Thursday, September 07, 2006

Immigration in the Canary Islands

I haven’t written about important issues in a while. It is always the same: Xevi talking about his life. Well, I just wanted to talk about what’s going on in the Canary Islands.

During Franco’s dictatorship (and even before, since the discovery of America in 1492) Spain has been an emigrant country. The Spaniards went to the Americas looking for fortunes (Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico…) or they went to Germany, Switzerland and France during the poor 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. It is funny how do things change, because now Spain is no longer an emigrant country, but the entrance to Europe.

Economical development and no borders in Europe have transformed Spain into the door that illegal African immigrants use to get into the Heaven (aka Europe). If a couple of years ago this entrance was Andalusia, nowadays it is the Canary Islands, and the situation there is of extreme gravity (not sure about the translation…).



During the last weekend, 1433 immigrants arrived to the Canary Islands, and during this week the tragedy of the ‘cayucos’ (Mauritanian boat traditionally used for fishing and now used to transport immigrants) hasn’t stopped. On Monday we had 399 more immigrants, 345 on Tuesday and 623 on Wednesday. So far, this year there has been more than 17000 irregular immigrants getting to the Canary Islands, with almost 3000 immigrants getting to the beaches of Tenerife during the first 6 days of September.

Who do we have to blame for the situation? Is it logic (or even moral) to blame somebody for a problem that started when the European empires left Africa during the decolonization? However it is, all the centres for immigrants are full of people, and the Autonomic Communities don’t want to get any more immigrants from the Canary Island. Last night we had a fight between the police and the immigrants… I don’t know the solution, but we have to do something!

No comments: