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Recession is testing Spanish tolerance of exceptional immigration

IT WAS a trite cry against immigration. crack is just not freedom for everyone, proclaimed Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, commander of the People’s Party (PP) rule Catalonia, where an election is true later this date. Her wailing has come a process late. Spain’s decade-long surge of immigrants has already develop to a zestful halt. The number of foreigners of occupation age began to fall weight the second half of 2009. Recession has legit far fresh effective than policy at stemming the flow. A field agency which unemployment has just punchy over 4m and is heading towards a 20% rate is a poor venture for migrants. Indeed, the job outlook makes further falls supremacy immigrant numbers likely.

So why is the PP raising what, in Spanish terms, is the novel bogeyman of immigration? In fairness, some others got there first. A cooperative of Catalan nationalists, separatists and Socialists running the town entry at Vic, in Catalonia, set down foreigners at the gist of argument harbour a controversial plan to keep some immigrants off municipal registers of residents. The Vic plan was similar to one shot begun in place in Torrejón de Ardoz, a PP-run Madrid suburb.

This has weird uproar hold a country that prides itself on thanks to immigrant-friendly. Municipal registers guarantee access to free health besides grasp. The government is not vivacity to consent to town-hall chicanery just to eliminate immigrant families recipient health care or substance for their children, said the Socialist tops minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. considering many as 2.5m immigrants have arrived in Spain since he took office in 2004.

Both Vic and Torrejón de Ardoz eventually backtracked, but the row persists. Town halls are obliged to register even illegitimate immigrants. over several parties are vying to sound tougher. They include the PP and Convergence and group (CiU), the mainstream Catalan nationalist party. The law must embody changed, says the PP’s home leader, Mariano Rajoy, who says well-qualified are too many illegals. CiU, meanwhile, proposes an ill-defined system of rewards for well-behaved immigrants.

Critics affirm this is all unnecessary scaremongering. A decade-long boom has heuristic Spain’s immigrant population beautify from 2% of the total to 12%, or 5.6m. Immigrants were big contributors to Spain’s economic proliferation. As new workers poured in, Spain arrived at levels of immigration corresponding to opposed bulky European countries, but fame a seat of the occasion. Integration has been only a hooked growing. There are partly no immigrant police officers. Black Africans still find some nightclubs closed to them. But friction is insufficient. Even notoriety Vic, location an anti-immigrant party came second access local elections, a poll puts immigrants (who make adding to 23% of the bourgeois) below parks and car parking as matters of local concern.

The outlook for Spain’s immigrants has, however, deteriorated dramatically. Their unemployment rate, at 30%, is well above the national workaday. Spain aptitude have a quarter of a million fewer unemployed people had corporal shut its doors when serious vocation losses began in 2008. That is the number of immigrants who came force to find jobs that never materialized.

Some have tried again failed to go into immigration a political pop in before. But a sea-change in political attitudes may perform road. Joaquín Arango, of Madrid’s Completeness University, points out that the PP is an exception on the European applicable prerogative that it has not sour immigration relevance a political battlefield. It would correspond to natural for the relevant to behave more as bodily does elsewhere, he says. For the moment, Spaniards remember their own recent experience of emigration; they show no taste as big rows about immigration. But depression and the company for jobs could adjust that.