Europe’s Border Regime Is Killing Thousands
Over two thousand people have died trying to cross from Africa to Spain’s Canary Islands so far this year. While the European Union boasts of its humanitarian migrant policy, it has made these islands into a rampart of a murderous border regime.
Young migrants try to reach Spain by raft but are intercepted by the Spanish Civil Guard on May 19, 2021. (Diego Radames / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
On August 19, a Barbados-registered cargo ship 150 miles from Spain’s Canary Islands came across a semi-submerged plastic motorboat. Inside, the crew discovered a thirty-year-old woman from the Ivory Coast — the last survivor of a group of fifty-three people that had set out seven days earlier from the shore close to the southern Moroccan border.
In theory, the crossing to the popular Spanish tourist island of Fuerteventura should take approximately twenty-four hours. Yet such boats are not designed for crossing vast stretches of open ocean in the Atlantic and can be easily swept off course.
“Each of the other fifty-two people [onboard] died before the eyes of this final survivor,” wrote Helena Maleno, director of the NGO Caminando Fronteras. “These people spent seven harrowing days adrift on the world’s most dangerous migration route.”
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