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MIGRATION-SPAIN: The Threat of Deportation

Alicia Fraerman

MADRID, Sep 12 2006 (IPS) - Immigrants who enter Spain illegally should know that they will be deported “sooner or later,” Deputy Prime Minister María Teresa Fernández de la Vega warned on Tuesday, although she defended last year’s amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

Her remarks came at a time of great controversy between those who defend the socialist government’s policy on immigration, harsh critics from the centre-right opposition Popular Party (PP), and the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that support the social integration of immigrants and are opposed to repressive measures.

The secretary general of the PP, Mariano Rajoy, said that on Wednesday, when parliament reconvenes after the summer recess, he will ask Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero whether he still believes he was right to allow 600,000 immigrants to legalise their status in late 2005.

That decision by the Zapatero administration was sharply criticised by the PP.

To some extent, Fernández de la Vega responded in advance by suggesting to Rajoy that the PP support “a broad national pact on immigration” with the governing Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), but which would not include a ban on mass amnesties for immigrants, as called for by the centre-right.

In spite of the harsh warning to migrants contained in her speech to PSOE lawmakers and members of the European Parliament, Fernández de la Vega urged them to publicly defend the legalisation of immigrants, which she said had been “exemplary,” pointing out that it was part of a “responsible, sensible and firm” policy.

While acknowledging that immigration is a complex problem with “no easy solutions,” she called for strengthening Europe’s borders, but also for measures to help tackle the problems in the countries of origin, through development aid, fair trade and support for good governance.

In the meantime, Justice Minister Juan Fernando López Aguilar and his Mauritanian counterpart, Mahfoudh Ould Bettah, signed four legal cooperation agreements Tuesday to regulate legal efforts to fight transnational organised crime and human trafficking networks.

They include transfer of persons convicted of such crimes, extradition of accused parties, and civil and criminal justice cooperation and assistance between the two countries.

In response to arguments that Spanish jobs are put at risk by the growing influx of immigrants, the secretary general of employment at the Labour Ministry, Valeriano Gómez, stated that the Spanish labour market “will continue to need the contribution of the immigrant population for many years to come.”

Furthermore, according to a recent study by the Autonomous University of Madrid, immigrants bring 12 euros (15 dollars) into the Madrid region for every one euro spent on them, and they generate 9.7 percent of the regional gross domestic product (GDP).

Cándido Méndez, secretary general of the General Workers Union (UGT, one of the country’s two main labour confederations), said that no labour market can consider itself closed, even when it is difficult to assimilate new workers. That view is also shared by the other main union confederation, Workers’ Commissions (CCOO).

However, the PP submitted a proposal to the Senate on Tuesday to expand a Comprehensive System of Electronic Surveillance in the Canary Islands before 2008, and to increase the forces committed to border security, especially at sea.

The bill, which so far lacks the votes needed for approval, calls for more agreements for the repatriation of immigrants, a Spanish policy aimed at committing the entire European Union to border surveillance, and minimum standards – also Europe-wide – for accepting asylum seekers.

The president of the non-governmental Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance (CEAR), Ignacio Díaz de Aguilar, told IPS that people were exaggerating.

Díaz de Aguilar thought that both the government and the PP have taken “radical” stances on illegal immigration, and that the cries of alarm in response to the arrival of boats packed with migrants at the Canary Islands were not justified.

The frail boats making the sea crossing from Africa are often shipwrecked, with tragic results.

Provincial government officials in the Canary Islands, one of the 17 autonomous communities that make up Spain, said that this year 22,500 undocumented immigrants have arrived in the archipelago, which is off the northwest coast of Africa. Another 5,000 migrants died en route when their boats went down, or from hunger and thirst after many exhausting days at sea.

The Canary Islands’ deputy minister of Social Affairs and Immigration, Froilán Rodríguez, said on Monday that another avalanche of immigrants is expected, as he had been informed that hundreds of boats are for sale in Guinea, each of them capable of carrying over 200 migrants in overcrowded conditions.

Sub-Saharan Africans began to travel to Europe two decades ago in flat-bottomed “patera” boats, which were launched from the Moroccan coast and crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Spain.

In recent years, however, people from other African countries, such as Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea Bissau and Guinea Conakry increasingly began to cross the Atlantic Ocean, using equally frail but slightly bigger boats.

Like the PP, Rodríguez is demanding that the borders be closed and that the EU be called on to act, deploying security forces off the African coast.

Immigrants arriving at the Canary Islands are taken to the mainland by order of the Spanish government, and most of them then enter other EU countries. Because of this, Rodríguez believes that the other EU governments will be persuaded of the need to act in coordination.

The migrants arriving in ever greater numbers to the Canary Islands have been on the front pages of the newspapers and have pride of place in the pages devoted to immigration issues, because the tragedies at sea provide a daily diet of pictures of dead, dying or starving people.

However, most of the immigrants who come to Spain are from the Community of Independent States (CIS), formed in 1991 and consisting today of 12 of the countries that formerly belonged to the Soviet Union, as well as countries of the former East European socialist bloc.

The latest official figures indicate that 498,642 immigrants entered Spain in 2004, 225,393 of them from the CIS. There are no statistics available on undocumented immigrants, although different sources indicate that they outnumber the legal entrants.

Díaz de Aguilar maintains that the alarmist attitudes in society arising from government statements and the PP’s demands are out of touch with reality, since 80 percent of the immigrants who reach the Canary Islands and are then taken to the Spanish mainland are taken care of in Madrid by NGOs who provide shelter and help them to integrate into society.