Spanish authorities are searching for dozens of migrants who are missing after their boat sank on Saturday off the Canary Islands, killing at least nine people. It is the latest deadly episode along the crossing from West Africa.
What happened in this sinking?
A boat with 84 migrants aboard capsized last weekend off the island of El Hierro in the Canary Islands, which are part of Spain, the authorities said on Monday. The maritime authorities received a distress call after midnight on Saturday. Nine people were found dead, 27 were rescued and the authorities were searching for the other 48.
“There is little expectation that some of the people that are still considered missing will actually be found and saved,” said Jorge Galindo, a spokesman for the global data institute at the International Organization for Migration.
That would make this the deadliest such sinking in Spanish waters since at least 2014, he said. But the route from West Africa to the Canary Islands is vast, and there have been deadlier disasters outside Spanish waters in recent years.
How many West Africans are trying to cross and why?
Since 2020, despite ebbs and flows, migration has been relatively high on the route, said Andrea García Borja, the project coordinator of the migration organization’s Missing Migrants Project. As of Sept. 22, about 29,500 migrants had made the trip this year, according to the organization. That’s about double the number from January through September of last year.
There are a few key drivers:
Pushes: Many people in West Africa face political instability, terrorism and persecution. Climate change is hurting livelihoods. Job prospects are sparse.
Pulls: Life in Europe can seem glamorous. Migrants often send money home or share their life on social media.
Timing: The weather itself plays a role. This month, Canary Island authorities said that calm seas and gentle winds had led to an uptick.
Still, the numbers are a fraction of the more than 212,000 migrants and refugees who tried to cross the central Mediterranean Sea from North Africa last year, according to a report by the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations refugee agency.
Why is the route so dangerous?
In 2021, the International Organization for Migration said that it was “extremely concerned” about a sharp increase in deaths and disappearances at sea of migrants on the route; that year, at least 785 people had died by the end of August. This year has been almost as deadly: Mr. Galindo said that at least 775 people had died as of last week.
But confirmed deaths on the Western Atlantic crossing — and on migration routes worldwide — are most likely “a fraction of the true death toll,” Mr. Galindo said. Many people die at sea without any official record in “invisible shipwrecks.”
Ms. García Borja described a few main risk factors:
Distance: The boats that leave from Senegal or Mauritania can take about 15 days to reach the Canary Islands. (It is about 900 miles as the crow flies from Dakar, the capital of Senegal, to the Canary Islands; distances across the Mediterranean are usually much shorter.) The more time spent in open water, the more time there is for something to go wrong.
Crafts: The small boats have no sanitation facilities or protection from hot, sun-baked days or wet, freezing nights. Migrants can get dangerously dehydrated or sick. Engines can break down, too. Some boats have even turned up in the Caribbean, the passengers dead, after drifting across the ocean.
Coverage: The migrants pass through an enormous expanse. Even Spain, the wealthiest nation on their route, can struggle to react to distress calls in time to rescue people. The boats can be hard to locate and seas can be dangerous.
Crowding: Some smugglers have started overloading the boats with more migrants, Ms. García Borja said. Then the crafts ride lower, people are cramped and there is less room for food, water and supplies.
What are countries doing in response?
Spain announced a series of agreements with Mauritania in August designed to stem the migrant flow from that country, including renewed collaboration between their security forces.
Some countries, like Italy, have tried to crack down on migration through aggressive measures, like building a processing camp in Albania for asylum seekers and restricting rescue boats. Some human rights groups have harshly criticized the measures, but they appear to have had an effect: Italian arrivals were down 62 percent through August of this year compared with the same period in 2023, the International Organization for Migration found.
But Ms. García Borja said that expansion, rather than restriction, would save more lives.
People in West Africa will keep trying to come to Europe, and without legal options, they will resort to undertaking dangerous crossings: “The search and rescue capacities are limited,” she said, and will never be enough to rescue everyone trying to cross.
She called for more legal visas, not more search and rescue workers: The only way to make migration safer, she said, would be to “eliminate the necessity of the people to take this route.”
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