The mandatory reception of migrant minors was on the table, as well as a political challenge. Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, had threatened the PP: if the communities where both parties governed in coalition accepted a single child, Vox would break up those executives. The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, had said that he would not accept threats or blackmail. That was the context when on Wednesday at five in the afternoon, Canary Islands time, the regional councillors of the sector entered the meeting of the Sectorial Conference on Childhood, held in Tenerife. Sources present at that meeting reconstruct for EL PAÍS what happened in a meeting that is usually innocuous and that on this occasion led to a major crisis in the Spanish right and blew up the coalition governments of five autonomous regions.
The most relevant point on the agenda was to report on the proposed reform of the Immigration Law that had been previously agreed upon by the central government and the Canary Islands. This reform obliges the autonomous communities to take in unaccompanied migrant minors when the territories to which they have arrived, mainly the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla, are overwhelmed. Nothing that was discussed there was binding, but the position of the PP communities – 11 of the 17, plus Ceuta and Melilla – on whom its approval in Congress depends, was key. The transfer of more than 3,000 children to the Peninsula was being debated. Only seven autonomous representatives travelled to Santa Cruz de Tenerife; the rest connected online. The meeting lasted four hours.
The Minister for Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, the Minister for Youth, Sira Rego, and the President of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, outlined their arguments in favour of the legal initiative to resolve the “unmanageable” situation of the islands. “Voluntary distributions do not work,” stressed the minister. “We must do our part,” stressed Rego. “Beyond the 400 minors, [cuya distribución] It is expected that it will be approved, despite the threat from its government partner, we need a response in the coming months,” Clavijo asked the PP councillors, warning them that they expect tough months of arrival of canoes.
Only Asturias, Castilla-La Mancha and Navarra, governed by the PSOE, supported this proposal to reform the law. The Basque Country and Catalonia were open to doing so with nuances and conditions. Meanwhile, the councillor of Ceuta was left alone defending it before all his colleagues from the PP (almost all the PP councillors were women). The pattern of the PP councillors was repeated: there was no need to take a position. None of them had had the opportunity to study a text that had been sent to them 24 hours before, although all the political groups had already had a previous version since the last week of June. “We consider ourselves informed”, “we will study it”, “take it to the competent body and stick to consensus and not imposition”, they repeated one after another, according to sources present at the meeting.
From the first turn of the speech, the reproaches were chained together. Several PP councillors were angry because the message that had permeated the media was that the voluntary distributions that have been tested since 2022 do not work due to their lack of solidarity. “I am outraged,” said the representative of Castilla y León, who detailed the obstacles to fulfilling the reception commitments. “The minors have not come, not because Castilla y León does not want to, but because the Canary Islands do not do the paperwork to transfer guardianship to us,” she said. “If it has not been fulfilled, it is due to overflow and administrative incapacity of the Canary Islands,” agreed the councillor of Aragon.
The representatives from Madrid and Murcia adopted the speeches of their respective leaders. The first accused the Government of being “inhumane” and of reforming the law “through the back door”. The second expressed her disappointment at finding “a patch” and “a nonsense”, instead of “a realistic and responsible plan to deal with the migration crisis”. Several questioned the ministers, as if it were a plenary session of Congress, about what measures the Government was going to adopt in migration policy.
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There was, however, no speech similar to that which the popular leaders have repeated in public these days. Several communities, such as Ceuta, Andalusia, Murcia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, declared themselves overwhelmed, but their councillors did not speak of sending Navy ships to stop the cayucos, nor was there any alarm. “We must provide a dignified response and this does not involve a one-off distribution but rather a real contingency plan. And before talking about funding we must have a diagnosis,” maintained the councillor of La Rioja. “This issue is too serious to continue giving the spectacle of these days,” she reproached. “Let disqualification not be the basis for immigration policy. We have spoken of the best interests of the child and of human rights, so let these principles be the ones that govern everything,” said the representative of the Balearic Islands.
Catalonia and Andalusia, despite the ideological differences that separate them (the first governed by ERC, the second by the PP), coincided in part of their demands. Both communities assured that they are taking into their reception networks hundreds of alleged minors who were transferred from the Canary Islands to the Peninsula as if they were adults. The Andalusians estimate them at more than 400 and the Catalans at more than 800. The data from the Ministry of Migration are different: of the 715 files that have been opened and resolved since October 2023 to determine the age of the children who arrived on the Peninsula from the Canary Islands, the Prosecutor’s Office has only recognized 175 minors who must be protected by the communities. But the complaints of Andalusia and Catalonia are not incompatible with these figures because they welcome not only those declared minors by the Prosecutor’s Office, but also those who are awaiting the results of the tests to determine their age.
“Are there first-class and second-class children?” the Andalusian councillor asked. “They have transferred many minors to us [desde Canarias]who also have the right to funding,” he added. “I get tired of listening to myself because we are not talking about new issues and we are not getting answers,” added the Catalan councillor, who listed several of the system’s flaws, including the lack of reliable data on minors taken in by each territory and the slowness of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, “which takes months” to certify the age. “There is an opportunity not only to resolve the problems in the Canary Islands, but to try to resolve all the problems that all communities have,” concluded the representative of Catalonia.
After almost three hours of meeting, the only vote on the agenda came, which had nothing to do with the underlying issue of the change in the Immigration Law but with a short-term measure: the reception of 347 migrant minors who live in Ceuta and the Canary Islands and whose distribution to other communities had been pending at the meeting on June 11. It was a commitment that was adopted three years ago and that had not been questioned until now. A voluntary mechanism that, according to Minister Rego, “is not efficient” and “does not work.”
In the current situation, in which the Canary Islands are hosting almost 6,000 migrant minors, distributing 347 is a symbolic gesture. Of those 347 children and adolescents, the PP communities were to host 209; and the five territories governed by Vox, barely 110. All the autonomous regions except Catalonia, which abstained, voted in favour. And with the PP’s yes, the extreme right justified the political tidal wave that followed.
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