Spain's New Challenge

VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE

Illegal Immigration Spain's New Challenge By Janice Valls-Russell Barcelona MEETING THE PRESS August 6 on Majorca, the island where King Juan Carlos traditionally spends part of the...

...An additional 260,000 illegals have applied for permits on other grounds, bringing the applicants so far in 2001 to 580,000...
...Such pragmatic bluntness, coming from a moderately conservative politician, is all the more creditable in the light of the mounting unease over immigration that can be sensed in recent opinion polls...
...A survey of EU countries released in March found that Spaniards feel less threatened by racial, ethnic and religious differences than other Europeans...
...They prefer to have fewer children and help them through their studies to jobs that are viewed as proof of social advancement...
...measures aimed at maintaining Spain's currently satisfying economic growth...
...The objective is to try to prevent this Catch-22 situation, believed to be linked to a rise in the kind of petty crime that is, often unfairly, associated with illegal vagrants...
...Aznar has postponed making a decision on whether or not he will attend a bilateral summit that is supposed to be held before the end of the year: He is reportedly irritated by what he perceives as Morocco's unwillingness to do anything to prevent emigration...
...To date, the main casualty of Spain's efforts to deal with the problem has been its relations with Morocco...
...Forcing open Spain's door will be harder in the future: Rajoy has announced that, in accordance with European Union (EU) guidelines, quotas will be set based on labor needs...
...Acres and acres of plastic sheeting shimmer in the sun...
...While the authorities try to find ways to restrict immigration and ensure that law and order are maintained, albeit without escalating the issue, the opposition is reluctant to attack them too frontally and attempts to fight what they fear may be a rising tide of xenophobia...
...Immigration (official, that is) accounts for the bulk of the increase: 800,000 out of a total increase of 847,000...
...The figures of the latest census, carried out in 2000, were officially released by the government on August 3. They put Spain's population at 40,499,791 inhabitants, a 2 per cent increase since the 1996 census...
...In villages in southern Spain known for festivity rituals opposing "Christians" and "Moors" —which date from the expulsion of the Jews and Moors in 1492—youths have turned the tradition into nasty raids (ratonadas) against immigrants and their supporters...
...Besides tightening its immigration laws and cracking down on gangs that extort money from vulnerable people desperate to get into Spain—or, once in, to find a job—the government has increased the police patrols in Ceuta and Melilla as well as along the southern coastline...
...They came in just ahead of the people of Luxembourg and Finland in this respect...
...In recent years both the United Nations and the European Union had expressed concern over a trend that seemed to suggest a decrease—or excessive aging—of Spain's population...
...Spain has tentatively proposed economic cooperation if Morocco agrees to seal its borders...
...Already in the 1960s, when France pulled out of Algeria, hundreds of pieds noirs (French citizens of Algeria) settled in Spain, mainly around Alicante, where they nostalgically gazed south toward Algiers and Oran...
...Most had reached continental Spain via the Canary Islands...
...An association of Moroccan immigrants in Spain estimates that during the past year over 600 people trying to get into the country drowned, were asphyxiated in container trucks, or were crushed in the undercarriage of vehides that use the ferries between Spain and Morocco...
...Even at the mil rate, few Spaniards are willing to endure that kind of drudgery...
...Manuel Chaves, the Socialist president of the regional Andalusian administration, has observed that although an electronic barrier is a spectacular and headline-catching concept, entry by sea accounts for barely 15 per cent of illegal immigrants...
...In a sense, Spain may be fortunate: Its politicians can, if they care, learn from the mistakes made in other countries, and, with luck, avoid the demagogic passions all too often unleashed by immigration issues in Europe...
...It is expected that the number of foreign residents living legally in Spain will reach 1.2 million by the end of the year, twice the total in 1997...
...In the first seven months of this year, 320,000 of them applied for residence permits on the grounds that they have been in Spain more than six months and are employed or have a job offer...
...But another 700, whom the police suspect arrived in similar vessels that same day, slipped through their fingers...
...Instead, this country has become an increasingly attractive place to foreigners...
...Perhaps this reflects the Prime Minister's feeling reasonably secure, since his Popular Party (PP) was returned to office just over a year ago...
...One survey, carried out in Catalonia in early July, indicates that 48.6 per cent of Catalans feel there are too many "foreigners" in their region—compared with 35.9 per cent last November...
