Spain’s government under fire over plan to house migrants in disused airport

A Spanish government proposal to house thousands of migrants in a disused airport has drawn widespread criticism from local politicians, with one of them comparing it to the detention camp at Guantánamo.
It has emerged that the Socialist-led administration of Pedro Sánchez is considering using the airport of Ciudad Real, on the plains of the Castilla-La Mancha region 160km south of Madrid, as an emergency migrant stay centre.
The airport was initially designed to take the overflow of flights from Madrid. However, by the time it was completed, in 2008 at a cost of €1.1 billion euro, a new terminal had already been built for Madrid airport. Ciudad Real airport was operative for only three years and after the euro zone crisis hit Spain it sat empty as a symbol of the profligacy of the economic boom.
With more than 45,000 undocumented migrants arriving in Spain so far this year, most of them reaching the Canary Islands from Africa, the government is looking for ways of accommodating them while their legal status is processed.
The minister for inclusion, social security and immigration, Elma Saiz, said no firm decision had yet been taken regarding the use of the airport. “We are in an absolutely preliminary phase,” she said.
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However, local politicians have expressed anger at the possible plan.
“It’s not just an absurd idea put forward by the government, it’s also unacceptably offensive,” said the mayor of the nearby city of Puertollano, the conservative Miguel Ángel Ruiz. He said the initiative proposed “turning an infrastructure which at the time was conceived as a flag-bearer of progress and development in our province into a ghetto for immigrants”.
Mr Ruiz said it risked becoming “Castilla-La Mancha’s Guantánamo”, a reference to the US detention camp in Cuba used to house terrorism suspects.
Francisco Cañizares, the conservative mayor of the city of Ciudad Real, 12km from the airport, was similarly scathing, suggesting it would be “a concentration camp for immigrants”. He said the government’s plan, if implemented, would mean that 3,000 migrants would be housed in the airport.
Criticism has also come from within Mr Sánchez’s own Socialist Party. Emiliano García-Page, the Socialist president of the Castilla-La Mancha region, said the central government had not consulted him about the idea. Describing the proposal as “an outrage”, he said the airport would become “almost a refugee camp”.
This controversy has raged just as Mr Sánchez has been staunchly defending what he describes as a humane approach to immigration, and rejecting the policy of sending migrants outside the bloc for deportation, which Italy has started to implement.
“We Spaniards are children of migrants,” he told the Spanish parliament. “We are not going to be the parents of xenophobia.”