Pope Leo visits dock of shame in Canary Islands speaking up for migrant rights: Human dignity has no passport

ARGUINEGUÍN, Spain (AP) — Pope Leo XIV traveled to a once-notorious epicenter of the European migration debate on Thursday, challenging countries to uphold migrants’ rights while shaming those leaders, including Christians, who turn them away with indifference.Leo issued an impassioned plea to recognize the dignity of migrants from the port of Arguineguín, in the Canary Islands.In 2020, the port was dubbed “dock of shame” because of the squalid conditions migrants were forced to live in for months during a spike in arrivals.“Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border,” Leo said, with rescue ships docked behind him and a simple wooden cross made from a shipwrecked migrant boat nearby.Leo is spending the final two days of his weeklong trip to Spain in the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago closer to Africa than the Iberian Peninsula and a key point of entry for migrants who make the perilous Atlantic crossing from West Africa.He is fulfilling a wish of Pope Francis to visit the islands to commemorate the thousands of lives lost at sea.With two migrants standing by him, Leo threw a bouquet of flowers into the sea.

The gesture recalled one Francis made in 2013, at the start of his pontificate, when he visited another migration flashpoint in Lampedusa, Sicily and denounced the “globalization of indifference” that the world showed migrants.The Canary Islands have long been a stepping stone for migrants trying to reach Europe from West Africa and Morocco.Some experts consider the Atlantic route they take to get here more deadly than the more well-known central Mediterranean smuggling route from Libya and Tunisia to Italy.Migrant arrivals in the Canary Islands peaked in 2024 at nearly 47,000.

Following pressure and deals between the European Union, Spain and the governments of several West African nations, arrivals have fallen dramatically, with just over 3,000 people landing there in the first five months...