...Beyond purely electoral motivations, Spanish conservatives are at pains to appear moderate and satisfy the electorate that their political convictions are anchored in democracy: Barrel-thumping propaganda against foreigners is something one associates with the darker years of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship...
...usually homeless before arriving, they have no one and nowhere to return to...
...At that time, 31.1 per cent of Spaniards reckoned that immigration is the third most important challenge facing their country, after unemployment and terrorism—significantly up from barely 6 per cent in January...
...For obvious reasons, it is difficult to know exactly how many illegal immigrants there are here...
...The birthrate, too—about the lowest in Europe—is boosted by immigration: Immigrant women bear more children than Spanish women, but this should not be overestimated, warns Cabré: The current birthrate in Morocco (2.2 children per woman) is lower than it was in Spain in the 1970s, and the birthrate among immigrants rapidly drops below that of their home countries...
...Yesterday's poor farm workers have become today's rich landowners, exploiting others the way they were once exploited...
...The work is done mostly by immigrants, who spend up to 15 hours a day trapped in the heat under the sheeting, earning about $ 16 for their labors, though the minimum wage is close to $29 a day...
...Of late, anxiety has been growing over the seemingly unstoppable influx of illegal immigrants from Latin America and from North and sub-Saharan Africa...
...But debates in Parliament have on the whole been moderate and responsible...
...Under Spanish law they cannot be expelled unless they have been judged, but if they are left free pending trial there is a risk that they will break the law again, having no stable source of income...
...Every year, tourism brings Spain a seasonal influx of some 50 million sun-worshiping holidaymakers...
...Last year 420 tons of drugs were unloaded in the region...
...Yet even if this does not cover illegal immigrants, the percentage is about the lowest in the EU...
...In spite of the recent opinion polls, Spanish society continues to give an impression of tolerance...
...In 1991 the two countries signed a "Friendship Treaty," but a cool wind is blowing southward from Madrid, and the mood on the other side of the Straits is chilly...
...together, people from the 15 EU countries constitute one-third of all foreign resi dents...
...In July a delegation of Spanish Socialists visited Rabat on a conciliatory mission...
...The snag is," as one immigration officer puts it, "they don't move south again once the grapes are picked...
...Barcelona's rapid expansion in the 1950s and '60s was largely due to incoming workers from southern Spain...
...Over the past four years, Extremadura, Galicia and northern Castille have seen their populations drop, while those of Catalonia, the Madrid conurbation, and the Balearic and Canary islands have grown...
...In some towns and cities, the atmosphere is tense...
...Such internal migration continues to this day...
...This would consist of a system of fixed and mobile radar units and infrared cameras capable of spotting incoming launches loaded with immigrants or drugs...
...Some months ago, the difficulties of a Moroccan having to deal with his two quarreling wives in a small town were met with good humor and sympathy (for the husband) by his neighbors...
...Immigration certainly is having an impact on Spanish demography...
...All the way back to the Conquistadors, migration has been a way of life among Spaniards, for economic as well as political reasons...
...Revealingly, 28.8 per cent view immigration as Spain's second most important problem after unemployment, ahead of terrorism...
...Aznar's team has refrained from exploiting a subject that, in France for instance, periodically dominates election campaigns...
...On July 26, coastal police in Andalusia rounded up more than 300 people, including a baby and two pregnant women, crowded on eight small boats...
...Illegal Immigration Spain's New Challenge By Janice Valls-Russell Barcelona MEETING THE PRESS August 6 on Majorca, the island where King Juan Carlos traditionally spends part of the summer, Spain's Center-Right Prime Minister, José Maria Aznar, went over some of the issues on the government agenda: recurring terrorist attacks by Basque separatists...
...In recent years, though, prosperity and democracy have lessened the need to seek out better horizons north of the Pyrenees...
...Villagers from parched Andalusia and Extremadura, to the south and west, sent their daughters to serve the rich bourgeoisie of Madrid and Barcelona...
...And tens of thousands of Moroccans living and working in France pass through each summer to visit relatives in their home country...
...and roughly 8 per cent are from Eastern Europe...
...Demographer Anna Cabré notes that Spaniards do not want their children to go into these jobs, because they associate them with their own forebears' grinding poverty...
...merely 10.4 per cent thought so in November...
