The crisis of Senegalese cayucos arriving in the Canary Islands since the summer seems to have no end. Yesterday, 170 migrants arrived in two boats in La Gomera and El Hierro. The day before yesterday, 248 people disembarked in the archipelago. More discreet numbers than in the autumn – when there were days with over 1,000 arrivals – but which show that the Canary Islands route continues to perform at full capacity. And it is the activation of this crossing from Senegal, one of the deadliest in the world, that caused irregular immigration to Spain to grow by 82% in 2023, according to the data made public yesterday by the Ministry of ‘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 migration policy of Central government after Morocco promised more important border control in exchange for Pedro Sánchez’s government’s turnaround on the Sahara issue.
The curves of the graphs were favorable for the central government until June, coinciding with the social and political outburst in Senegal caused by the arrest of the opposition leader. Until May 31, 4,406 people had arrived in the Canaries in 99 boats – the vast majority, shepherds from the Moroccan coast. These data assumed that arrivals in the Canary Islands were falling by 46%. Despite this, irregular entries soared from then until the end of the year with an increase of 154%, after 39,910 migrants arrived in 610 boats – and now, most of them Cayucos from the Senegalese coast.
Not even in the first cayucos crisis of 2006 did as many boats arrive in Les as last year. 17 years ago there were 31,678 migrants, which is why there are no precedents in terms of the magnitude of the recent wave, which has not yet subsided, as expected from the central government after strengthening cooperation in migration matters with the Senegalese authorities. On Tuesday, the Canarian president, Fernando Clavijo, expressed “concern” about what could happen in 2024.
In the Peninsula and the Balearic Islands the data are not better either. 14,435 people arrived there, 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 with, flatly denied that Algiers has used immigration as a weapon of political protest. The same sources assure that the vast majority of boats that arrived in the eastern Andalusian area and the Levant in 2023 came from Morocco.
What does seem obvious is that Morocco, after the reconciliation with Spain sealed in Rabat, is exercising a border control ferry at the fences of Ceuta and Melilla. Without going any further, on Friday the Moroccan authorities stopped a thousand sub-Saharans in the attempted mass jump of the Ceuta fence, with clashes that ended with 50 Moroccan officers and 30 migrants slightly injured. Irregular entries in the autonomous cities have been reduced by 46%. For Melilla, 166 entered in 2023, compared to 1,175 who did so in 2022, the year in which the tragic jump occurred that ended the lives of at least 23 people.
After the data was published, sources from the Ministry of the Interior defended that migration “is a phenomenon of enormous complexity”, but that, thanks to the recent European migration pact that has been reached, instruments will be given to the partner countries to promote safe, orderly and regular migration.
