Spain’s approach to reducing illegal maritime crossings has had impressive results, with numbers down dramatically last year
MADRID – The UK could learn valuable lessons from Spain, which reduced small boat crossings last year while Channel crossings rose over the same period, experts told The i Paper.
More than 41,000 people crossed the English Channel in small boats last year, the Home Office said, a 13 per cent rise compared to 2024. The numbers were the second highest on record, second only to the 45,774 people who made the crossing in 2022.
In comparison, maritime crossings to Spain, including to the Canary Islands from West Africa, fell by 46 per cent year-on-year in 2025, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry.
Some 32,925 people reached its shores by sea in 2025. However, this was down from 61,372 the year before.
Spain has struck political and economic deals with African countries like Morocco, Mauritania, Gambia and Senegal, which are some of the main sources of migrant arrivals. It has also been directly involved in military and police operations with those countries to stem the flow of flimsy boats making the perilous journey from Africa.
In July, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez signed an agreement with his Mauritanian counterpart, Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, on migration cooperation. Spain has signed similar deals with Gambia, Senegal and Mali.
At the same time, it has sought to encourage legal migration to help fill a shortfall in its workforce. Young Malian migrants have been offered work at an Amazon centre in Spain, to promote a labour deal for a limited number of migrants.
Meghan Bunton, director of global programmes at the Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank, said the UK could learn from the approach Spain has taken to reduce small boat arrivals.
“Spain was one of the first countries to take a diplomacy-first approach to migration management,” Bunton told The i Paper. “One thing it has done well is to pursue more comprehensive partnerships rather than just things that are framed around enforcement alone.”
She said that, with Morocco, Spain has seasonal employment opportunities, and emphasises job, trade and development “rather than just enforcement”.
The UK, meanwhile, has taken a strong enforcement approach, with a “one-in, one-out” scheme designed to deter crossings by returning illegal migrants and efforts to work with France to reduce overall numbers.
Bunton said that the UK is “trying to build on what is called upstream developments. It includes packages of development. The difference is that it does not have this direct leverage over the main departure countries. It has France, and that is proving an extremely difficult relationship to manage in comparison.”
Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said that often migration flows can be controlled when high-income countries border low-income ones.
“If it was a big priority for France to reduce the small boats crisis, there are a lot of things they could do, but it is just not. There has not been any action on the French side,” she said.
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“The big difference between the [Spanish and UK situations] is France,” she added, saying that it is difficult to reduce immigration simply through development programmes.
Spain has its own small boats issue, albeit on a much smaller scale, with 7,321 people travelling from Algeria to the islands of Majorca, Menorca and Ibiza last year, up 24.5 per cent compared with 2024.
Relations between Spain and Algeria have deteriorated in recent years, so a deal between the countries to try to cut arrivals has not been possible.
