Spain opens door to illegal migrants

[Menydh]

Spain opens door to illegal migrants

Reuters
February 7, 2005

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's Socialist government offers an amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from today despite concerns it could make it an even more attractive destination for migrants.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government says the amnesty will allow it to manage migration. However, its assurances have done nothing to quell the controversy.

Spain is the main gateway to Europe for illegal immigrants. An estimated 800,000 migrants live in the country illegally, but there is no way to know how many will benefit from the amnesty.

The scale of the problem was underlined on Saturday when Spanish authorities rescued 227 African would-be migrants from a decrepit fishing boat drifting off the Canary Islands.

Jose Manuel Soria, head of the local authority in the island of Gran Canaria, wrote in the conservative ABC newspaper on Sunday that the incident showed the drawing power of the amnesty offer -- even though new arrivals cannot qualify.

"The irresponsible announcement of papers for everyone redoubles the risk and the ingenuity of the clandestine expeditions," said Soria, a member of the opposition Popular Party which has roundly criticised the amnesty.

El Mundo newspaper said in an opinion piece that it was no coincidence that Spain was facing an influx of immigrants from Africa and of east European migrants through the Pyrenees in the days before the amnesty took effect.

The amnesty is an attempt to recognise that thousands of migrants are already working illegally without paying taxes or joining the social security system.

It is also underpinned by a desire to keep a closer eye on foreigners after the al Qaeda-linked bombings that killed 191 people on March 11 last year.

Most of the Islamic militants accused of carrying out the attacks were born in Morocco and many of the victims were also immigrants.

To qualify, migrants must have an identity document, prove they were in Spain before last August, have a job contract for at least the next six months and have no criminal record.

Some 160 Social Security offices throughout Spain will open in the evening for the next three months to accept applications for residence and work permits, the government said on Sunday.

There have been long queues outside consulates in Spain and several Latin American countries in recent weeks by hopeful applicants or family members requesting documentation.

German and Dutch officials have raised concern over Spain's amnesty, fearing that, once legal, immigrants could move to northern Europe, the Financial Times reported on Friday.


[source]

[Ederico]

Socialists, it says it all.

[Timo]

No, España!
Don't do this to yourselves.

Is this because of the train bombings before election and getting the socialist in office? Don't they know it was moslems that bombed their countrymen?

[Menydh]

They are retarded to levels that you could never manage to imagine. Not only they are Socialists, but their mind is still in the 30's.. worse yet.

Just a month ago they were proposing an alliance of Europe with the Arab World to counter America. Someone in Brussels must have told them to shut up their big mouths, because they haven't insisted on it lately.

All the political weapon of President Zapatero is a forced and wide smile at all times (he calls it 'talante'.. sort of 'willingness'), which I strongly suspect that it denotes a defficiency known as cretinism.

However, I don't see this is all that bad and maybe very positive. No, I haven't lost my mind.. yet. I'll explain...

While other nations have been dealing with immigration since much longer, in Spain it is a phenomenon unknown only 20 years ago. So the effect has been more shocking in Spanish society than it has been in other European societies.

This move to legalize the illegal immigrants will bring waves of new immigrants in Spain. Tricks are known to have been used by wannabe immigrants not residing in Spain to obtain faked evidence of being illegally residing here (like, for example, it was found that there were a few South Americans who were in their countries but had papers as 'residing' in a van abandoned on a street). So numbers will have already added to the real illegals. And all of them, once 'regularized', will bring in family and more. Just yesterday, a boat with nearly 300 immigrants was found left with no pilot near the coasts of the Canary Islands. Guess what.. they have been taken to the islands (as always, on humanitarian grounds), and that means that they arrived in one day before the deadline.

Last, those illegal posts will be filled with new waves of illegals (unless one is so stupid as to think that these retards are going to avoid it). It's going to be chaotic.

Spaniards are already much enraged with the current numbers, and this will help make many people react. Instead, if you let them coming over longer periods at smaller paces and breeding in here, people will get used to them just as they did in Britain and other countries.


