The last scenario in the Canary Islands is a foretold crisis

Arguineguín: sobre política y comunicación migratorias

photo_camera AP/JAVIER BAULUZ - Migrants from Morocco after reaching the coast of the Canary Islands, crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a wooden boat

The now almost permanent "migratory crisis" associated with the "southern borders" (including Europe), is located these weeks in the Arguineguín dock (in the Gran Canarian municipality of Mogán). What is happening there serves to highlight two shortcomings of our migration policy (foresight, coordination) and a property of communication on migration: what we might tentatively call "information distortion" of its true nature.  

As for the lack of foresight, the current situation should not have surprised the Executive, as it is a crisis predicted at least since last summer. As the government's own reports already stated, it was foreseeable that migratory flows would shift from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic as a result of the control Morocco began to exercise over the migration routes in the north of that country (control, it should be recalled, financed by Spain and the European Union). Likewise, the media have been reporting on repeated arrivals of migrants to the south of Gran Canaria since the end of May. The situation was therefore foreseeable months ago; we have seen it grow gradually throughout the summer, and only when it became a "problem" that was difficult to manage (which led to the Minister Grande-Marlaska and the European Commissioner Johansson travelling to the area on Friday 6 November) did the government decide to make a plan with emergency measures public (on Friday 13 November).  
 

Gran Canaria migrantes

On the other hand, as we have already pointed out in previous texts, throughout last summer the lack of harmony between the Ministries directly involved in migration management - coordinated by Vice-President Carmen Calvo - has become evident. The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, which is responsible for receiving migrants who arrive in the Canary Islands, is in favour of transferring them to the mainland, where the existing reception network can respond better to the needs of new arrivals. This approach is not shared with Interior, which prefers to reduce transfers to the peninsula as much as possible - so as not to send a positive message to people waiting to cross the Atlantic from the African coast. Instead of transfers to the peninsula, Interior advocates resuming migrant expulsions (suspended in March because of the closure of borders caused by the health crisis). The Defence Ministry, however, is reticent about the transfer of military facilities on the islands to house migrants. After different discrepancies between migration and defence, it seems that the solution to accommodate migrants in Gran Canaria may lie in the fitting out of an old powder keg, Barranco Seco, near Las Palmas.  
 

REUTERS

Finally, situations such as that of Arguineguín place those of us who follow migratory issues in the commitment to give an account of them, once again giving informative preeminence to border control, to the detriment of other migratory issues (interculturality, socio-cultural integration, etc.). This is what we can call the "synecdoche effect", through which we identify a whole (migration) with one of its parts (border control), bypassing the others and diminishing their presence in the media. Those of us who comment on what happens in Arguineguín contribute (voluntarily or involuntarily) to consolidate this synecdoche, strengthening the association between migrations and control measures, for example, and thus re-feeding a link that we would like to replace (or, at least, contribute to unlink). The proposed migration plan presented by the European Union last September was, in a sense, another strengthening of this partnership, as it devoted much of its content to border control.  
 

migrantes

What we are discussing today therefore has much in common with other events (arrivals by sea, islands or coasts under pressure, tension at borders); it takes on the same informative importance as they do and, by strengthening the migration-security partnership, continues to relegate to second place other migratory aspects that are worth describing fully and deeply.  
 
Luis Guerra, Professor of Spanish Language at the European University of Madrid, is one of the main researchers of the INMIGRA3-CM project, funded by the Community of Madrid and the European Social Fund.

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