The government has committed to providing more than 50 million euros before the end of the month to tackle the migration crisis in the Canary Islands, but it is an amount that, for the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, is “insufficient“.
Thus, Clavijo considers that the amount offered by the government is insufficient and requested 160 million, in addition to the resources and collaboration of the territories, although he appreciated the commitment of the president to face the extreme situation that they are experiencing the islands. In this sense, he announced that the president had confirmed a meeting with the Minister of Finance to study this economic demand which seeks to ensure that “Spain does not put itself forward” but “assumes the competence of border management assigned to it by the constitution”.
In a press conference after the meeting held this morning with Sánchez, the president of the Government of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, stressed that the Executive “cannot be absent” from the migratory drama of the archipelago nor “use as excuse» that the powers in this matter are autonomous. Clavijo was energetic, recalling that the State has “the legal obligation to apply solidarity” and “not to look away”.
The president of the Canary Islands defended that the Canary Islands require “a unique treatment for this phenomenon”, because they are a gateway to Spain and Europe, and this was conveyed to him and “we are going to ask and demand of the Canary Islands.
He asked him to provide the financial resources and to “agree with the opposition because it is not the responsibility of the Canary Islands” since the reform of the immigration law “must be a country agreement”.
The President of the Canary Islands regretted the situation experienced this Wednesday in Congress, which had to address the migration crisis in plenary session and only certain parliamentary groups addressed the issue in question. “We do not understand what happened yesterday in Congress and that the Canary Islands are left alone,” he said.
It is “a humanitarian drama transformed into a political debate”. He does not understand that “the Canary Islands are left alone” and he denounced it during the session on migration held yesterday “they talked about everything except migration“.
He admitted “not understanding” the position of the PP which “gets up from the table” in the negotiations, but neither “the statements of Patxi López who compares unaccompanied migrant minors to tourists”. “”This is the level of this country?«, we asked.
The Canary Islands president is “very disappointed” with what happened yesterday, but assured that “we continue to work on a solution.”
Regarding the failure of negotiations with the PP, he explained that “I was not able to speak with the spokesperson of the PP in the Canaries” and vice-president of the Canary Islands Executive, Manuel Domínguez, although he defended him by stating that “he is just as committed as I am”, and that they will tackle the situation because “we do not share the decision of the people at the national level to get up from the table”.
For Clavijo, “a national agreement has been reached to deal with the situation in Ukraine”, and he therefore does not understand why this cannot take place with regard to migrants on the Canary Islands route.
“We are not going to support second-class citizens”
Regarding regional funding, Fernando Clavijo maintained his position, assuring that “we are not going to be in favor of a bilateral agreement”, because “the funding is intended for the welfare state” and “it is not fair that ‘there are communities’. with more resources or first and second class citizens.
In this sense, he asked for “transparency” and for a decision to be made “with all the agents and the autonomous communities”.
For his part, the Minister of Territorial Policy, Angel Victor TorresCuriously, Clavijo’s predecessor as president of the Canaries took advantage of the criticism expressed by the latter on what he experienced during Wednesday’s parliamentary plenary session to say that “I share with the president of the Canaries that a magnificent opportunity was lost, because it was the “Popular Party that requested the appearance of the President of the Government to speak about the migratory phenomenon. Torres, however, did not refer to the criticisms expressed by Clavijo, of the Canarian Coalition, against the actions”. of the PSOE during this plenary session, in particular against those of its spokesperson, Patxi López.
The head of Territorial Policy, however, alluded to the coalition that Clavijo maintains with the PP in the islands to criticize him for “putting the Spanish government on the same scale” as “the parties that voted against” the reform last July . article 35 of the Immigration Law for the distribution of immigrant minors, among which he cited the PP but not Junts per Catalunya, the investiture partner of Pedro Sánchez, with whose help this legal modification would have been carried out. According to him, this positioning “is not credible”. Torres, who said he felt “tired, even physically” by the negotiations for this reform of immigration rules, declared that “the decision is, at this moment, in the hands of the Popular Party, I hope that they will sit down again,” he said. . Clavijo had previously criticized the Executive for affirming that powers over minors belong to the autonomous communities, to which Torres responded that this was still pending the resolution of an appeal before the Constitutional Court, after the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) provisionally suspended a protocol for the distribution of immigrants because it understood precisely that the powers do not belong, in this case, to the Canary Islands, but to the Spanish government.
