its record of immigrant arrivals, according to data provided this Thursday by the Ministry of the Interior. The archipelago received 46,843 people by sea in 2024, 17.4% more than the 39,910 in 2023. Arrivals in Spain as a whole totaled 63,970, with an increase of 12.5% compared to the 56,852 in 2023. This data that almost equals the maximum of 64,298 people of 2018. The Canary Islands represent, in this way, just over 76% of total entries to the territory.
Migrants arriving from the peninsula and the Balearic Islands, on the other hand, decreased by 6.5% to 14,431 people. The number of people who have entered through Ceuta and Melilla by land increased by 114.5% to 2,647.
The human movement in the western Atlantic has put the immigration debate at the center of the political brawl. Especially around the 5,812 unaccompanied migrant minors that the archipelago protects. Since the beginning of 2023, and unlike what happened at the beginning of the decade, in the midst of the pandemic, the Government of Pedro Sánchez has accelerated the transfers of adults to different parts of Spain to avoid congestion in the archipelago. The guardianship of minors, however, does correspond to the regional Executive, which has seen how it has been impossible, to date, to reach a political agreement in Congress that would allow a reform of the immigration law that would establish a system of mandatory distribution of minors between autonomous communities. The Canarian Government has doubled its resource network, up to 86, according to official data.
It so happens that the Popular Party is part of the Government of the islands together with the Canary Coalition. In an interview on SER, he attacked both the Government and the PP, whom he accused of being “complicit” in maintaining the alert situation in the Canary Islands. “The Government, because it does not intervene having the powers; assured the nationalist leader. This Thursday, before the same microphones, the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory and former Canarian president, Ángel Víctor Torres, has accused Clavijo of unfairly attacking the Government in the negotiation for the distribution of migrant minors because what he wants is to protect, care and not anger his partner in the regional executive, the PP. “Clavijo governs with them. And to take care of them and not to anger them or to protect them, what he does unfairly is attack those who are supporting him, which is the Government of Spain. I think he’s wrong, that’s what I say,” he emphasized.
The national leadership of the PP has put Vox in the same bag as the central government this Thursday, in a twist of speech, to justify its position on immigration matters, where they remain anchored in their refusal to reform the immigration law, reports Virginia Martínez. “There are two irresponsible speeches. On the one hand, there is that of Pedro Sánchez, who says that immigration has no impact and that it must be resolved as he says; and, on the other, there is the irresponsibility of Vox, which says that the evils and the origin of all the evils that threaten Spain have to do with immigration,” said the national spokesperson of the PP, Borja Sémper, in statements to the media in Madrid. “There is a shared irresponsibility in this absence of immigration policies on the part of Sánchez and Vox,” he added.
The immigration fight has been at the center of the debate for months. The Popular Party voted to take into consideration in the Congress of Deputies a proposal prepared between the central Executive and the regional Executive itself – and supported in the regional Chamber by the PP itself. Since then, he has also left the negotiating table. The last one, during the. The PP, threatened by Vox in the event of any concession, has not moved an inch and conditions its support on the Government meeting its demands on immigration policy, a demand for maximums that the Executive does not intend to assume.
