Canarios en una mina: la crisis migratoria de los cayucos y la europeización de la política migratoria

Abstract

Understanding how the Spanish state and the Canary Islands dealt with the cayuco crisis and its aftermath is instructional for the current migrant crisis facing Europe. Employing the theoretical lenses of liberal intergovernmentalism and neo-institutionalism, this article studies how the EU has shaped the governance of migration policy using both hard and soft governance. Hard governance refers to coercive legally imposed mechanisms, whereas soft governance may be cooperation or voluntary adoption of EU models. During the cayuco crisis, as thousands of African migrants arrived to the Canary Islands, the Spanish government sought assistance from the EU and its member states via Frontex, and adopted the EU's externalization of migration policy with Plan Africa, an aid package to stop immigration at its source. Both Frontex and Plan Africa were EU policy prescriptions, that exhibit EU soft governance and the Europeanization of migration policy. As a result, Spain achieved its goal of stopping the flow of irregular migrants, yet the state remained the main actor in migration policy, as liberal intergovernmentalists assert. However, the EU-inspired policies that Spain ultimately adopted during the cayuco crisis have been emulated in the current migrant crisis, inspiring a model for present and future migration policies in Europe.

Border control and accident rate of irregular immigration in the route to the Canary Islands (Spain) during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…2015). These actions have been defined by different scholars as soft governance measures: flexible structures, committees, and networks (Dudek, C. and Pestano, C. 2019;Ba Palmqvist, P. 2021). These are initiatives that are implemented through cooperation agreements with the governments of the countries from which migrants originate, in the form of aid packages to stop immigration at its source.…”

The current status of Migrant Disaster Victim Identification in the Canary Islands

“…The small boats used also transitioned to the traditional Senegalese fishing canoes (cayucos), which had greater capacity accommodating more than 100 people. To understand the scope of this phenomenon, half of the 30,000 illegal migrants who arrived in the Canary Islands in 2006 (the peak) were Senegalese (Dudek & Pestano 2019), while 1,000 out of 7,000 African illegal migrants who died during the crossings in the same year were Senegalese. 6 It has not been a priority for the Spanish or Canarian authorities to identify deceased migrants.…”

La diáspora venezolana y su repercusión en la estructura socioeconómica colombiana

“…Sobre procesos migratorios actuales se tiene el correspondiente a la Unión Europea (UE); migrantes que llegaron en su gran mayoría de África, describe Dudek & Pestano (2019), que es el Estado el que debe hacerse cargo de la situación migratoria, y citan el caso de las Islas Canarias (España), llamada la crisis de los cayucos, allí el Estado español utilizó una gobernanza dura con mecanismos coercitivos impuestos legalmente con cooperación de países Europeos y Africanos, pero a su vez, una gobernanza suave que correspondió a un paquete de ayudas que adoptó la política de exteriorización para las migraciones. Aragonés & Salgado (2019) indican que Estados Unidos, siendo un gran receptor de migrantes especialmente de origen mexicano, para el momento actual la tendencia viene cambiando, hoy son de origen chino e indio, movidos especialmente hacia el trabajo con alto valor agregado.…”