<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - migration]]> 10 <![CDATA[They warn of the disappearance of a small boat with 29 people that was heading towards Mallorca]]>

The organization Alarm Phone has alerted about the disappearance of a boat with 29 migrants on board that was heading towards Mallorca. According to what the entity reported in a message published on the social network X, the vessel departed on Sunday from the coasts of Boumerdés, in Algeria, and since then there has been no further news of it.

]]> <![CDATA[3 ‘Abascals’ and 851 ‘Maricarmens’]]>

Abascal is a surname of toponymic origin with roots in the Basque Country. The first Abascal that those of us who are boomers like myself remember is José Manuel, a Spanish middle-distance runner who, despite not having the finishing speed that other athletes of his time like Sebastian Coe, Said Aouita, and José Luis González could have, managed an agonizing bronze medal in the 1,500-meter race at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, the same ones as Carl Lewis, Michael Jordan, and Juan Antonio San Epifanio, Epi.

]]> <![CDATA[The story of a young man who traveled by boat, was in a coma and is now trapped in an administrative limbo]]>

When he arrived in Ibiza, Barp—a fictitious name to protect his identity—could practically not speak. He was also unable to look the people in front of him in the eyes. He had survived a 15-day sea crossing in a small boat, during which, according to his account, they ran out of fuel, water, and food. When they were rescued on May 4, 2025, he was already unconscious.

]]> <![CDATA[They warn of the disappearance of a small boat with 15 people that was heading to Mallorca]]>

The organization Alarm Phone has alerted to the disappearance of a boat with 15 people on board that was heading towards Mallorca and of which there has been no news since Sunday.

]]> <![CDATA["To say that immigrants are invading us is false"]]>

Raquel Guasch Ferrer has been the State's island director in Ibiza and Formentera since 2024. She is the first person from Formentera to hold the position. Her term will be marked by the management of the migration route from North Africa, which has the Pityusic Islands, and especially Formentera, as a preferred point of arrival, and which has caused recurrent political disputes between administrations. Since Pedro Sánchez revealed in Congress (last September 3rd) that there had been a “routine report” on “the Balearic Islands and the Peninsula” that warned of a high probability of migrant arrivals, the political storm has not ceased in the Islands. The State has been accused from Ibiza, Formentera and Palma of not informing about this hypothetical massive arrival of small boats. In this interview, we try to find out what is true, and what is false, in the controversy, and how the State handles the arrival of thousands of migrants each year to the Balearic Islands.

]]> <![CDATA[The Government opens itself to limiting the purchase of second homes if Brussels endorses it]]>

The Government will "evaluate" the affordable housing draft law that the European Commission presented this week. The first vice president, Antoni Costa, has assured that they will even consider limiting the purchase of second homes if Brussels endorses it. He said this after the European Union (EU) opted to promote this limitation in areas affected by the housing crisis. The vice president also referred to the possibility of prohibiting the purchase of homes by non-residents, although the Commission's initiative does not cover this issue. "We are willing to analyze it if the door is opened," he explained.

]]> <![CDATA[They find the body of a minor with a life jacket in the waters of Formentera]]>

A Civil Guard patrol boat located the lifeless body of a young man this Saturday evening about six nautical miles south of Formentera. The Armed Institute confirmed the discovery this Sunday.

]]> <![CDATA[The Balearic Islands consider aid for Ceuta "insufficient" and warn: "We cannot accommodate minors"]]>

The Balearic Islands Government has considered the aid of 25 million euros for the care of migrant children in Ceuta "insufficient" and has reiterated that the Islands "cannot" accept minors from a distribution. This was emphasized by the Minister of Families, Social Welfare and Care for Dependency, Sandra Fernández, in statements to the media after the Sectoral Conference on Children and Adolescents, to which she attended remotely. The meeting, which Aragon, Extremadura and Castile and Leon did not attend, had a single item on the agenda, the aid to Ceuta, which was approved unanimously by all the autonomies present.

]]> <![CDATA[A boat missing on the way to the Balearic Islands was intercepted by Algeria and the 26 occupants were deported to Niger]]>

A raft that had been reported missing while sailing towards the Balearic Islands was reportedly intercepted by Algerian authorities and its 26 occupants deported to Niger, according to an announcement this Friday by the organization Alarm Phone.

]]> <![CDATA[Disproportions]]> This is a summer of disproportion, and it is so not only because of an eclipse that, at the rate we are going, we will have to watch from our home TV, because only those who have paid to come to Mallorca will have the right to contemplate it... The unbearable heat is also disproportionate, the highest since records began in 1961, with a persistence that highlights one of our main vulnerabilities: no matter how much the tourism industry and Aena pretend that records of tourists and flights can be beaten year after year, natural resources, but also the system and infrastructures, have limits, even if no politician dares to define them clearly.

