The president of Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijowill travel on January 21 until Strasbourg to meet with the European Commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration, Magnus Brunnerand deal with the migration crisis that the archipelago lives. Besides, will request priority treatment regarding the distribution of financial resources in immigration matters.
This meeting will take place after the letters that Clavijo has sent to Brunner requesting help “from the European Union in the face of the strong” rebound in the Atlantic route. This situation would have worsened after the “special increase” in the arrival of unaccompanied migrant minorsas reported by the regional Executive in a press release.
Clavijo will focus this meeting on conveying “directly” to the new commissioner the “need for the Canary Islands” to be one of the first options regarding the “distribution of funds of the European Pact on Asylum and Migration”, since Brussels will decide in the first half of this year the allocation of the financial resources planned to support the EU’s migration policy.
Clavijo also hopes to have Brunner as “ally when launching a call for supportunity and solidarity in the EU to achieve a common response to this “migration challenge.” The Canarian president will inform the European commissioner of the “collapse suffered” by the reception system for unaccompanied migrant minors on the islands. In this context, the Canarian executive currently guardians alone more than 5,800 children“whose rights cannot be fully met”, a situation that was described as “completely unsustainable” in the letter sent to Brunner on December 23.
This meeting will take place when the archipelago “suffers the biggest migration crisis of its history”. In 2023, 39,910 people arrived on the coasts of the islands, 158% more than the previous year, “breaking all historical records”, however this figure has been surpassed in 2024 “with 48,843 migrants and brings the number of migrants welcomed by the Canary Islands to almost 88,753 in the last two years.”
More than 2,500 people in the first 10 days of 2025
In his letter of January 6, Clavijo explained what happened in the first days of this year. “In this short period of time, arrivals to the Canary Islands have increased exponentially and the reception possibilities are becoming increasingly difficult,” he said.
In the first ten days of 2025 they have arrived at the archipelago more than 2,500 people after navigating the “dangerous Atlantic Route, one of the deadliest” in the world. The Canarian Government cites the annual report of the NGO Caminando Fronteras, to point out that this organization ensures that “9,757” people lost their lives in 2024 on this journey, which implies an average of 28 deaths per day.
Clavijo will also take advantage of his meeting with Brunner to, as he did in his first letter, invite you to visit the community in order to have “a real vision of the extreme situation” that the islands are experiencing due to the migration crisis.
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