The pact sealed this Tuesday between the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and the head of the Canary Islands Government, Fernando Clavijo, to unify criteria on how the transfer of migrant minors between communities should be carried out has caused a new confrontation with the central Executive. After months of talks with the Government to push forward a legislative change that imposes a redistribution of the reception of migrant children – an initiative that Junts, PP and Vox ended up knocking down in Congress in July – Clavijo, who declares himself overwhelmed, has changed his interlocutor. The new strategy has led the leader of the popular party to visit Clavijo in Santa Cruz de Tenerife where they have signed a document that includes a good part of the demands that the PP is demanding, such as the declaration of a national migration emergency, the urgent convening of the Conference of Presidents or the obligation of the State to assume all the expenses derived from the reception when any community (and not only the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla) exceeds 100% of its capacity. The meeting has upset the Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, who has attacked Clavijo, leader of Coalición Canaria, for his party’s change of direction. Torres has accused him of conforming to the discourse of the right and the extreme right.
This move opens a new chapter in the complicated negotiations that began before the summer to convince a parliamentary majority to accept the change in article 35 of the immigration law to make the distribution of migrant minors between territories obligatory. In Tenerife, Feijóo made it clear that he will not resume negotiations with the proposal by La Moncloa and the Canary Islands Government to modify this law and defended the new guidelines signed with the Canarian nationalists. “It is a document that seeks consensus and to solve present and future problems,” he said after the meeting on Tuesday. “We would like the central government to join the vision of the State that is reflected in this document,” he added. The text, called Agreement to address the migration crisishas the approval of both the popular groups in Congress and the Senate and the 14 autonomous communities and autonomous cities governed by the popular party, according to Feijóo and Clavijo.
“The Popular Party,” the latter has asserted, “can today offer an agreement with the will to negotiate,” which will be sent, he explained, to the Government of Spain. “This is a proposal,” the leader of the Popular Party added, accusing the central Executive of not having put forward “a single one” to them.
Proposals
The document justifies the declaration of a migration emergency throughout the territory to make it easier to carry out the hiring and “to draw attention” in the European Union. In turn, it calls for an urgent convening of the Sectoral Conference on Childhood to agree on the distribution criteria and “guarantee that no autonomous community is exempt,” as Feijóo has stressed. It also includes what the parties have called the “Action Plan against Migratory Discontrol,” which, in turn, consists of six points, including the improvement of police control at the Spanish borders or providing more human and material resources to the General Immigration Police Station. Here, aspects that are already part of the current migration policy are also demanded, such as deploying the Security Forces in the countries of origin and transit “and the deployment of Frontex and the European Asylum Agency.”
The agreement also calls for a commitment from the central government to “respect the critical situation and the criteria” of the majority of autonomous communities. The fifth point establishes that there is a “guaranteed financial sufficiency” for the communities, which must be established in a joint meeting of the Sectoral Conference on Immigration and that of Children and Youth. This section calls for the creation of a contingency fund for the autonomous communities and for the reform of the immigration law to explicitly state that the State will assume the “financial commitment” to cover the extraordinary resources of the communities whose assistance capacity is “exceeded”.
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Both the Canary Islands Government and the PP have explained their funding proposal in recent weeks, which is also made explicit in the agreement: the autonomous communities will continue to assume responsibility for the reception of children in their centres until 100% of their capacity is reached; when the centres are between 100 and 150% full, they will continue to stay in the centres managed by the communities, but the State will have to transfer economic resources to them and, when that 150% is exceeded, it will be the State that will host the minors in housing solutions intended for this purpose, as is the case with adults.
In the corridors of Congress, the head of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, responded this Tuesday that the agreement means that Coalición Canaria has “joined the theses of the Popular Party”, which, before, had already “joined” “the theses of the extreme right”. The minister has reminded Feijóo and Clavijo that they had a pact signed by nine political groups and that would have allowed the reform of the immigration law, but it was frustrated by the votes of the PP, Vox and Junts, in reference to the plenary session of July 23 that overturned the reform of the law.
In his opinion, the objective of the PP president is not to resolve the problem, but rather he is acting “to delay, to put off, to prolong, to make partisan and political use of it”, he stressed. “If he really believed in the urgency, there is a document that has been worked on for eight months. Vote yes and we will modify whatever can be modified”. Torres has also made it clear that his will is to continue working with the PP and the communities, and has pointed out that the ministry is finalising a “rigorous, realistic, objective and updated document of the resources that the autonomous communities have”. Before him, the Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, Elma Saiz, had spoken, who has denounced Feijóo’s “hypocrisy” and “cynicism” in immigration matters, whom she demanded “to work with rigour” and “to stand by” the Canary Islands, a territory that she considers “turned its back” on by refusing to process the consideration of the reform of article 35 of the Immigration Law. “I appeal again to Mr. Feijóo to leave the messages, the agreements fakethe performances”.
Last week, after meeting with Sánchez on August 23 at an event that served to push the PP to accept the distribution of minors, Clavijo raised his tone against the central government, demanding greater involvement from the Executive. After an alleged incident between the archipelago, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Security Forces over the care of people who had just disembarked, the head of the Canary Islands Government considered that from then on the minors were the responsibility of the central government, as they were under police custody, and not abandoned or helpless, and announced that he was considering taking the Executive to court to delimit the powers.
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