Oh! and an economical recession will help much when people start losing their jobs and see that immigrants are employed. The economy is still in good shape after the years of Liberal-Conservative rule, but the Socialists will take care of 'fixing' that small detail (I wouldn't invest a cent here if I were a foreigner, and foreign investors seem to be starting to agree with me).

[Timo]

Our comrade Ebusitanus, has posted pictures of Moroccans going to Spain on boats or whatever. I can't believe that stuff. Man any government with balls would have their Navy/Coast Guard (or whatever it is called in Spain) fill those Africans full of bullets for trying to invade the country. It is an invasion of aliens, and I dare anyone to try and debate that to the contrary. It makes me sick. What happened to the days where a nation's boarders were guarded and they held sacred?

[Cristoforo]

This is pure insanity. I am angry at this and I am not even Spanish. If I was Spanish I would probably be furious. Not only will they recompense illegals for their illegal entry but they will make the rest of the Europeans pay for it for it's obvious that most of these immigrants, one regular, will move north.

These socialists already messed up when they gave the impression that they fell for the AQ blackmail and retired their troops. By doing so, they said to AQ "Listen, when you want something from Spain, blow our trains and we will give it to you"

Let's hope that at least the right and radical right groups there gain more support by this.

[Ebusitanus]

Nothing will happen IMHO...While there is food in the fridge and soccer and soapoperas on TV many, if not most, will bitch but nothing will happen de facto. Inmigrants will keep getting cash, housing and making their Ghettos from where whites will run away like in the rest of Europe. Inmigrants, packed in their different ethnic groups, backed by this power feeling of defensless white Europe, will keep asking for more and more handouts and settling in. Yes, we all hoped for France to turn into a big slugfest when the Scarf Law came out..but inmigrants are not stupid..they know they want to stay.

[MDIEIR]

As u know they wonna stay. We have the right to be here as the most spanish one. On the late 30 or 50´s they went to South america askin´for the same thing that the inmigrant as know, just jobs for gettin´a better style of life. I think if they work, they pay the taxes, they invert the money here. It was not the same with the spanish inmigration in Argentina. The actual one got a Carreer I mean they went to the University before gettin´Spain. I dont know you should get better information...

[Menydh]

Why do you speak as if you were one of them, Dietrich? Argentineans here at large are of Spanish plus other European stock. This is not about you, and you will not favour yourself by choosing the wrong side of the conflict.

As a matter of fact, I remember a conflict with immigrants in a town area near Barcelona years ago. The immigrants were mostly North Africans, and among one of the neighbours who was shown on TV complaining against them was one who, from his accent, was Argentinean or Uruguayan.

Besides, it is not as if Argentineans were not concerned about this problem either. You should know what Argentineans think about Mestizo and Indian Americans.


@Ebu. You are, as usual, too pesimistic. It is not that I am being over-optimistic here. But there are many sectors of Spanish society which are much discontent about the situation as is now. You also forget that, while there is not one unified and organized anti-immigration party in Spain (DN doesn't count in my book and I have issues with their background), there is an important sector of voters of the center of right who do not belong there. This is, in my opinion, a moment to be seized and I'm not going to allow pesimism over the situation to affect me.

Torres más altas han caído. Y si no, dale tiempo al tiempo.

[MDIEIR]

Thats not true. Since I got my spanish nationality i got no problem, but when I arrived here I went as non communitary resident . First at all, if I went to spanish company they where not inform at all nd say " you cannot work here", is not a spanish work permit...bla bla bla... When I got my homologation law degree here I have had to examinated in two hours almost 10 subjects. These subjects took to the normal student here almost five years. Thats not fear because at the same time you have to fight to the exam nd the spanish way of thinkin´ in other words spanish demages. Even if I have spanish backround I had suffer the same misery as an African who came by pateras.- (by the way sorry for my English not choice to practice at all)

[Menydh]

Most Argentineans I know are part Spanish, part Italians. Many are the first or second generation descendents of the Spaniards who emigrated there in the 40's and 50's, and therefore some sort of reversed migration. Some are part Spanish, part German as in your case. Argentina, unlike the rest of America (South, Central and North), has maintained a close attachment to Europe and it is, in my opinion, and to some degree, a rare case where a New World culture has developed without departing much from its European roots.

