Spain unveils emergency immigration measures

Bloomberg

The Spanish government approved emergency measures to handle a significant increase in the number of migrants reaching the country’s southern beaches.
The administration will set up centres to process and identify migrants’ needs in their first few days, the prime minister’s office in Madrid said.
The government said it expects the trend to continue for the rest of the year.
Two months after taking office, Socialist premier Pedro Sanchez, 46, is facing criticism for stepping in to offer refuge to a migrant rescue ship, the Aquarius, after Italy’s populist government refused access to ports in Sicily.
“It’s not fair to talk about a pull effect,” the government said.
“The government took decisions with the Aquarius for humanitarian reasons and to show that it’s possible to have a different kind of immigration policy in the European Union.”
Some 22,000 people have reached the Spanish coasts so far this year. That’s almost as many as in the whole of 2017 and compares with 10,500 people the previous year.
Last week more than 600 migrants entered the country from Morocco after storming the border fences surrounding the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the North African coast.
Fifteen Civil Guard officers were injured in the incident.
Immigration isn’t the big issue in Spain that it is in other Western countries such as the US, the UK or Italy.