants: if these people sent selfies home from the elegant hotel room, this meant that more and more people would dare to make the crossing that threatened their lives. “One in four ships capsize at the crossing, one in 16 migrants dies on average, but the smugglers don’t care.”
