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Thousands of migrant children to be rehoused throughout Spain
More than 1,400 displaced youngsters will be moved to migrant facilities in Andalucía, Murcia and the Valencian Community
After months of negotiations, the Spanish government has finally come up with a plan to ‘redistribute’ more than 4,000 migrant minors to new facilities across mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands. The children are currently being housed in the Canary Islands at a facility that is desperately overcrowded.
An additional 400 youngsters will also be moved from the autonomous city of Ceuta to Spain. A large number of the children will find new homes in the Region of Murcia, the Valencian Community and Andalucía.
The historic move has been made possible by a change to the Immigration Law, which was approved on Tuesday March 18 in an agreement between the Spanish government and Catalan pro-independence party Junts.
The plans will now move full speed ahead with the relocation of the children and adolescents, while also providing aid totalling €100 million to communities currently overburdened by large numbers of migrants.
According to the Ministry of Children, there isn’t any “definitive number” on how many migrant children are currently being housed in Spain. But based on the data available, it looks as though 806 minors will be moved to Madrid, 795 to Andalucía, 478 to the Valencian Community and 189 to Madrid.
The rest will be rehoused in Aragon, Asturias, the Balearic Islands, Cantabria, Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, Catalonia, Extremadura, Galicia, Melilla, Navarra, the Basque Country and La Rioja.
Controversially, Catalonia, home to the Junts political party, will only receive 27 unaccompanied minors despite its size.
“Among the criteria that determine the distribution is population size, but the efforts made by Catalonia over recent years are also taken into account,” a Junts spokesperson justified the decision. “The distribution is made among those communities that until now have not welcomed immigrants or have made a much smaller effort compared to that made by Catalonia,” they added.
Despite this huge concession, the ever outspoken president of the Catalan government Carlos Mazón has slammed the Spanish government for once again pandering to the separatist party and pushing through the immigration reform without much thought or planning. He insists that the rehomed children could face even worse overcrowding and that efforts would be better spent trying to “return” them to their families.
The opposition party in the Valencian Community took things a step further still, accusing the government of green-lighting “an absolutely arbitrary distribution dictated by Catalan separatists without any kind of migration policy.”
For his part, Mazón has described the Spanish government's attitude as “an attack and contempt for the autonomous communities” as well as “a lack of humanity toward minors.”
Image: Archive
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