In the Canary Islands, resources are limited, and no country can bear the population burden of the archipelago without taking its toll. Here, there are resources like water, which must be objectively rationed and prioritized for agriculture, reducing its cost in the sector. As for drinking water, we see successive cuts in large areas of the archipelago affecting thousands of families, due to the evident scarcity, when the rainy season has barely ended, and the value for money is the worst that can be offered. We better not even talk about desalination.
On the other hand, public services, whose staff have been severely attacked by the Spanish labor reform, have significantly lowered social quality, as they bear immense saturations that all the inhabitants of the archipelago witness, as they suffer them very closely daily. Meanwhile, the Canarian executive, with the local bourgeoisie at the helm, does not go beyond claiming circumstantial aid, which patches but does not provide future solutions. A conservative, cowardly bourgeoisie that is not capable of proposing real changes, comfortable to the right of colonialism.
The Canary Islands have a population density of 286 people per square kilometer; while Spain's is 93 p./Km2 and the European Union's average is 116 p./Km2. Tripling the number of people from the metropolis should be more than enough reason to demand total border control; as well as the urgent elaboration of legislation that would allow preserving the living standards of the inhabitants, who suffer social conditions that are already inadmissible. Especially when the results are in sight: higher unemployment rate, lower pensions, higher poverty rate, alarming risk of social exclusion, etc.
I am telling all this because of the recent news of the measures taken by Merkel's German government against immigrants, which has been labeled by different sectors as "philo-xenophobic." Note that the term is like an equivalent to xenophobic, but softened, without changing its original meaning.
Germany protects its own as the Canary Islands has never done with itself, despite talking so much about a Residency Law that limits the entry of more settlers into the archipelago, but without achieving anything, which has made us the benchmark with the worst figures of the territories that today belong to the European Union. Because if we are not careful, all those expelled from Germany will end up in the Canary Islands. Because we are afraid of being labeled as xenophobic or "philo-" even at the cost of sacrificing our welfare state. It has always been like this: being good means being foolish.
In Germany, they agreed to expel all EU immigrant members who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, without worrying about how they are labeled, the Schengen Treaty, or the faces that their European partners may have. In the Canary Islands, we will continue to speak in a low voice, because we are not a state that makes its own decisions, but we are subject to one of the states at the bottom of the EU.
In the Canary Islands, where we could enjoy another of those exceptions to the Schengen Treaty, without being outside of it, as there are so many, we will have to wait for a political change to achieve a social improvement that the current one does not give us and will never be a Spanish initiative. Because, for Spain, we are still the colonial sewer that represented the first overseas colony and finally the last. Until the inhabitants of the archipelago want to, nothing more.
They could send us from Germany some of that self-protection eagerness, which seems to be left over, while we organize ourselves as a nation and get rid of so many conservative crooks, whose phobias limit them, locking them in submission and collaboration with that colonial state that they insist on feeding.
Pedro González Cánovas,ANC Member
