In Africa, the president speaks of immigration as a “moral issue” rather than a legal right. And the next day, on top of that, he announces as “indispensable” the impossible and undesirable repatriation of undocumented immigrants defended by the far right.
Sánchez says return of those who arrive irregularly in Spain is “essential”
During her trip to Mauritania, Gambia and Senegal, the to a large extent announced by President Pedro Sánchez is circular migration. When last year I attended the conferences of the meeting in Senegal Back to the rootsand the authorities of the Senegalese president at the time, the authoritarian Macky Sall, were selling the virtues of these agreements that benefit a hundred elected officials without managing to interest the Senegalese present. Do you know what they were asking? That jobs on offshore platforms to extract the newly discovered oil and gas be reserved for Senegalese workers or that multinationals employ Western and European labor, as always.
In other words, they thought about how to end the neocolonial plunder and earn a living in their beloved land, with their beloved people, without having to emigrate. Because the immense citizens of the planet are attached to their roots. Now, if we need or want to emigrate, it is not, as President Sánchez rightly said, a “question of moral principles, solidarity and dignity”, it is a legal right set out in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which precedes Article 14 of the right to asylum for the persecuted. Should we apply human rights, created as a vaccine against barbarism, or do we leave them on empty paper?
Spain invaded and emigrated without papers
Those summer days when, like so many Andalusians, I return to La Montaña of our ancestors, emigrants from Cantabria, I remember the visit to the palace of the Marquis of Comillas, born of the modest boy Antonio López López who, orphaned by his father and laundress mother, emigrated as a child to Andalusia and then, at the age of 14, to Cuba where he made his fortune, met the Catalan upper middle class and became close to Alfonso XII.
Was a “circular migration” imposed on Antonio López, who started selling trinkets and became a shipowner and merchant of black slaves? How many white Spaniards held permits in the 19th century migration to Latin America, or how many whites in one of our “invasive avalanches” to America, Africa, Asia? The cherry on the cake of the proof of our “great replacement” on the Amerindians is that Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo (PP) and Javier Ortega Smith (Vox) have dual Argentine nationality and Rocío Monasterio (Vox), Cuban. Will they say that their ancestors were there since the Big Bang… or, if you prefer, since Adam and Eve?
We Spaniards migrate today and in the past, we did so even overcrowded and underfed on inhumane ships, as shown in books such as Third class passengers.
Dance of Spanish emigrants in America on the “Monte Sarmiento”, 1915.
And despite this, it is allowed to dance on the crossing, which will scandalize Xavier García Albiol (PP) in line with his tweet on the Moroccan passengers of the Ibiza-Barcelona ferry, or perhaps to rejoice in the face of discouragement, according to one’s racism. according to the color of the skin.
Spain kept the invaded African territories until the day before yesterday: the Moroccan protectorate until 1958, the colony of Equatorial Guinea until 1968, the Sahrawi province until 1975. How can someone who invaded with armies call the arrival of dying people by boat an “invasion”?
The left needs vision and not to get upset
Even more. Europe, and therefore Spain, are currently involved in dark operations in the Sahel, through Ukraine. An absurdity: while we pay millions to the Mauritanian government, which tramples on human rights, especially those of women, to prevent the migration of Malians who are victims of jihadism, large sums of our taxes are paid to Ukraine, an ally of the jihadists in the country. Sahel, because the governments of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso who are fighting terrorism receive military support from Russia and the Wagner group. And Ukrainian interference is denounced not only by the three countries mentioned but also by the West African Economic Community which is facing them.
Sánchez’s position was already timid at the beginning of his trip to Africa (in Mauritania and Gambia), but after criticism from the PP accusing him of causing a “call effect” and fearing the ultra campaign that convinced the population that immigration is its fourth problem, upon his arrival in Senegal he declared that it was “essential” to expel undocumented immigrants.
Making a flag of the mass expulsions of undocumented immigrants, instead of regularizing them, while they work, are necessary and are ready to contribute, is to fall into the adhesion to the racism of the extreme right instead of pedagogically proposing the cosmopolitan social alternative.
Where is the process approved by the Congress of the Popular Legislative Initiative to regularize the situation of 500,000 immigrants? Is the president unaware that mass expulsion attempts throughout Europe are failing due to diplomatic and legal reality? Is there no one in social democracy who sees that this noise about the expulsion of immigrants or that of the German government that, after the murders committed by a Syrian, criminalizes the group, gives votes and institutional power to the radical far right and the radicalized right? Are the most left-wing partners powerless or do they not influence the issue?
Don’t Outsource Childcare
I am concerned by the news revealed by elDiario.es that the Ministry of Youth and Children, headed precisely by the Minister of Sumar Sira Rego (IU), is considering, in the face of the PP blockade, the distribution of migrant boys and girls between autonomies, entrusting your care to NGOs. It would be a matter of handing over custody and care to associations on the peninsula even if guardianship remained in the hands of the government, first in Ceuta, why not then in Melilla or the Canary Islands?
If there is already a structural problem of mistreatment of immigrant minors in outsourced centres located in the communities that have guardianship over them, what would happen if, in addition, the centres were autonomous and without responsibility for their lives?
Bad idea. In the care of immigrant children, immigrants in general, minors under surveillance, whether foreign or Spanish, there needs to be less outsourcing and more public centres with better resources, well-paid professionals and resources. In any case, come on, as in health, education and retirement homes. This must be a fundamental conviction of the left. I cannot imagine that he would hesitate when we know of cases of abuse in outsourced centres such as the one of injuries, torture and sexual assaults in Ateca (Zaragoza) or the death by asphyxiation of Illias Tahiri in Tierras de Oria (Almeria).
These are not isolated events at all, but rather a structural problem due to the inattention of the administration, as demonstrated by the complaints of the Aragonese unions after Ateca and information such as that revealed by elDiario.es through Canarias Now about how two NGOs take over 67% of the archipelago’s million-dollar budget to care for immigrant children, with special contracts, while they suffer from overcrowding, violence and lack of child protection. If this already happens when minors are in the same community that has their legal guardianship, what would happen if they were sent to NGO centers in other autonomies without responsibility for their lives?
