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?

Overhead, lights suddenly flash red. A potential threat has been detected in one of the camps. This “threat” has been flagged by Centaur, a high-tech security system the Greek Migration Ministry is piloting and rolling out at all of the nearly 40 refugee camps in the country. Centaur includes cameras and motion sensors. It uses algorithms to automatically predict and flag threats such as the presence of guns, unauthorised vehicles, or unusual visits into restricted areas. The system subsequently alerts the appropriate authorities, such as the police, fire brigade, and private security working in the camps. From the control room, operators deploy camera-equipped drones and instruct officers stationed at the camp to rush to the location of the reported threat.

Nearly 40 cameras are being installed in each camp, which can be operated from the control room. There will also be thermal cameras, drones, and other technology – including augmented reality glasses, which will be distributed to police and private security personnel.

“This fits a broader trend of the EU pouring public money into dystopian and experimental surveillance projects, which treat human beings as lab rats,” Ella Jakubowska, policy and campaigns officer at European Digital Rights (EDRi), told Al Jazeera. “Money which could be used to help people is instead used to punish them, all while the surveillance industry makes vast profits selling false promises of magical technology that claims to fix complex structural issues.”

The main objective of ROBORDER is to develop a fully-functional autonomous border surveillance system with unmanned mobile robots including aerial, water surface, underwater and ground vehicles (UAV1, USV, UUV and UGV), capable of functioning both as standalone and in swarms, and incorporate multimodal sensors as part of an interoperable network