Refugees from the brutal Syrian civil war in West Africa
You know, we have to keep reporting the immigration stuff.
But it’s, you know, it’s filler, right?
Filler.
Nearly 32,000 men, women and children have reached the Canary Islands by boat so far this year on the world’s deadliest migration route, breaking a 17-year-old record for arrivals in the Spanish archipelago.
On Friday and Saturday, four boats carrying a total of 739 people arrived at El Hierro, the smallest and most westerly of the Canary Islands, along with the bodies of two people who had died on the perilous Atlantic route from Africa. A further two people died in hospital.
The latest arrivals bring the total number who have reached the archipelago since the beginning of the year to 31,933. During the small boat crisis in 2006, 31,678 people made it to the Canaries.
According to data from Spain’s interior ministry, 14,976 people arrived in the Canaries in October alone, increasing the huge strain on the islands’ infrastructure.
Fernando Clavijo, the regional president of the Canary Islands, said the milestone underlined the scale of the humanitarian challenge faced by the islands, and he renewed his calls for more help from Spain’s government and the EU.
“Figures shouldn’t trump everything else, but in this case they define the humanitarian emergency in the Canaries,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The 2006 figures have been exceeded but the response from the state and from the EU isn’t the same. Managing migration on the southern border should be a priority in both the Spanish and European agendas.”
Txema Santana, a journalist specialising in migration and a former adviser to the Canaries regional government, said the high number of people arriving this weekend – and the four deaths – were yet another sign of things to come.
“Going into November with this intensity [of arrivals] is going to lead to a haemorrhage of dead and disappeared people,” he said on X.
This year’s arrival figures are already more than twice as high as last year’s.
There’s nothing anyone can do about this.
“It is what it is,” as they say.
We have a democracy in the West, meaning we don’t have any form of representation, or any way to petition our grievances.
Basically, we just have to deal with it, until some better form of government arrives.
Senegal is doing more to stop boats of invaders to Europe than Europeans are…