Breaking down the Far Southern Border of Europe:Immigration and Politics in the Canary Islands

Abstract

Irregular immigration arriving on small boats from the African continent has placed the Canary Islands at the center of the national and European political agenda regarding immigration. It has also converted the archipelago into an observatory where the connections between migration policies and human rights can be analyzed. One of the main arguments of this article is that despite the archipelago’s long history of receiving immigrants and the presence of other groups of irregular migrants, what triggered the incorporation of immigration into the regional political agenda and political rhetoric was the fl ow of clandestine African immigrants at the end of the 1990s. The increased frequency with which these boats began to arrive on its shores in the fi rst half of 2006 has reignited and intensifi ed the debate on population, territory and identity in the archipelago.