Migrants to Spain Find Welcome Mat Withdrawn
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Victor Mallet, Financial Times (London), Sept. 27, 2008
Sadio Keita, a 28-year-old lorry driver from Guinea, is both lucky and unlucky. He was lucky to survive the hazardous boat journey from Senegal to the Canary Islands last year, thus reaching Spain, one of the most lenient European destinations for illegal immigrants. He was unlucky to arrive just as Spanish economic growth began to slow.
“I have not found any work at all,” says Mr Keita, speaking in French at an immigrant reception centre run by a Jesuit foundation in the Madrid neighbourhood of Ventilla. “If I had known it would be like this, I wouldn’t have come.”
Other immigrants poring over classified job advertisements at the Pueblos Unidos (United Peoples) help centre are finding it equally hard to find work as the Spanish welcome mat is withdrawn.
Javier Medina, a Chilean machine operator, lost his job installing air conditioners when the property bubble burst and the construction sector contracted sharply. “The economic crisis is the cause,” he says.
Over the past decade Spain has been the biggest importer of labour in the European Union. Waves of migrants from north Africa, South America and eastern Europe poured into Spain—once an exporter of cheap labour—to work as builders, domestic workers and waiters. Construction, tourism and the broader economy were thriving.
By 2007, there were nearly 4.5m foreigners living legally in Spain, as well as hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. Legal migrants alone, including those who have gained Spanish nationality, account for 12 per cent of the population, up from 3 per cent in 1998.
This rapid transformation of the face of Spain—parts of Barcelona and Madrid seem almost as cosmopolitan as London or New York—occurred with little animosity or racial tension. Spaniards welcomed the cheap labour needed for building sites, hotels and farms. The newcomers took advantage of public services such as schools and hospitals that are open even to illegal immigrants.
“Those were the good times,” says Xavier Vives, economics and finance professor at the IESE Business School in Barcelona.
“Now the times are worse, and constraints in public services are beginning to bite.”
A combination of fastrising unemployment—now at 2.5m, or 11 per cent of the workforce—and grumbling about foreigners among native Spaniards has prompted a hasty reappraisal of immigration policies by politicians of both left and right.
An outbreak of rioting earlier this month by immigrants in the southern town of Roquetas de Mar after the fatal stabbing of a Senegalese man further worsened the atmosphere.
A few days earlier, Celestino Corbacho, labour and immigration minister, had sparked a political row by explicitly linking unemployment to immigration and declaring that the number of visas for migrant workers would be cut to “roughly zero” next year.
Mr Corbacho was obliged by his fellow Socialists in the government to retract his statements.
Spain, nevertheless, joined other EU states this week in approving a deal to crack down on illegal immigrants while encouraging an inflow of highly skilled foreigners.
Spain has also launched a plan to pay jobless immigrants their unemployment benefit in advance, provided they go home and promise not to return to Spain for three years. About 165,000 legally resident, non-EU citizens—mostly from Ecuador and Morocco—can take up the offer, but officials think only about 10,000 will do so.
With the jobless total rising by some 3,000 a day, the impact of the scheme is likely to be small. But it shows that the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is groping for a solution to an unemployment problem certain to worsen in the months ahead.
For Daniel Izuzquiza, co-ordinator of the Pueblos Unidos centre in Ventilla, the scheme is wrong because it suggests a link between immigration and unemployment and labels immigrants as second class.
In this working-class barrio , which has readily absorbed new residents of Moroccan and Latin American origin over the past decade, elderly Spaniards have begun blaming immigrants for queues at the doctor and the lack of nursery school places for their grand-children.
(Posted on September 30, 2008)
Comments
This lends support to the idea that the present Western madness of allowing immigratio will stop when times get tough. Hello, economic collapse! Better it should come now than in the future, when our demographic position will be weaker.
Posted by c23 at 4:51 PM on September 30
Imagine that: a relation between immigration and employ-
ment. This is stupendous. Someone should nominate this Socialist
for the Nobel Prize in Economics. I understood this when I was
seven or eight, but I didn’t have a college degree so it didn’t
count. I didn’t forget it; I just thought everybody knew about it. Otherwise, I would have said something.
