• Immigration: Andalusia records 63% less migrants arriving in patera in 2019
  • Budgets.The government of Pedro Sánchez makes another 'broken' Andalusian accounts, this time with the mena

The Government of Pedro Sánchez is considering centralizing the attention to unaccompanied foreign minors (menas) who enter the country every year, with the idea of ​​assuming the management of the centers where they are received in the first instance to distribute them in a balanced way between the Different autonomous communities. The idea is to avoid the situation of collapse that, depending on migratory flows, occurs in border communities such as Andalusia.

The work for the design of this new management model met yesterday coinciding with the formal protest of the Junta de Andalucía before the Government's decision not to renew the extraordinary credit granted in 2018 in order to finance the costs related to the attention to Foreign minors

In recent days, the Regional Executive has denounced that the Ministry of Health has informed them that it does not intend to repeat the aid of 27 million euros that was granted to the Board after the migration crisis of 2018, which collapsed the centers of minors and forced to enable extraordinary places.

Then, the Junta de Andalucía (governed by Susana Díaz) made several appeals to the Government due to the seriousness of the situation and, in the absence of help from other autonomous communities, the Government approved this extraordinary loan of 40 million euros, of which Andalucía received 27 to complete the resources provided by the Ministry of Equality and Social Welfare.

That migration crisis has not been repeated with the same intensity in 2019, since the flow of boats between North Africa and the Andalusian coasts has been lower. The Ministry of Health and Social Policies recalled yesterday, in addition, that the competence to care for minors (foreigners or not) is exclusive to the autonomous communities and that the 2018 grant had an exceptional character to the extent that the Arrival of massive immigrants to Andalusia.

At present, the numbers of unaccompanied foreign minors have been maintained, being even slightly lower than those registered on January 1, 2019, therefore, the Ministry believes that the same conditions do not exist.

And that, despite recognizing that in the draft budgets for 2019 that the Government of Pedro Sánchez elaborated at the time but never got to be approved due to lack of support in Congress, there was a new item of 30 million recorded in prevention of that a crisis situation like that of 2018 could be repeated.

The Junta de Andalucía alleges, in any case, that minors arriving in 2018 remain under their guardianship and that, even those who reach the age of majority and therefore leave the supervised centers also require aid for their labor and social insertion, with which the extraordinary financing needs have not diminished.

The Ministry of Equality, Social Policies and Conciliation, chaired by Rocío Ruiz, regretted this Monday this decision of the Ministry and even considered that the information referring to a change of model to centralize the management of care for unaccompanied minors is filtered to means to hide the open debate before the complaints of the Board.

In fact, although both the Ministry and the Board have confirmed to EL MUNDO (after advancing the Ser chain) that work is being carried out on that line, for now, there is only one draft to which the Andalusian Ministry has made some contributions and that It is negotiating within the framework of the Children's Observatory, where the Government, the autonomous communities and other public and private organizations that work in defense of minors are present.

That first text has not yet received the endorsement of the observatory plenary. Once it was approved, it would be transferred to the Government (currently in office) for its implementation, which necessarily passes through some legal modifications that allow the Government to recover that competence currently in the hands of the autonomous communities.

We are talking, therefore, about medium- or long-term measures that can hardly be used to solve the financing problem that the Junta de Andalucía currently has in order to continue giving adequate attention to foreign minors under its guardianship. The Andalusian Government maintains, in any case, its commitment to provide the 1,389 places that have been created this year.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Andalusia
  • Susana Díaz
  • Africa
  • immigration
  • María Luisa Carcedo Roces
  • Pedro Sanchez

Public funds The Government of Pedro Sánchez "intervenes" Andalusia and demands cuts

Immigration The government of Pedro Sánchez makes another 'broken' Andalusian accounts, this time with the mena

Immigration Margarita Robles says that the entry of Podemos in the Government will not affect "in any way" the role of Spain in NATO