Ángel Víctor Torres, President of the Canary Islands Government, described the unemployment figures for April as “good”, with 3,699 more people employed. At the Premium Atlantic Forum organised by the Diario de Avisos Foundation, Torres stressed that, at present, “the Canary Islands have 80,000 more people working than when we came to office”.
“Undoubtedly, one of the greatest concerns of Canary Island families is, if any member of that family unit is unemployed, looking for their first job or is long-term unemployed, that they can have a job. And so today’s figures for the month of April, with 3,400 fewer people unemployed, are good data and good news,” said the President of the Canary Islands Government.
Torres emphasised the special importance of these figures: “Today we have the best figures in the historical series, the best figures in 15 years, and we have 400,000 more people living in the Canary Islands than we had 15 years ago. Youth unemployment has fallen by 30%. If we are talking about the time of the pandemic, there were 14,000 young people unemployed and they have come out of it. And this is the way forward, the fact that we have the economic strength to have almost a million people working in the Canary Islands at the moment and a drop in unemployment like we haven’t had in five years”.
Ángel Víctor Torres wanted to highlight this “good news” when “in pre-campaign” and “lately, the negative news is what prevails”. “In all this time we have had a lot of adversity to overcome. In 2020, the Canary Islands lost almost 20 points of its GDP. We had a closed economy and we were the community most affected because we live off tourism, which accounts for 35% of that GDP. Furthermore, as everyone knows, only the Canary Islands had a volcano and a migratory phenomenon like the one we had in 2020.
And compared to those who said that we had no future, that it was impossible, that poverty was going to be tremendous in the Canary Islands, even in those data such as the recent survey of living conditions we have been improving in all parameters”. “.
Torres said that the Islands “have recovered” to be able to face the future with “more optimism” in the face of future challenges: “If we have a rise in the cost of living but no work, the situation is already critical. At the moment we have to work for the rising cost of living, for the shopping basket, but the best news is that most families have managed to ensure that people who have been out of work for a long time now have an income and a job, which is also very important in terms of self-improvement”.
The Canary Islands: Migration
Finally, he also referred to the phenomenon of migration, after 45 people were rescued in the early hours of last night in the waters off Lanzarote: “It is true that the other day we saw a rather sad image of people sleeping in the port of Fuerteventura. In the year 2020, in September 2020, after the Government of the Canary Islands handed over many educational infrastructures to the Government of Spain, we had to ask for them to be returned because the school year was about to begin. It was a tremendous decision.
Difficult, but right. We had to start the school year again in September 2020 and we did not have sufficient facilities, absolutely everything had been dismantled by other governments who believed that the migratory phenomenon was not going to return, and the migratory phenomenon is cyclical, it returns occasionally and at the moment we have desertification, we have COVID in Africa, we also have poverty and we have an international situation with the conflict in Ukraine that has also boosted migratory movements”.
Torres advocated having “resources for emergencies, resources for a dignified response, while at the same time we have to make demands. That is why I am pleased that the Pact on Asylum and Immigration in the European Union is moving forward, so that this solidarity is obligatory between Member States and between the whole of Spain.”
The president continued that “undoubtedly the circumstances today are absolutely better than those we had in 2020, and hence the dignified response that is being made. In the same way, and I will say it until the last day, neither xenophobia, nor racism, nor the exclusion of any person because of their skin colour are traits of the Canarian population, the majority of Canarians are not like that, and therefore xenophobia must also be persecuted, and those who come and what they do with violent attitudes have no place in our society.”
