Spain's Civil Guard maritime patrols in the Strait of Gibraltar are working at full pace this year. 

When we asked to accompany a patrol boat into the waters, the Civil Guard officer in Madrid asked: For drug trafficking or for migrants? 

We are interested in migrants, but Civil Guards and other experts said that drug traffickers, who have long crossed these waters in ultra-fast launches to transport drugs from Morocco to Spain, have also gotten into the migrant trade in recent years. 

The irregular African migrants pay dearly for rides in unsafe boats – sometimes the bottoms literally disintegrate and they drop into the water. That's where Spain's protective services come in. We accompanied a Civil Guard patrol ship commanded by Sergeant Adrian Romo, who has been fighting irregular migration for a decade. 

The Civil Guards on this ship are on duty for 24 hours. Sometimes all of that time is spent at sea, but more often it's a mixture of time at sea and time back at base, in the port of Algeciras, just across from Gibraltar, where they are ready to sail again at a moment's notice. 

Their role, said Sgt. Romo, is to spot and intercept irregular migrants and to alert Spain's maritime rescue service, which patrols in larger ships painted bright orange, to come and pick up the migrants. But the Civil Guard vessel, just three years old, is equipped with ladders that can be deployed at an angle into the sea so that migrants in distress could climb up on to the Civil Guard ship and then stay in a below-deck holding area briefly until a maritime rescue service vessel can come along. 

Sgt. Romo said there is a much bigger issue than just picking up migrants. “To stop them from coming,” said him, “their home countries (in Africa) have to be better off. No one wants to leave and cross the sea, which is so dangerous, for an uncertain future.” The UN's Migration Agency reports that more than 35,000 irregular African migrants have reached Spain this year, more than those to Greece and Italy. 

Overall, the influx to southern Europe from January through late September reached about 80,000. The UN Migration Agency also recorded 1,730 deaths, according to figures from the IOM's Global Migration Data Analysis Centre. 

Yet those figures are fewer than in the same period of 2017, when 133,000 migrants arrived, especially to Italy last year, and 2,673 deaths were recorded. In the port town of Algeciras, we met Ibrahim Sanogo of Mali, who told us he left his homeland six months ago to travel north by land, finally getting into a small boat to cross the Mediterranean, and then being rescued at sea. He'd been in Spain for just a few weeks. 

At first, he was at a migrant holding center guarded by the police, and later released to an NGO called Cepaim, which works with migrants, especially in southern Spain, helping them to find an opportunity. Sanogo said his reason for leaving Mali was simple – to find work and earn some money to send back home. 

“If you're a man, you can't just wait. You have to help your family. I think migrants should get temporary visas to fend for themselves in Europe for a while, and then return to Africa.” Like many migrants, Sanogo, who speaks French, wants to go to France. He said he has an aunt in Paris. But the migration issue is one that generates heated debates and emotions. 

Not far from our interview with Sanogo, a perfume store clerk in Algeciras, Irene Lopez Tapia said, “Spain helps the migrants more than the Spaniards. The migrants always get more aid than the Spaniards – for housing, for food, for everything.” 

As the international conference on migration in Morocco gets underway on December 10, the leaders present will be pressed for answers that can help satisfy numerous contingents – their diverse populations, including the Civil Guards and other security and rescue services, the NGOs, and the migrants themselves. 

(Cover Photo: Spains Maritime Rescue Service rescued about 148 migrants aboard dinghies at the Alboran Sea and brought them to Malaga harbor, Spain, December 7, 2018. /VCG Photo)