BARCELONA: Pope Leo XIV is visiting the Canary Islands on Thursday to draw attention to the plight of migrants who risk their lives every year trying to reach Europe, fulfilling a wish of Pope Francis to visit one of the epicenters of the European migration debate.<\/p>\n
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 that is a key point of entry for migrants smuggled from West Africa.<\/p>\n
He is meeting with recently arrived migrants and representatives of the church and humanitarian organizations that care for them and work to integrate them into Spanish society.<\/p>\n
Most poignantly, he will commemorate the thousands of lives lost at sea from a port that in 2020 became known as the \u201cdock of shame\u201d because of the squalid conditions migrants lived in when they came ashore during a spike in arrivals.<\/p>\n
Spain\u2019s Socialist-led government, which had been shamed by the 2020 crisis, has bucked a trend in Europe and the United States by defending immigration on economic and humanitarian grounds. It has launched a legalization push earlier this year for hundreds of thousands of immigrants without authorization.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez has highlighted the benefits to the economy with an aging workforce and low birth rate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BARCELONA: Pope Leo XIV is visiting the Canary Islands on Thursday to draw attention to the plight of migrants who risk their lives every year trying to reach Europe, fulfilling a wish of Pope Francis to visit one of the epicenters of the European migration debate. Leo is spending the final two days of his …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":98923,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98924,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98914\/revisions\/98924"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}