According to the information of the local census of inhabitants, on January 1^st 2008, the percentage of Africans in the Canary Islands is barely 10% of the whole foreign population. As we already know, the archipelago has been characterized since several decades by its touristic and powerful attraction that draws visitors from many countries, whose most of them have chosen the islands as a regular residence. It’s also proverbial the capacity demonstrated by the Canary Islanders to coexist with other cultures and to welcome them not only with their traditional hospitality, but with an open attitude and acceptation. Anyway, we can’t forget that the Canary Islanders have played a leading part in one of the most intense migratory movement into Venezuela and Cuba throughout the 20^th century.

One of the defining features of the autonomous region is its geographical proximity to the continental African reality. This reality is testified by some very free-flowing trades that, during the last decades, have been changing depending on the geopolitical vagaries of the region, about all, the transfer of the Western Sahara to Morocco, and of the involvements that represented for the archipelago its full integration in the European Union and the resulting loss of the status of free port.

The interest created by the Canary Islands, as industrial destination for the Maghreb people and the inhabitants from countries situated in the middle of the Sahara, has suffered a remarkable growth during last years, as the sums of the regularization process of the year 2000 demonstrates in the province of Las Palmas, main recipient of those groups. Among the applicants of work original from these regions we can emphasize people from Maghreb with advantage; followed by Senegalese and Mauritanians; very below, and in decreasing order, we can find citizens from Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, the Guinea Republic, Nigeria, The Gambia…

Since the arrival of the first small boat in 1994 until today, there have been many Africans who have got into the Islands by this mean of transport; about all starting from 1998, when an important rise of the illegal immigration of Maghreb people by small boats occurred, about all in Fuerteventura and Lanzarote Islands. With the change of the century undocumented people from the sub-Saharan area, particularly from Sierra Leone, Mali and Nigeria started to arrive one after another to Fuerteventura. Only by the end of the year 2004, the Integral Service of external surveillance (SIVE) started bearing results, introduced in the Island in 2002. Even so, its efficiency is very far from being satisfactory, and the delay and difficulties for its implementation in Gran Canarias and Tenerife threatens to create the deviation towards them of small boats that went before to Fuerteventura or Lanzarote.

Once equipped the SIVE in Gran Canarias and in Lanzarote, since 2007 the flow of illegal boats was canalized towards Tenerife, where the system of detection wasn’t permanent, and it was equipped with radars having a range much smaller than those installed in Fuerteventura, Lanzarote and Gran Canarias. At last, in December 2008, the SIVE of Tenerife started to work. Sensor stations started to work too in La Gomera and El Hierro by the end of that year.

Many associations and institutions collaborate with the reception and the care of immigrants who arrive to the coast. Thanks to them, most of the bureaucratic procedures bothering the mutual wellness of the coexistence are made possible and speed up, and these people are provided with a basic social work. Nevertheless, the procedural irregularity in which many of the Africans are in the Canary Islands hinders the starting of projects that spread the immediate refuge and give continuity to the actions undertook to ease the dramatic conditions of his entry in the archipelago.

For that nature of border situated in the south of the European Union, the Canary Islands is a place of transit and in passing almost obligated for the African immigrants. It’s a question of a phenomenon that can be only characterized as logical, normal and irreversible and therefore, will continue during the next years. The flow of immigrants can’t be stopped, and even corrections may be made to the geography.

Both the Canary Islands and Spain need the immigration for many reasons. Don’t forget that Spain, with Italy and Japan, have the worst record as the international birth rate, and consequently has high sums of people advanced in years. Moreover, thanks to the African immigration, the agriculture could survive, even in precarious conditions, and workers have been given to productive sectors as the construction industry, the hotel and catering industry, the household chores or the care of the elderly.  Without the presence of immigrants’ children, many educational institutions had closed because of a lack of children no receiving schooling.

It’s required that the welcome society, used to the immigration phenomenon from perspective exclusively statistical – and, rarely alarmist-, knows the human reality of the immigration and gives face to those persons who live sometimes dramatically the distance of the earth where they were born.

All in all, living is choosing… the only important thing, is that every human being exercises his / her freedom to choose the kind of life and the place of the world appropriated to their aspirations and conveniences: always respecting the legality and the laws regulating the civic life of the country where they preferred as the goal of their migratory adventure. The immigrant is also much more than a worker or a cause of problem: it’s a human being who loves and feels and misses and feels happiness and sadness.

More information about Africa in Kharito