The president of the Government of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo (Canarian Coalition), spoke this Thursday on Radio Lanzarote-Onda Cero after the approval of the decree law of the Government of Spain to reform article 35 of the Immigration Law and to be able to relocate 4,000 migrant children who are now staying in the Canary Islands and another 400 who have arrived on the coasts of Ceuta was published this Wednesday in the Official State Gazette (BOE).
Among the keys of the agreement, Clavijo has assured that as the resources of the islands are "saturated", from this moment on, "all the children who arrive in the Canary Islands will not stay in the archipelago, but have 15 days to be relocated to another autonomous community". Therefore, he assured, "we are not going to have more saturation, if you allow me the expression, we are not going to continue accumulating children here".
The president takes this decree as "a guarantee that we are not going to get worse" and that now "a process begins" with the 5,800 children welcomed on the islands, since "the decree establishes a guaranteeing procedure in which the child is heard, the services of the autonomous community have to issue a report, the Prosecutor's Office also has to issue its report and only after that process the child is relocated".
At the same time, the Canarian president indicates that most of the under 18s want to leave for the Peninsula, while in the younger ones, "we have to see their circumstances". Thus, he added that "if we have a boy or a girl of 10 years old who is already rooted, is already in school, already has their environment, many of them can be, we are not going to generate another trauma to the child".
The regional Executive has one year to regulate the situation in the resources for children in the archipelago. Thus, he indicated that the "ordinary" reception capacity in the islands is 900 children.
Regarding how to apply it to the different communities, the decree law takes into account "the previous effort". "There it is seen that Catalonia not only has more places, but also has many more children than Madrid, Valencia, A Coruña, La Rioja, and Castilla la Mancha. What the decree does, which also, which has been done in the Canary Islands together with the services of the Ministry, what the decree does is define a national reception system for unaccompanied foreign children".
"When you define it at the national level, with criteria such as GDP per capita of the population, the previous effort, insularity, etc. I define a national system and each of us gets our quota", he continued. Clavijo explained that in the case of the Canary Islands or Ceuta the quota is "hyper-passed", while in regions like Catalonia it was "almost complete".
In contrast, other communities "have not been so supportive and have not wanted" to welcome more children, assuring that "they are saturated", but without creating new places.
The reactions to the decree law
"Weeks before we were working discreetly so that the decree could be a reality and [in politics] until it is voted anything can happen", Clavijo highlighted during an interview on the morning show Buenos días, Lanzarote.
Clavijo has celebrated that after 18 months an agreement has been reached to relocate in different parts of the country the children who arrive on the coasts of the Canary Islands without the company of any of their parents, either because they set sail alone from their countries of origin or because their parents died during the journey.
"I am left with the fact that in these 18 months we have not been alone, the NGOs have been there, the councils and the town halls have been there, the media have been decisive in keeping this in the news, the political groups, all except Vox", the regional president indicated during his speech.
Faced with the joy of reaching an agreement, Clavijo has also responded to the reactions of popular leaders in autonomous communities such as Madrid, with Isabel Díaz Ayuso at the head, or Valencia, with Carlos Mazón, who have rejected this distribution. The Madrid president has even announced that she will appeal this decree law before the Courts. "There you see people, you discover them", added the Canarian president.
Likewise, he has assured that "if any type of procedure is opened", the Canary Islands will appear and that he does not believe that it "will have much recorrido" in the Courts.
However, Clavijo has embraced the support of almost all political formations in the Canary Islands and has defended that it is an example of "useful politics". "We have managed to isolate ourselves from all that, from that bad sterile politics", he continued about the conflicts at the national level.
