A frantic spring to end the overcrowding of immigrant children in the Canary Islands | Spain

More than a year of negotiations and displays laterSpain has approved a new reception model of unaccompanied foreign minors. The Foreigner Law will now force the favorable votes of 179 deputies, to all territories being supportive and that the most vulnerable attention among immigrants is not just an obligation of the entry territories. The vote was followed by a long silence until a result was announced, in which only the PP and Vox voted against. The Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, tried not to cry, but ended up excited and wrapped by the Minister of Childhood, Sira Rego. The president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, did not release a tear, but lived an exciting moment when the majority of deputies present in the hemicycle. All those involved were euphoric and optimistic, but there is still a long bureaucratic and legislative path until the first adolescent leaves the Canary Islands.

Rego aspires to launch transfers in summer, once both their department and the Canarian government have put the machinery to walk. The Minister of Childhood will summon all the autonomous communities on April 28 in an appointment in which the figures of minors that should be relocated in each territory will be presented Based on the criteria agreed on population, income, prior reception effort … The calculations are still preliminary because there are those who play with the numbers. Aragon has not informed of the minors he welcomes; Madrid does not speak of available places, but of minors who have passed through their centers and Andalusia has Colado The family foster care (which is barely used with migrants) as squares of your network. In any case, the final distribution table, according to ministerial sources, will not be very different from the one that already transcended a few weeks ago and that supposes that a handful of the PP communities have to assume the bulk of the transfers (only Madrid, Community Valencian and Andalusia should host some 2,000 adolescents).

Seen the frontal rejection of the PP to this initiative and the threats of several leaders to resort to the distribution in the Constitutional, Rego already has the opposition of the communities governed by the PP. « We have mechanisms that allow us to guarantee the fulfillment of the Royal Decree, » warns sources from the Ministry. « If you want to cooperate, phenomenal, but if part of them decide to rebel, we will continue working within the framework of the law. »

In parallel to the conversations with the autonomous communities, the government still has to prepare the development of the Royal Decree, which is still in the elaboration phase. That text that the Minister of Minister must approve is essential to define the small print, from how transfers will be executed to how the reception of the reception community should be.

The Canarian government (as well as Ceuta’s) also has work to do. First, the Canary Islands, with some 6,000 children and adolescents in a dimensioned network for 800, has to formalize its immigration contingency situation. This is the status with which the relocation of minors is legally activated and that means certifying that their resources are triple their capacity. From that statement, the transfer of minors who continue to reach the islands would be activated more immediately, for which, in theory, there is a period of 15 days since its landing. With the clear protocols and the places per assigned community, those who are already housed in the archipelago will be relocated, giving priority to those who are over 16 and have no roots.

The Canarian Ministry of Youth and Childhood has already begun to select those profiles, but all that procedure is not less. The administrative resources of the islands are also limited and they have been saturated for example when voluntary transfers of a few hundred children have had to be executed, those transfers, those transfers, those transfers which caused the rupture of Vox last July with the PP in the communities where they ruled together. To the (sometimes strict) conditions of the communities, it was added that the Canarian administration itself was unable to process the necessary documentation in time and form to send children to other territories.

Clavijo, happy to achieve what has been chasing for so many months, does not forget that he still has three contentious pending with the central government, among others, the different promised economic items to compensate for the welcome effort of these years and that they have not been delivered. The demand amounts to 135 million euros. Another is the one that refers to the reception of the 1,200 minors who have requested asylum or intends to do so and that the Supreme Court has considered that the State must assume. It remains to be seen how it is resolved.