Having said that, it is up to you to learn to separate official policies and views from the reality. If you fall into their ways, i.e. if you end up identifying yourself with the immigrant mass, you will end up being one of them.

There is still an issue with integration. Argentineans cannot pretend to arrive to Spain and continue being hard core Argentineans. Either you fully integrate and let yourselves be fully assimilated by the Spanish society and our idiosincracies, or you will marginalize yourselves.

Despite this all, I admit that I still have a problem with one defined type of Argentineans. At least 'defined' in my eyes. But that's a different story which I don't wish to discuss now and here.

And yes, your English sucks and it is hard to understand.
Maybe you should raise your case before us in the Ibero-Romance sub-section and in Castillian.

[etoile noir]

Totally ridiculous. Apologies to the spaniards but i disagree with your government's decision.

so what's going to happen now? apologise to them all and say 1492 never happened and give them back granada? let them all live in the luxury of the Alhambra?

aha of course. tell zapatero not to forget to do some refurbishing works before .... you know, some air conditioning units, carpets, mod cons.....

[Menydh]

These are the numbers that different sources are speculating with:

Government - less than 800,000
The National Institute of Statistics - 1,500,000
Police Unions - 2,000,000

Whatever the truth (I suspect the worst), they will add those number to the more than 600,000 immigrants already in a regularized situation.

[Almost a Christian]

Socialists the world over have but one goal in mind....to turn their respect nations into multicultural circuses in which their citizens are made into clowns...

[Menydh]

Updates (Feb. 8, 2005).

Ángel Acebes, General Secretary of the center of right PP and former Home Minister, criticizes the Spanish Goverment for "wide opening the gates of Spain while they are seeing that Europe is closing doors". He also said that "... we share a common territory that is Europe, in which the borders are being eliminated. Thus the reproaches that are being made to Spain from the rest of the European countries".
[source (in Spanish)]


A. Acebes previews a "huge avalanche of illegals in Spain who have already rushed into by land, sea and air through the strainer of our borders". Consuelo Rumí, Secretary of State for Immigration, has accused him of turning into the "best allied of the maffias, giving fraudulent information and manipulating all the process of normalisation". Acebes has estimated that the number of total foreigner which will finally be regularized will not be near one million, but a minimum of three to four millions by virtue of the expected family regrouping.
[source (in Spanish)]

Newspapers in Morocco highlight the process of regularisation in Spain. They calculate that between 100,000 and 200,000 Moroccans illegally living in Spain will be regularized and added to the already 400,000 Moroccan legal immigrants.
[source (in Spanish)

Diego López Garrido, General Secretary of the Socialist group, has accused A. Acebes of "racist and xenophobe" for criticizing the process of regularisation and said that his comments were "irresponsible".
[source (in Spanish)]

[Vitor]

Diego López Garrido, General Secretary of the Socialist group, has accused A. Acebes of "racist and xenophobe" for criticizing the process of regularisation and said that his comments were "irresponsible".
[source (in Spanish)]

hum...Diego Lopez Garrido is what?
racialphiliac?

what he pretends?
Extreme right in spain?

It does appear so!
More immigrants and we will get more xenophobe people and...problems.

It will introduce new problems, this guy want more problems?
why?
What the spanish people win with this?
nothing?
So,Why?

I still don't get this socialists...why they shout against apartheid and do not say ANYTHING about this?


I still don't get it...

They are spanish first or socialist?
If they are first socialists then why the hell they don't manifest against stuff like this?

ho well...why bother!
...there is no hope!

[Ebusitanus]

The more millions of inmigrants stream in, the more the conventional political parties will kiss their ass in look for prospective votes from them. While this trend might raise the importance of "radical" parties to fight this tide, sadly that move will be checked by the stream of eventually nationalitzed non-whites and mongrells for parties that "favour" them. In the end we will look more and more like present day USA.