...Security measures are necessary, says the CenterRight president of the autonomous Catalan administration, Jordi Pujol, but "it would be irresponsible to letpeople think that they will suffice...
...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...
...The least tolerant, according to this same poll, are Belgians, Danes and Greeks...
...The project, estimated to cost approximately S107 million, has been greeted with a certain amount of skepticism...
...International cooperation, labor flexibility and dealing firmly with both lawbreaking immigrants and racist nationals can achieve a good deal...
...Olive-picking more to the west is another labor-intensive activity where landowners are happy to employ illegals...
...In the labor-intensive fruit and vegetable regions, the authorities have asked the Madrid administration permission to grant provisional work permits...
...Furthermore, Justice Minister Margarita Mariscal has asked the courts to arrange speedy trials for illegal immigrants charged with a crime...
...The Catalan findings carried forward a trend indicated by a nationwide poll conducted this past March...
...Most pathetic are the minors in their teens who slip into the country...
...Their sons were attracted by the factories of the Basque country and Catalonia...
...Immigrants also attempt to cross the Straits of Gibraltar in small boats...
...Sub-Saharans are given a fortnight to leave, but many simply stay on...
...a financial scandal involving an investment company whose clients include state agencies...
...Some immigrants destroy whatever documents they have and refuse to name the country they come from...
...Others apply for the status of political refugee, under the UN Convention...
...A few aspects of the new immigration law are opposed by the Socialists and Communists, who worry that it undermines civil rights...
...Similarly, where the grape-pickers on France's vineyards were once Spaniards who moved north at the end of the summer for a few weeks, the grape-pickers on Spain's vineyards move in from across the Straits of Gibraltar...
...underneath, tomatoes, broccoli and other vegetables grow, primarily for export to the rest of Europe...
...Artur Mas, a member of the Catalan regional administration, thinks the burgeoning fear is unfounded: True, foreign residents constitute 3.5 per cent of Catalonia's population, and the national average is 2.3 per cent...
...Young men from rain-soaked Galicia and Asturias sailed west to the Americas...
...A Spanish woman who works in an association that provides welfare aid to immigrant women had to go into hiding for several days to escape being lynched by fellow Spaniards...
...The idea, expressed with force by conservative and Socialist politicians alike, is that in the long run only economic and political aid to the Third World can hope to reduce the irresistible attraction of what populations there see as the Western El Dorado...
...A few hours prior to Aznar's press conference the police in Barcelona dismantled a makeshift encampment on one of the city's central squares, where a hundred or so illegal immigrants from subSaharan Africa had been living since the end of last winter...
...But the plains and hills around Almeria and Murcia, so parched and poor that they long served as sets for cheap Westerns, owe their current prosperity precisely to illegal immigration...
...Thousands of English and other expatriates from northern Europe have chosen to retire in the sun all along the Mediterranean shore...
...The 1936-39Civil War sent about half a million Spaniards into neighboring France...
...Interior Minister Mariano Rajoy reckons that the figure could reach 2 million—about 5 per cent of the Spanish population—in two to three years...
...The vast majority, he points out, gam entry on short-term visas or through forged identity, labor and residence documents...
...As unemployment continues to drop, more suchjobs should become available, especially at the lower end of the market...
...Moroccans represent the largest single outside group (22.3 per cent) in Spain...
...An immigration law passed last year also became effective on August 1. It requires illegal immigrants to show that they have been living in Spain for three years, and they have to return to their home country to apply for an entry visa before being entitled to a residence permit...
...Experience in France and other European countries has shown it is equally nefarious to pretend the problem of immigration does not exist, or to whip it up into an electoral issue...
...One project being considered is the erection of an electronic "wall" along Andalusia's 43 5 mile coastline...
...there is a growing tendency to link petty crime and illegal immigration...
...They show little concern for their charges, many of whom live in makeshift shacks cobbled together from packing cases and the plastic sheeting...
...One issue of rising concern to many Spaniards was left out—immigration...
...In keeping with a bilateral treaty, Moroccans unable to justify their presence in Spain are immediately sent back to Morocco...
...Spain's enclaves on the Moroccan coast, Ceuta and Melilla, are tempting entry points...

Vol. 84 • September 2001 • No. 5


 
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