THE rubbish-strewn beach at Hann, a suburb of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, is packed with colourful, canoe-like pirogue fishing boats, ideal for smuggling lucrative human cargo. A dozen years ago the first ghastly scenes of drowned bodies washing up on European beaches featured pirogues from Hann and elsewhere that set out for the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago just 60 miles (100km) off the African coast. In 2007, 32,000 migrants reached them by sea. By 2010 the flow had slowed to a trickle, with fewer than 200 reaching the Canaries by sea most years since then. None came from Senegal.
With hundreds of thousands of migrants now arriving elsewhere in Europe, that sounds magical. “Spain has accumulated experience that no other country has,” says Carmen Gonzalez, a migration specialist at the country’s National Distance Education University. But can that experience be applied to today’s surge?
The secret of Spain’s success was co-operation with transit countries such as Senegal, Morocco and Mauritania, says Gonzalo Robles of AECID, the government’s aid agency. As a former secretary of state for immigration, Mr Robles drew up agreements that helped block…
