PAYBACK TIME

This is Europe's problem too, says Madrid (Mike Elkin, The Telegraph, May 19th, 2006)

Spain has issued its most urgent international appeal for help in coping with illegal immigrants flooding into the Canary Islands.

Madrid announced it will dispatch diplomats to several countries in western Africa, where the migrants come from, while a European parliament delegation will arrive next month to assess a problem that the Spaniards say is not just theirs but Europe's.

The calmer seas of early summer have seen a sharp rise in the numbers reaching the holiday islands, which are the closest European land to the west African coast. More than 1,400 arrived in Tenerife and Gran Canaria in the past week, while 2,000 have landed this month, mostly from Senegal and Mali, compared with 4,751 in the whole of last year.

Their journeys can be as long as 900 miles, in usually small, often unseaworthy, craft. Hundreds have perished on the journey. Yesterday Spanish coast guards intercepted seven boats carrying a total of 483 people. Several more craft carrying hundreds more migrants were caught attempting to land on the two islands on Wednesday.[...]

On Tenerife the new arrivals are crammed into the police headquarters, a court house and a pre-fabricated barracks, which already houses 200 people. Police cells are also packed. "We have never seen anything like it," said government prefect Jose Segura, describing it as an emergency situation.

The wave of immigrants does not seem to have affected the tourism in Tenerife, however. "The authorities usually catch them as they arrive and then take them via bus or ambulance to the town," said the director of a hotel on the southern coast. "If it didn't appear in the press, I don't think anyone would even know."

Thank goodness for that. Nothing spoils an idyllic holiday like a boatload of starving refugees appearing from out of nowhere on the beach. But allowing that this kind of “mass migration” is unmanageable and unacceptable, it does point to the dangerous irony of immigration threatening to turn Europe and North America inwards and towards a mentality of protective isolationism. We can try to build fences and barriers that will not stem the tide, but if we really want to control immigration levels from Africa and Latin America, we should slash agricultural tariffs and get very tough with dictators and statists (Venezuela, Bolivia, come on down!). When was the last time anyone heard of boatloads of desperate migrants trying to sneak in from Chile or Singapore?