Category Archives: immigration

Tourists and Refugees

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Tourists and Refugees Cross Paths on Gran Canaria

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/it-ruins-the-vacation-feeling-tourists-and-refugees-cross-paths-on-gran-canaria-a-783962e7-8beb-4373-8423-ae209cb1775ds

Gran Canaria’s tourism industry is doing all it can to survive the coronavirus. Some luxury hotels are even hosting the increasing numbers of migrants arriving from across the ocean. It is a clash of two worlds.
Omar arrived in the port of Arguineguín, located 16 kilometers west of Playa del Inglés, three weeks ago after spending three days on the Atlantic. The Coast Guard pulled him out of the sea along with 22 others. More than 8,000 people like Omar arrived in the Canary Islands in November alone, part of the more than 20,000 for the whole year.

“We all have to die somewhere,” Omar says, adding that he wasn’t afraid during the journey. Once he arrived, he was given a black sweatsuit, the uniform of the new arrivals. He immediately changed, throwing his old clothes into the trash. He then spent a week sleeping on the ground with no running water. His clothes were constantly damp, there was never enough food and, he says, the lines in front of the few portable toilets took forever.

15 days on top of a tanker’s rudder

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https://www.facebook.com/elpaisinenglish/posts/3352201451555964 

A teen’s journey to Spain’s Canary Islands: 15 days on top of a tanker’s rudder

A growing number of migrants are finding increasingly dangerous ways to reach the archipelago, with around 20 stowaways needing to be rescued in just four months

https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-12-09/a-teens-journey-to-spains-canary-islands-15-days-on-top-of-a-tankers-rudder.html

In the last four months, around 20 people have been rescued trying to reach the Canary Islands as stowaways on cargo ships. It is impossible to know how many have died on the way.

Prince says that the adults were seriously considering throwing themselves into the sea and swimming, even though there was nowhere to go. “We had a hammer and we were hitting the hull of the ship so the crew would get us out of there. They definitely heard us, but no one responded,” says Prince.

support populist beliefs falls

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Support for populist beliefs in Europe has fallen markedly over the past year,

The YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project, a survey of about 26,000 people in 25 countries

“You could think of the virus like a volcano,” said Matthijs Rooduijn, a political sociologist at the University of Amsterdam and expert on populism. “It has hit populism hard, but it will leave behind fertile ground for the future.”

Populism, which frames politics as a battle between ordinary people and corrupt elites, has grown rapidly as a political force, with support for populist parties in national elections across Europe surging from 7% to more than 25% in 20 years.

Populist leaders mainly on the far right – Italy’s Matteo Salvini, France’s Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Sweden’s Jimmie Åkesson – have surged and populist parties have entered government in nearly a dozen European countries.

“Things are already changing quite rapidly with the second wave,” Rooduijn said. “Conspiracy theories are rising; populations are becoming increasingly polarised over the measures governments are taking.

Anti-immigration sentiment remained most consistently strong in Sweden, where 65% of respondents said fewer immigrants should be allowed into the country in future, up from 58% last year. The figures were similar in Italy, where 64% of those surveyed agreed immigration should be cut, against 53% last year.

The country with by far the strongest anti-immigration feelings was Greece, included in the survey for the first time in 2020. Nearly four out of every five respondents wanted immigration reduced, with 62% saying it should be reduced by “a lot”.