]]> <![CDATA["If you don't want it, there are many black people who want to work with us": three arrested in Palma for labor exploitation scheme]]>

The National Police have arrested three managers of a company in Palma accused of being part of a criminal group that allegedly exploited workers in an irregular situation in Spain. The investigation suggests that at least five people were victims of these practices, even though the company had up to twenty contracted workers.

]]> <![CDATA[34,000 migrants have requested extraordinary regularization in the Balearic Islands]]>

The extraordinary regularization process for migrants promoted by the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, which began in April and ended on June 30, has closed in the Balearic Islands with a total of 34,166 applications registered and 6,639 appointments assigned. Now, the challenge is for the Administration to be able to resolve the files within a reasonable time. The lawyer and coordinator of the UIB's Legal Clinic, Sebastià Arbós, believes it is still too early to assess the outcome of the process. "It is too soon to see how it has gone. I think those who wanted to submit the application have been able to submit it, but now the Administration needs to resolve them," he points out.

]]> <![CDATA[Moha]]> Not too many days ago I had a bump with the car. Nothing of great importance, more than a slightly dented door and the documentary and management hassle that the thing entails in the following days. This week I went to the workshop assigned to me by the insurance company to have it appraised. A workshop run by Manacor people of the kind they now call 'of a lifetime'. 'You'll have to wait a little, because the young man who takes care of it starts at nine', and I went back into the car and spent some time there scrolling through my mobile phone.After a few minutes, "the young man who takes care of it" appeared, smiling. "I'll take a couple of photos and send them to the house. If they don't see any signs of fraud, we'll move forward and you won't have to bring it back until we have to fix it," he told me amiably. We entered the office: "I'll jot down my direct number for you," and he gave me a card with a name written by hand. I'm not wearing my glasses. "Who should I ask for?" "Moha," he told me.If you had heard us, you would not have made any difference. Both of us adapting to the slightly formal and a little distant and cordial tone that the communicative situation required. Both of us in a 'lifelong' Manacor Catalan. Basically, because both of us are, 'lifelong' Manacor residents, from my life and from hers.And we'll leave it at that, I'll call him. There's no more difference between Moha and me than the origin of the name, within the professional relationship we've had. Obviously, then each to their own home, and the dogs to Coll's, as they say. Already in the car, I delve into my linguistic and cultural musings. I've thought about our great-grandparents in Havana, or in Buenos Aires, which are the two mythical names with which people of a certain time summarized the Majorcan diaspora in America. How must they have done it? They must have learned and spoken the language of the place, of course. But they must have looked for each other, they must have formed a community. What language did they speak to their children, if they formed a family there? All sorts of situations must have occurred. It depended on whether both parents were from here or not, whether they saw themselves returning to Mallorca someday, whether they thought that to ensure the future in the new land it was convenient to speak to them in Spanish or whether, on the contrary, they didn't want their children to lose the language their parents had taught them in any way.Just like all the people who arrive in Mallorca and who right now represent a third of the population. The narratives, depending on who articulates them, use different, sometimes antagonistic vocabularies: “coexistence”, “interculturality”, “integration”, “assimilation”, “cultural substitution”, “invasion”...We are moving in slippery terrain that allows for two interpretations: the most raw and uninhibited capitalism has settled within our homes. It is as if the United States had disembarked its model directly on this small island of ours in the middle of the Mediterranean. Incessant and tumultuous movements of population to feed the monetary greed of a handful of new rich and speculators, so that they can continue to pluck the golden goose of tourism on the backs of others; and a society divided into isolated communities, into stagnant ghettos that seek no other bond than the commercial or labor one, and even then. Rootedness and sense of belonging are weak. It is a way to keep communities poorly anchored to the territory, with no interest in defending it, and divided, with no possibility of organizing collectively, of uniting for a common cause, of questioning this or that policy together.However, let's talk about the second reading. Languages and cultures can be linked to a territory, but they can also be linked to a community. Neither of these two assumptions makes them better than others. Nor worse. All cultures, all languages, are necessary to sustain the global 'lingosystem'. Each way of speaking represents a way of understanding and interpreting the world. As humans, we cannot afford to do without any. Neither the others', nor our own. No one is in a position to tell another what language to speak, nor what form their cultural expressions should take. And we Catalan speakers in Mallorca know this well, because, however little we want to keep the presence of the language alive, we come up against ignorance, contempt, and affront.The singer and creator Joana Gomila (what would we do without her?) recently gave us a new idea: the right to cultural opacity. The idea is from the thinker from the island of Martinique, Édouard Glissant, who says that people, cultures, and languages do not have the obligation to be completely transparent or understandable to others. The idea of "translating everything" into one's own frameworks is very much linked to a way of understanding the world that is very colonial, perhaps even supremacist.Let's think of all of us, of all the Majorcans of today, those who were born here and those who have come. Whatever their lineage and their names. All have the right to preserve an irreducible part of their culture, the right not to be completely translatable, the right to exist without having to justify themselves according to external categories. Let's think about it, we Catalans of Mallorca, for ourselves, in this essential depth of our way of seeing and understanding the world. If we do, we will be more capable of empathizing also, for that very reason, with all this otherness that is now so ours, so from here, and that does not arrive as a threat to dilute us, but as an opportunity to make us richer, and I'm not talking about money.Because suspicion, obsession, and hatred, in general, are not usually cultural, even though the Spanish far-right, and now also the Catalan one, want to dress it up as such. Hatred, obsession, and suspicion, unfortunately, are class-based and the rejection of difference is arbitrary and depersonalizing.Moha's case from the workshop sends me back to school, which is, for now, the only meeting space we have managed to set up. That's where this normality comes from. From there, empathy must be able to emerge and suspicion towards difference must be dismantled. And from there, the building material we need must be able to emerge to construct the necessary bridges and meeting spaces, also in adult life, to become a plural, healthy society and, yes, call me naive, with the Catalan language as the backbone of it all.

