Spain tries to buy out immigrantsAs economy sours, jobless are offered payments to leave
Chicago Tribune's Christine Spolar
10:58 PM CDT, October 12, 2008
MADRID ? Spain once wooed and wanted immigrants.
Over the last decade, the booming economy sought poor foreigners to come and harvest its bounty of grapes, avocados and oranges. It welcomed waves of Latin Americans, Moroccans and Romanians to build fancy resorts along its sunny coast. Immigrants were absorbed into Spain's economic landscape, and their presence often was touted as a symbol of this European country's vision and tolerance.
Not anymore.
As the economy has downshifted and soured, so has Spain's attitude toward foreign workers. Talk of what to do about Immigration has turned politically perilous, according to migration analysts and advocates, with
a new initiative from the left-wing government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero encouraging legal immigrants to pull up stakes.
Transplants not tempted to go back Since late September, the government has been offering lump-sum payouts?
up to two years of unemployment benefits?for jobless migrants to leave. Spain is fighting off a recession, a surprise turn for what had been a star economy, and both legal and illegal immigrants are suddenly targets in uncertain times.
Spain's tactic also is seen as a signal flare across Europe: Facing severe economic difficulties, troubled governments everywhere are hunkering down to protect their own.
Spain's boom, heavily dependent on construction, was waning a year ago. The global credit crisis has now confounded all prospects. Europe's best-performing economies were in trouble even before the U.S. lending market touched off worldwide financial problems. Ireland fell into recession in late September. France followed this month. Economists predict that Germany, Spain and Italy are likely to be next.
About 1.7 million of Spain's 40 million people are collecting unemployment, with migrant workers making up about 10 percent of the out-of-work population. Claims have soared overall?by 25 percent?since 2007, said Maravillas Rojo, the government's labor secretary. That explains Spain's new view of its economic boundaries, she said.
"It's a structural way of coping," Rojo said. She described the offer to immigrants as a "humanitarian gesture to help those who would like to return" to their countries of origin. Spain is looking for volunteers, she emphasized, and "there's nothing negative about this."
Yet labor advocates and the political opposition scoff at the initiative as a panic measure and wonder how migrant workers, many of whom have lived in Spain for years, would benefit from uprooting their lives again. Immigration groups said authorities never held consultations before the initiative went into effect. Legal advocates said they still are sorting through its implications.
The proposition offers a quick handout, with a catch. Those who grab the money must leave Spain for three years. If they seek then to return, Spain has the right to refuse. Unemployment benefits are based on annual pay in Spain. So for immigrants, the cash would be attractive.
The average salary in Spain is about $31,000, though surveys indicate that in some places immigrants average about 25 percent less.
"People didn't realize the fine print: They will lose their residency rights," said Dora Aguirre, co-founder of the Asociacion Ruminahui Hispano Ecuatoriana, which represents hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorans. Many of her clients left their homeland because it has been beset by economic troubles.
For them, "the initiative is absurd," Aguirre said.
No advocacy group is advising migrants to take the deal?and even government estimates about the number who will take it have quickly fallen from 100,000 to 13,000.
Spain's repositioning
reflects a growing unease about a new working class that has taken root in Europe. Spain, Italy and Greece see thousands of desperately poor Africans sail to their shores illegally every year. Millions of foreigners fly to Europe's major capitals with fake visas and eke out black-market lives.
This autumn, immigrants and mafia clans in Italy clashed near Naples. And in Austria, recent elections buoyed extreme-right parties, a turn that analysts attributed to anti-immigrant sentiment.
Spain's impulse to push out immigrants transmits "a message the immigrants are to blame for native Spaniards being out of work," Aguirre said. "The whole image of the past?that Spain wanted immigrants to integrate?is gone."
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