Since 2020, the Canary Islands have received 80.5% of irregular immigration arriving in Spain, but this has not translated into an increase in crime on the islands. Home Office data dismantles political discourse that attempts to link migrants to crime. “It seems that the situation is contrary to all logic, but after 30 years of studying and reading many authors, the relationship between immigration and crime is negative,” says Elisa García España, professor of criminal law and criminology at the University of Málaga.
Immigration has once again dominated the political agenda in the Canary Islands in recent years. Three decades after the first boat arrived in Fuerteventura, the debate remains stuck in old discourses that attempt to link displaced people to insecurity. This Tuesday, all the groups of the Regional Parliament united to stop a non-law proposal (PNL) promoted by Vox, in which it tried to hold survivors of the Canary Islands route responsible for an alleged increase in crimes in the islands. In its explanatory memorandum, the far-right party distorts crime figures to link them to an “immigration invasion”.
However, the crime rate in the Canary Islands is lower than the national average. According to Interior Department data, statewide there were 48.6 criminal offenses per 1,000 residents in 2022, but fewer in the islands, 43.5 per 1,000 residents. There are other autonomy, such as the Balearic Islands (63.4), Catalonia (60.6) and the Community of Madrid (59.2), where the rate is even higher.
Furthermore, the evolution of crime in the Archipelago shows that, since the start of the new century, crime has decreased and then stabilized over the last decade. In 2000, this rate was 66.5 per 1,000 inhabitants. In 2023, last year, it had already fallen to 46.5 per thousand, after a small rebound since the coronavirus crisis. All this while the weight of the foreign population in the Autonomous Community has tripled over the last 23 years.
“Political communication is sentimental. It’s gut-wrenching. “They are the wildest, the most violent,” explains journalist Samuel Toledano. For emotional discourse to work, “solid elements” are necessary. “That’s where data comes in. They take the data they’re interested in, decontextualize it, and they already have a strong argument. “In this way, great propaganda works better,” adds the professor of communication sciences and social work at the University of La Laguna.
The Canary Islands Coalition and the Popular Party have also adopted the slogans defended until now by the far right. In a television broadcast, the secretary of the Lanzarote CC Organization, Echedey Eugenio, expressed concern that unaccompanied foreign minors share classrooms and hospitals with their families. “Do you know with whom these 6,000 minors will share their schools and health centers when they become adults? With my children and my grandchildren,” shouted the deputy mayor of Arrecife City Hall.
On the eve of the last European elections, PP senator Sergio Ramos took advantage of the assassination of a young man in the municipality of Telde, in Gran Canaria, to agitate the campaign. The vice-mayor of this city also took advantage of the death of the boy, stabbed after a fight, to assert that migrants represent “a very serious problem” for which the Spanish government is mainly responsible.
The perception of insecurity that the senator intended to convey is also not supported by data. Archives from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) reveal that Canary Island nationals commit more crimes than foreigners. In 2023, according to the latest update of figures published this week, 79% of those convicted on the islands had Spanish nationality, compared to 21% of foreigners. And what the data shows us is only “the system response” to crime, not the “real crime,” says García España.
The professor, who has been studying the relationship between immigration and delinquency for decades and who directs the Criminological Observatory of the Penal System Against Immigration (OCSPI), underlines this fact and the difficulty of “delimiting” the concept of immigration, where many of things integrate. . “I have been living in the United States for a year. I changed my usual residence and became an immigrant. But when we talk about immigration, this broad concept is not in people’s minds,” he emphasizes.
García España recalls that “criminal law does not affect everyone in the same way”, that it is “much easier” to prosecute the crime of theft than administrative corruption or to attack “a certain population “. It is a “selective” system, insists the expert, particularly with people with different ethnic characteristics, which is “highly demonstrated”. “This is an individual bias, which does not mean that they are racist and that they attack foreigners in a malicious way”, but rather that “they divert their actions without them realize it,” he emphasizes.
By acting on 100 immigrants and 10 Spaniards, yes, “we obtain certain returns,” concludes the professor. “We are constantly looking at whether the immigrant is the one committing the crime, but what we need to do is focus on the host social context. »
A 2012 investigation published in the American Law and Economics Review analyzed the provincial database from 1999 to 2009 in Spain to assess whether there was a relationship between immigration and crime. The work, widely cited in the academic field, concludes, in the words of one of its authors, César Alonso-Borrego, professor of economics at the Carlos III University of Madrid, that there is no proof of a cause and effect relationship between the two. factors, “particularly with regard to serious and property crimes”.
Among the reasons that may explain this, Alonso-Borrego alludes to the “cultural affinities” between the indigenous population and a significant part of the immigrant population in Spain during this decade, mainly of Latin American origin. The study also found that groups from other countries of origin, such as Romanians, had higher crime rates in the first years of their arrival, but within a short time these records began to resemble those of the nationals. “The most plausible explanation is integration,” underlines the economist.
“The security approach and the discourse of fear are among the most common expressions of new forms of contemporary racism: democratic racism,” explains the research. “Democratic” racism and moral boundaries: how to build an insurgent citizenship?prepared by Daniel Buraschi and María José Aguilar-Idáñez. “Racist discourse feeds on fear and justifies the rejection of migrants because it considers it legitimate to defend oneself against the threat posed by these people,” adds the study.
For activist Redwan Baddouh, the objective of these campaigns is clear: to generate tension and hatred towards migrants. “They are trying to get the poor to fight the poor. Here, the poor are told that another poor person is taking things from them, while the problem is not the one who comes from another country in a vulnerable situation, but the four cats who speculate and accumulate all the wealth.” he says. According to Baddouh, “it is not only the speeches of the extreme right, but also the actions of the State which fuel hatred” towards migrants “You do not regularize them and you keep them. in degrading conditions A situation of conflict is generated and you thus feed the monster of racism,” he concludes.
