In the first 10 months of 2023, more than 43,000 migrants and refugees landed on the Spanish coasts. Most of them reached the Canary Islands in small boats known as pateras. The number far exceeds arrivals to the UK, whose shores have been reached by about 27,000 people in the same period.
Unlike in the UK, in Spain net migration numbers are usually reported not as a negative, but as a welcome source of growth in a country with an ageing population. Immigration has not become a central issue in Spain's political debate, and the weaponized rhetoric of invasion is marginal, used primarily by the far-right party Vox.
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