The illegal arrival of people in Spain has tested the capacity of the reception services of the Canary Islands or the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, in addition to featuring in an important part of the political debate this summer. This Tuesday, the case exploded against the government in Congress, with criticism of its management of immigration from a good part of the parliamentary arc.
Several political groups chose the theme of immigration for the government control session held in the plenary session of the Lower House, the first in which Pedro Sánchez was present after the summer holidays (the previous one, the president was on an official trip to China).
Vox leader Santiago Abascal was the first to criticize the head of the Executive for his immigration policy, denouncing the money invested by the government in the reception and care of people arriving illegally in Spain. “Money that the Spanish do not have enough of,” Abascal defended.
The president of Vox maintained his speech in Parliament of frontal rejection of illegal immigration and warned that his party would make it a banner in all the institutions in which it is present. For people in an irregular situation, he defended, it is enough to allocate funds to “pay for their return ticket to their country of origin” or buy them flights to Brussels, “where the elites live.”
As usual, Sánchez categorically rejected this speech by Vox: “It has a lot of insults and lacks ideas, it has a lot of xenophobia and lacks humanity,” he censored Abascal. The president also took the opportunity to put the PP in the same bag as Vox regarding “events and xenophobia” in the matter of immigration, an argument that several of his ministers have also used subsequently.
This was the case, for example, of First Vice President María Jesús Montero, who accused “the right and the extreme right” of having chosen immigration as a “battlefield” for “populism, fake news and the criminalization of migrants.”
“Insolvent government”
On the other hand, Montero did not want to clarify what happened in a meeting held this summer between the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, the spokesman of the PP in Congress, Miguel Tellado, and the Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, revealed by the popular leader a few weeks later and from which he assures that a principle of agreement emerged that was subsequently not respected by the government.
“It is an incompetent, arrogant and insolvent government. They do nothing. “A lot of words and very little action,” Tellado lamented, accusing the executive of “threatening and blackmailing” the autonomous communities and “turning its back” on the Canary Islands.
Montero said nothing about this meeting, but took the opportunity to criticize the PP for its rejection of the reform of the immigration law annulled by Congress in July, as did the Minister of the Interior Fernando Grande Marlaska shortly afterwards, when the PP deputy Sofía Acedo accused him of inaction in the face of the massive arrival of people on the Spanish coasts due to the “lack of protection” of the state security forces and agencies.
The Interior Minister puffed out his chest, assuring that irregular immigration is “perfectly managed” by the government and that the problem is represented by minors who arrive alone in Spain. “It is their refusal to accept solidarity that leads them to use immigration in a tortuous way,” he accused the PP.
In turn, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, reiterated the arguments of the Executive praising cooperation with countries of origin, European values and agreements aimed at promoting orderly and “circular” migration. A term, that of circulation, scorned by Vox MP Carlos Flores: “Do you really believe that Mauritania is going to send hundreds of thousands of skilled workers to Spain who will then return to their country?”
In the absence of any details, Albares was very hard on the party led by Santiago Abascal, demanding that it not engage in “demagogy of human suffering” and not propose “pilgrim” ideas such as the use of armed forces to stop irregular arrivals or mass deportations.
The minister acknowledged that there was no “magic wand” to deal with the phenomenon and resigned himself to the fact that there will be people who will continue to want to leave Africa as long as its border with Spain is the most unequal on the planet. “It is a very serious phenomenon, we must not deceive the Spanish,” he asked Vox.
Set Reviews
The deputy of the Junts, Josep María Cruset, also questioned immigration, but in his case to demand the transfer of powers to Catalonia. Marlaska recalled that the control of borders and migratory flows is the exclusive responsibility of the State, but that there are other related issues that could be susceptible to transfer after negotiation between the administrations.
“If you do not comply with Junts, you will not have what you need, our seven votes,” warned the Catalan deputy, a new threat to the parliamentary stability of Pedro Sánchez, which Junts already demonstrated yesterday by preventing the processing of a Sumar Law to regulate seasonal rentals.
