Spain will make it easier for migrants and the unemployed to find work in agriculture. This marks the latest move in the country’s efforts to tackle a shortfall of farm workers due to the coronavirus.
53 migrants have climbed a barbed-wire fence into the Spanish enclave of Melilla in North Africa. Spanish guards stopped more than 200 others from entering.
Spanish authorities are searching for migrants on three boats missing in the Atlantic Ocean. Another boat capsized on Tuesday en route to the Canary Islands. 14 people, including two children, reportedly died.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that Spain was not in violation of European law when it returned two migrants to Morocco who, along with several dozen others, had scaled the border fence at the Spanish enclave of Melilla in northwest Africa in 2014.
The Spanish maritime rescue service on Tuesday resumed the search for a boat with 67 migrants missing in the strait between Morocco and Spain. On Monday, 119 migrants rescued from two rubber boats in the Alboran Sea were safely disembarked in Malaga.
The number of migrants arriving in the Spanish Canary Islands increased last month to 18 times the number in January 2019, the AFP news agency reports. However, fewer migrants are trying to reach mainland Spain by boat.
In the last few months, Morocco has ramped up arrests and clamped down on migration across its borders to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Now migrants still hoping to cross the border in order to reach the EU prefer to keep themselves hidden.
47 people were arrested in Gibraltar and Spain during the course of a police operation to break up a smuggling ring operating between Morocco, the British territory of Gibraltar and Spain.
A study carried out by Morocco's statistical institution has revealed that the typical Moroccan migrant is a young married male.
The Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras in a statement accused the Spanish authorities of illegally returning to Morocco 42 migrants who landed on the Spanish Chafarinas islands by boat on Friday.
Nine people smugglers have been sentenced to up to ten years in prison, in connection to an incident in the western Mediterranean that led to the death of a young Moroccan migrant in 2018.
As 2019 draws to a close, the European border agency Frontex has released its latest reports about fluctuating trends across migrant arrivals to Europe. It found that arrivals were falling in the western and central Mediterranean and growing in the eastern Mediterranean as well as the Balkans.