Migration

Nearly 32,000 men, women and children have reached the Canary Islands by boat so far this year on the world’s deadliest migration route, breaking a 17-year-old record for arrivals in the Spanish archipelago.

The latest arrivals bring the total number who have reached the archipelago since the beginning of the year to 31,933. During the small boat crisis in 2006, 31,678 people made it to the Canaries.

According to data from Spain’s interior ministry, 14,976 people arrived in the Canaries in October alone, increasing the huge strain on the islands’ infrastructure.

“Figures shouldn’t trump everything else, but in this case they define the humanitarian emergency in the Canaries,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The 2006 figures have been exceeded but the response from the state and from the EU isn’t the same. Managing migration on the southern border should be a priority in both the Spanish and European agendas.”

This year’s arrival figures are already more than twice as high as last year’s. According to the International Organization for Migration, between January and December 2022, 15,682 people reached the Canary Islands by boat from west Africa, a decrease of 30%, or 6,634 people, compared with the previous year.

The Russo-Ukrainian war is coming down to a race between the weakening political will of western democracies and the deteriorating military means of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. But this race will be a marathon, not a sprint. Sustaining that political will requires the kind of farsighted leadership which most democracies are missing. It calls for a recognition that our own countries are also, in some important sense, at war – and a corresponding politics of the long haul.

Is this what you hear when you turn on your television in the United States (where I am now), Germany, Italy, Britain or France? Is this a leading topic in the Conservative party contest to decide Britain’s next prime minister, or the run-up to the Italian election on 25 September, or the campaign for the US midterm elections on 8 November? No, no and no.

“We are at war,” I heard someone say recently on the radio; but he was an energy analyst, not a politician.

Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), observed recently that Russia might be “about to run out of steam” in Ukraine because of shortages of material and adequately trained troops. So Ukraine has a good chance of winning an important battle this autumn; but it’s still a long way from winning the war.

High energy prices as a result of the war continue to turbocharge inflation in the west while keeping Putin’s own war chest filled with the billions of euros Germany and others are still paying for Russian gas and oil. Although a few grain ships are now leaving Odesa, his blockade of Ukrainian ports has caused a food price crisis across parts of the Middle East and Africa, resulting in much human misery and potentially in refugee flows and political chaos. Those, too, are Putin’s friends. Better still: the global south seems to blame this at least as much on the west as on Russia.

Putin’s cultural and political analysis of the west leads him to believe that time is on his side. In his view, the west is decadent, weakened by multiculturalism, immigration, the post-nationalism of the EU, LGBTQ+ rights, atheism, pacifism and democracy. No match, therefore, for carnivorous, martial great powers which still cleave to the old trinity of God, family and nation.

There are people in the west who agree with him, subverting western and European unity from within. Just read Viktor Orbán’s scandalous recent speech to an ethnic Hungarian audience in Romania, with its insistence that Hungarians should not become “mixed race”, its sweeping critique of the west’s policy on Ukraine and its conclusion that “Hungary needs to make a new agreement with the Russians”.

In Germany, a plurality of those asked in a recent opinion poll (47%) saidUkraine should give up its eastern territories in return for “peace”

If Donald Trump announces his presidential candidacy off the back of midterm election successes for his partisans, this could spell big trouble for what has so far been rare bipartisan consensus in the US on large-scale economic and military support for Ukraine.

According to a former deputy governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, the country needs a further $5bn a month in macroeconomic support just to ensure that its economy does not collapse – close to double what it is currently getting.

Putin’s stocks of his most modern weapons and best trained troops have already been depleted.

Could he compensate for the loss of skilled troops by a general mobilisation? Will China come to his aid with modern weapons supplies? Can he escalate?

In effect, none of this stops people from crossing; having drones or helicopters doesn’t stop people from crossing, you just see people taking more risky ways,” says Jack Sapoch, formerly with Border Violence Monitoring Network. “This is a history that’s so long, as security increases on one section of the border, movement continues in another section.”

German MEP Özlem Demirel is campaigning against the EU’s use of drones and links to arms companies, which she says has turned migration into a security issue. “The arms industries are saying: ‘This is a security problem, so buy my weapons, buy my drones, buy my surveillance system,’” says Demirel. “The EU is always talking about values like human rights, [speaking out] against violations but … week-by-week we see more people dying and we have to question if the EU is breaking its values,” she says.

EU air assets are accompanied on the ground by sensors and specialised cameras that border authorities throughout Europe use to spot movement and find people in hiding. They include mobile radars and thermal cameras mounted on vehicles, as well as heartbeat detectors and CO2 monitors used to detect signs of people concealed inside vehicles. Greece deploys thermal cameras and sensors along its land border with Turkey, monitoring the feeds from operations centres, such as in Nea Vyssa, near the meeting of the Greek, Turkish and Bulgarian borders. Along the same stretch, in June, Greece deployed a vehicle-mounted sound cannon that blasts “deafening” bursts of up to 162 decibels to force people to turn back. Poland is hoping to emulate Greece in response to the crisis on its border with Belarus. In October, its parliament approved a €350m wall that will stretch along half the border and reach up to 5.5 metres (18 feet), equipped with motion detectors and thermal cameras.

In September, Greece opened a refugee camp on the island of Samos that has been described as prison-like. The €38m (£32m) facility for 3,000 asylum seekers has military-grade fencing and CCTV to track people’s movements. Access is controlled by fingerprint, turnstiles and X-rays. A private security company and 50 uniformed officers monitor the camp. It is the first of five that Greece has planned; two more opened in November.