Lanzarote Blog Day One: Migration
I’ve decided to put up a more or less regular blog on how things are here in Lanzarote, for me, who is here with N for six months, more or less (I intend to go to Scotland again in Feb to be with my mother, who has memory and mobility issues, but who wants to live at home for as long as possible).
Today’s is about migration, because The Canary Islands have had an exponential rise in migration, on top of which there’s a cost of living crisis for residents, with rents increasing dramatically. Actually, there has been lots of talk of the problems of ‘overtourism’ (hence the picture at the top) but I wanted to start by looking at how migration was seen by a random selection of people. In the end, two. So not representative. But they were unexpectedly frank, and their answers were somewhat surprising — refreshingly, not at all as I had predicted.
Migration, of course, is a global problem, one of the ‘fragmentations’ of the ecological emergency, leading to social and political polarisation among those in countries at the receiving end. It’s a problem that is going to get much, much worse, if mass movements of peoples is indeed to the disadvantage of all (this itself is a question which quickly divides people by ideology). At the very least, it is something we can bring into consciousness and awareness, and deal with in all the various aspects it represents of our…
