Outsourcing Repression

This was a point Juan Carlos Lorenzo, the Canaries coordinator for the Spanish Refugee Aid Commission, was keen to make when I spoke to him in October. “Human migration, particularly when it involves enforced displacement, is unstoppable,” he insisted. “The EU policy of outsourcing border security to third [non-EU] states like Morocco or Tunisia might temporarily contain migrant flows along certain routes, through their engagement in repressive measures. But such temporary reductions are only achieved by pushing people toward alternative points along the EU’s southern border and forcing them onto even riskier routes, like those from Mauritania and Senegal to the Canaries.”

Indeed, more than 46,000 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands in the last twelve months, a figure 20 percent higher than the 2023 total — itself the previous highest figure in the last thirty years. In a recent interview with El País, the UN high commissioner for refugees in the Sahel region, Xavier Creach, explained this surge in terms of two factors. First, the worsening armed conflict in Mali has seen at least 200,000 refugees displaced to neighboring Mauritania. On the back of this, for the first time Malians became the largest national group among those reaching the Canaries in 2024, ahead of Senegalese and Moroccans.

But Creach sees this demographic change among those arriving in Spain as closely related to a second point: tighter border controls along the central Mediterranean are making it increasingly difficult for refugees and migrants to reach Italy, which has seen a 60 percent fall in irregular migration this year. This had been a major European destination for those fleeing Mali. But in the wake of Tunisia’s €1 billion strategic partnership deal with the EU last summer, the North African state launched a brutal crackdown against migrants, thus complicating the route north toward the Mediterranean and redirecting migratory flows from the Sahel to the Canaries. 

In response, Spain and the EU pledged a combined €500 million package to bolster Mauritania’s capacity to curb onward migration — as its security forces engaged in many of the same abusive practices against migrants used in other states now “partnered” with the EU, such as arbitrary detention, physical violence, and enforced displacement to the country’s interior. Shocking footage emerged in November of hundreds of migrants locked up in a tightly packed warehouse in Mauritania, in images reminiscent of detention centers in Libya. Yet the sparsely populated state with a five-hundred-mile-long coast has not yet managed to reproduce a sustained, comprehensive strategy of containment, with increasing numbers of migrants from as far away as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Egypt also now arriving in Mauritania as an alternative entry point to the central Mediterranean.

Spanish Responsibility

But it is clear the policies of Spain’s left-leaning coalition government are having a direct impact on the mounting death toll in the Atlantic — even as many liberal commentators in the English-speaking world laud Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s rhetoric around the benefits of immigration. Discursively, Sánchez has clearly stood out among EU leaders in recent months, particularly in terms of his sharp rejection of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s plan to send asylum seekers to internment centers in Albania. This, in turn, has led the conservative Partido Popular to accuse him of creating “a pull effect” and making Spain seem an attractive destination for irregular migrants, as its leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has increasingly adopted the type of anti-immigrant scare tactics that were previously the domain of far-right Vox.

Furthermore, Sánchez’s government also looks set to regularize the status of 900,000 undocumented migrants over the next three years after the Spanish parliament passed a bill on the issue in November. Yet the majority of the migrants set to benefit from this are from Latin America and arrived in Spain by airplane, not risking their lives on the ocean.

By contrast, when it comes to migration along Spain’s southern frontiers, the Sánchez administration has pushed policies that are further imperiling lives. First, it has stepped up aerial and maritime surveillance operations of the Senegalese coast in conjunction with the EU border agency, Frontex, and the Senegalese navy. With Spanish aerial drones now monitoring the area, and an increased number of boats being intercepted and returned to Senegal, cayucos have been forced to travel ever further out to sea to avoid detection — thus taking even greater risks.

“The first thing I look for when I hear news of a boat being spotted close to the island is its exact trajectory, in case there is a chance it misses El Hierro completely,” explains Juan Miguel Padrón, the mayor of the port town of El Pinar, where thousands of people have arrived this year. As cayucos can no longer travel close to the African coastline, El Hierro, as the most westerly of the Canary islands, has become the main point of arrival for boats from Senegal over the last eighteen months. Yet given the stronger ocean currents on this route, boats risk simply being swept out into the Atlantic. “There have been cases of boats with fifteen to eighteen people dead onboard washing up as far away as Costa Rica and the coast of Latin America,” Padrón tells me. “Beyond El Hierro, there is only ocean.”

The Caminando Fronteras report also points to another critical aspect of Spain’s outsourced border security regime, finding that “direct inaction from search and rescue was decisive” in at least 150 instances of loss of life. The NGO, which runs an emergency hotline for migrants, gives the example of a cayuco with 150 people, which set sail from northern Senegal in October. Caminando Fronteras received a distress call from their wooden boat five days into its journey — with the Spanish coast guard locating it in an area that was on the edge of the search and rescue zones of Spain, Morocco, and Mauritania. According to the NGO, the three countries then spent several days transferring responsibility for its rescue from one country to another, until the boat finally drifted ashore in Mauritania after ten days at sea. By then, twenty-eight people had died.

Describing these deaths as “an entirely avoidable tragedy,” Caminando Fronteras sees this case as exemplary of how the Spanish state has even transformed search and rescue services into “another instrument for migration control, leading directly to an increase in the numbers of deaths on migration routes.” “The main thing is to stop them reaching Spain, nothing else matters,” a Guinean politician tells the NGO. “Spain tells [the Moroccan coast guard] to go, Morocco may or may not go, what’s important is that it has said it will and so Spain is no longer responsible. . . . It doesn’t matter if our young people do not survive.”

Collective Disappearances

Of those who die trying to reach the Canary Islands, the vast majority simply disappear into the Atlantic. The remains of only an estimated 4 percent are ever recovered. Of the small percentage of bodies retrieved by the Spanish authorities, less than half are then actually identified. A scathing 2022 report on Spain by the International Organization for Migration set out how it is “virtually impossible for relatives of missing or deceased migrants to carry out or participate in search, identification or repatriation processes.” In turn, this has given rise to the phenomenon of hundreds of nameless migrants’ graves across Spain’s coastal cemeteries — many found only meters away from Spanish Civil War mass graves — as families are left with lasting uncertainty about the fate of their loved ones.

“We are talking about collective disappearances,” Caminando Fronteras director Helena Maleno insisted in an interview from 2023. “Spanish and European authorities are selectively letting certain populations die — abandoning the boats at sea deliberately — or even, in certain instances, killing them directly in massacres, as we have seen in Tarajal and Melilla.”

As numerous experts and NGOs have argued, any alternative to this vicious necropolitics must involve opening up safe, orderly, and regular means of migration for people from the Global South, particularly those seeking asylum. Yet the direction of political travel inside the EU clearly precludes that, with the bloc’s new 2026 migration pact likely to reinforce the most repressive and punitive aspects of its border regime. In particular, it aims to increase deportations of irregular migrants and speed up the expulsion process while also creating new legal ambiguity around the right of those rescued at sea by European search and rescue to enter EU territory — with its new “screening” mechanism.

At the same time, Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, a member of Sánchez’s center-left Partido Socialista (PSOE), is now lobbying for Frontex to extend its mandate in West Africa to allow the agency to directly deploy and conduct patrols off the coast of Mauritania, Senegal, and Gambia. If 2024 once again confirmed the Atlantic route to the Canaries as the deadliest migration sea crossing in the world, conditions could yet worsen as militarization of the border is ramped up further.