Posted by Freyr at 8:08 PM on September 30
Helloooooooo….good for the Spanish!!! Way to go!!
Posted by at 8:40 PM on September 30
And a second EU state sees the handwriting on the wall. The EU is going to be torn apart by immigration. Those members who severely restrict, even eliminate it, will have booming economies while those countries that don’t, collapse. The successes will resent shoring up the failures and will leave the EU…then use the advantages of banning immigration to out-compete the other former members of the EU. Eventually, all of europe will adopt this….and enforce it with military force in many instances.
Whether this happens sooner vs later will determine if this turns into a third world war.
Posted by at 9:06 PM on September 30
It is difficult to know which is worse, the fact that Spain has operated as the gateway to Europe for millions of third world trash or the idea that paying the same trash in advance to return to their home countries for only 3 years before illegally reimmigrating is regarded as a “get tough” policy towards third world immigrants.
Yes, Europe and the US just may begin to see the writing on the wall once their respective economies take a nose dive, but the time to expell all third world immigrants is now, not when the native unemployment rate is 20%. To little, too late seems to describe the actions of the Spanish authorities to a tee.
Posted by at 9:31 PM on September 30
Germany has relatively few immigrants. Germany has a trade surplus as large as China’s. Coincidence? Think about it.
What this proves is what those of us who oppose mass immigration have been saying for years: that you can’t juice an economy by flooding it with immigrants, especially if they’re of the low skill/low human capital variety and when many of them send they’re savings back to the home country (over $40 billlion in 2006 alone). The strength of an economy is based solely on the knowledge base and human capital of its members.
The fact is that immigrants to the US recpature most (perhaps all) of the wealth they produce for this country; low skill immigrants from Africa and Latin America get more in taxpayer services than they produce for the economy; high skill immigrants from Asia have played a key role in transferring skills and technical knowledge from the US to their home countries, making our country less competitive.
And I won’t even get into the whole diversity/mortgage crisis nexus, except to say that ALL of the politicians who bought into
the no money down/lend to the unreliable idea were full fledged members of the Society of Open Borders Kooks (aka “SOBs”): George Bush, Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Mel Martinez (when he was HUD secretary), the Congressional Black Caucus, ad nauseum.
Posted by Jack at 4:30 AM on October 1
Could the end of Globalism be at hand?
Posted by at 11:21 AM on October 1
Send them all home, enact new restrictions, and then rebuild our economies and populations.
Posted by Awakening Citizen at 1:03 PM on October 1
“Spanish government discovers link between immigration and rising unemployment.”
Doh! I wonder if these geniuses have discovered a link between rising water and flooding as well…
Posted by at 1:23 PM on October 1
“This lends support to the idea that the present Western madness of allowing immigratio will stop when times get tough. Hello, economic collapse! Better it should come now than in the future.” — Posted by c23
———————————-
Economies have their cycles: up and down. These aliens are being paid to go back to Africa FOR ONLY THREE YEARS! When conditions get better, will the doors swing wide open once again? No doubt. We can guarantee, given the mentality of the determined socialists running the EU, that they will eagerly welcome back the “immigrants” with open arms just as soon as they can. Immigrants are a necessary part of their multicultural Marxist plan to disestablish the white race.
Let’s also look forward to the future and have our own plan based on keeping the doors SHUT. Once the “immigrants” (ie. invaders) have been gotten out, let’s KEEP them out.
Posted by at 2:52 PM on October 1
They need another Ferdinand and Isabella… or a Franco, to save them.
1492 again in 2012? Deo Volente!
Posted by Fr. John at 3:44 PM on October 1
“These aliens are being paid to go back to Africa FOR ONLY THREE YEARS! When conditions get better, will the doors swing wide open once again?”
* * * * * * * *
Remember too that these immigrants referred to are only a small PART of the alien population. According to the article, there were 4.5 million immigrants living LEGALLY in Spain (not even counting illegals). That number alone represents 1 person out of 8 of the Spanish population!
Then, out of those, only 165,000 LEGAL residents are qualified to “take up the offer, but officials think only about 10,000 will do so.” In other words, this is just a drop in the bucket. Yes, it’s a start, but there’s a long way to go.
Posted by at 10:27 PM on October 1