]]> <![CDATA[Experts warn of rights violations in cases against captains of migrant boats in Balearics]]>

The Observatory on Migrations in the Mediterranean (OMIMED) has initiated a collaboration with the Proyecto Patrones, an initiative driven by lawyers and activists specializing in the defense of individuals accused of captaining vessels in the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands. The objective is to analyze and improve the legal guarantees for alleged captains prosecuted in Spanish courts, especially in territories like the Balearic Islands, where these types of cases have increased in recent years.

]]> <![CDATA[No to war: either we defend life or we become accomplices]]> There are moments when silence is not prudence but complicity. Moments when looking the other way is not neutrality but surrender. And this is one of those moments.

]]> <![CDATA[Migratory flight: the Balearic Islands shoot up with 32.7% more arrivals while Spain falls 64%]]>

The Balearic Islands began 2026 with a sharp increase in irregular sea arrivals of migrants, in a context of a general decline in the rest of Spain. Between January and March, the Islands registered a 32.7% increase compared to the same period last year, while Spain as a whole experienced a 63.8% decrease and the Canary Islands an even more pronounced drop of 85.3%. The data point to a displacement of migratory flows towards the Algerian route, which in recent years has been gaining importance, positioning the Balearic Islands in a central role.

]]> <![CDATA[Migration: the Balearic Islands skyrocket with 32.7% more arrivals while Spain falls by 64%]]>

The Balearic Islands have started 2026 with a sharp increase in irregular maritime arrivals of migrants, in a context of a generalized decrease in the rest of the State. Between January and March, the Islands registered a 32.7% increase compared to the same period last year, while Spain as a whole experienced a 63.8% drop and the Canary Islands, an even more pronounced fall of 85.3%. The data points to a displacement of migratory flows towards the Algerian route, which in recent years has been gaining importance to place the Balearic Islands in a central position.

]]> <![CDATA[Court reinforces police presence in migrant regularization process but not attention]]>

The Palma City Council has reported that from this Tuesday, the number of Local Police officers will be increased in the queues that form at the Citizen Service Offices due to the large influx of people. They have also urged the Spanish government delegation to mobilize National Police officers in the same way. However, what the Martínez government does not plan to reinforce is the service of attention, given the avalanche of migrant people who come to the offices since the regularization process began.

]]> <![CDATA[Investigate the finding of two bodies on Formentera beaches]]>

The Civil Guard has opened an investigation to clarify the circumstances of the death of two bodies found on the beaches of Formentera.

]]> <![CDATA[The Government will return to the courts if the State extends the distribution of migrant minors]]>

The Balearic Government maintains its tug-of-war with the State over the distribution of migrant minors and already warns that it will return to the courts if the Spanish government approves a new decree to extend the current system. This was announced this Friday by the Executive's spokesperson, Antoni Costa, after the Governing Council, in a press conference marked by the firmness of his speech.

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