Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez travelled to the Canary Islands on Friday to meet with regional President Fernando Clavijo as the archipelago continues to face a high number of migrant arrivals and struggles to care for thousands of unaccompanied minors.
Sánchez’s minister for territorial policy and democratic memory Ángel Victor Torres, who is also the former regional president of the Canaries, spoke after the meeting on behalf of Sánchez’s government.
He said the discussions were fruitful and announced 50 million euros to the archipelago, extra financial help that had been given in previous years.
While adult migrants end up leaving the islands for mainland Spain and other parts of Europe following their arrival, unaccompanied minors are the responsibility of the regional government.
The Canary Islands says it currently is caring for more than 5,000 children and teenage migrants who reached the archipelago on their own, or who lost parents during the dangerous journey from the West African coast.
Torres said that Sánchez and Clavijo vowed to keep working on longer-term solutions to the issue of irregular migration but especially the topic of underage migrants travelling alone.
The solution, modifying the law to make solidarity among different Spanish regions mandatory, he said, had to go through parliament.
But an attempt at doing so in late July failed, with lawmakers refusing to even consider a proposal that would have forced other regions of Spain to take in some of the unaccompanied minors stuck in the Canary Islands.
Sánche’s visit to the archipelago, which is geographically closer to northwesten Africa than mainland Spain, comes a few days before he travels to Mauritania, Senegal and the Gambia, the main countries of migrant departures, to discuss irregular migration.
More than 22,300 reached the archipelago between January and mid-August this year, 126% more than the same period last year according to statistics released by Spain’s interior ministry.
On Friday, Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service said they rescued 173 people alive, among them six babies and eight women, and recovered two bodies from a boat found near El Hierro.
The Atlantic route from West Africa to the Canary Islands is one of the deadliest in the world.
While there is no accurate death toll due to the lack of information on departures from West Africa, Spanish migrant rights group Walking Borders estimates the victims are in the thousands.
Migrant boats that get lost or run into problems often vanish in the Atlantic, or in some cases, drift across the ocean until they are found in the Caribbean, carrying the remains of their passengers.