By Tito Drago
MADRID, Feb 8 2001 (IPS)

The situation of immigrants is deteriorating in Spain, but civil society groups and opposition political parties are expressing growing solidarity, and farmers are pressing the government for permission to hire foreign nationals who are already in the country in search of a job.

The fundamental problem arises from a new law that went into force Jan 23 and left more than 200,000 people with irregular immigrant status. They came to Spain to work but lack the job contract and visa that the new legislation requires for a work and residency permit.

Ecuadorean immigrants not only constitute the lion’s share of the immigrants in question – nearly 150,000, according to their representatives – but rising awareness of their situation has prompted the government, the opposition parties, regional governments and humanitarian organisations to clarify their positions on the matter.

Spain’s centre-right government under the Popular Party’s José María Aznar is maintaining its inflexible stance: every person who lacks a residency permit and a job contract must return to his or her home country and apply there at the Spanish consulate for the appropriate documents.

The application process through a consulate can stretch out as long as two years, with no guarantee that the result will be in favour of the would-be immigrant. Even those who obtained their documentation while already in Spain, and before the new law was enacted, had to wait more than six months from the time of application.

Enrique de Santiago, president of the Spanish Commission of Refugee Aid, said the law was “cruel” because it was unlikely that the owner of a business would sign a job contract with an immigrant without knowing when he or she would be able to begin work, and without the certainty that the immigrant would receive the appropriate government authorisation.

Most undocumented immigrants are seasonal or casual workers in agriculture or construction.

The government insists that those without the appropriate papers must return to their country of origin and, in the case of the Ecuadoreans, it has offered to pay roundtrip airfare.

Raúl Jiménez, spokesman for the Hispano-Ecuadorean Rumiñahui Association said that not only would the entire process take a long time, while the immigrants involved would have no guarantees of being allowed to return to Spain, but the government is talking about 40,000 people, when there are actually more than 150,000 Ecuadoreans in an irregular situation.

Humberto Alvarez, spokesman for the Ecuadoreans in the region of Murcia, in southern Spain, said it was “foolish for the state to waste so much money” paying roundtrip airfare, when it would be much simpler to process the immigration applications in Spain.

The real idea behind the trip, said Gabriel Toala, another Ecuadorean immigrant, “is covert deportation from Spain.”

The government of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia, in the northeast, has pledged to the Ombudsman’s Office that it will review the applications of some 700 immigrants being held by authorities, who have declared a hunger strike to protest their likely deportation.

Another positive action taken on behalf of immigrants occurred in the Andalusian province of Huelva, in southern Spain. There, farm owners requested permission to legally hire immigrants who the government considers irregular.

Manuel González, leader of a strawberry-growers association, pointed out that if they were not granted permission to hire the workers within 10 days, economic disaster would strike. “The farmers will lose a large portion of this season’s crop if there are not enough workers to bring in the harvest,” he warned.

In its protest against the new law, the main political opposition force, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has been joined by the United Left (a Communist Party-led coalition), all of the country’s labour unions, and non-governmental humanitarian organisations.

The government must legalise the status of all immigrants who are currently in Spain, without forcing them to return to their countries of origin for the application procedure, they assert.

For the moment, the government has backed down from plans for the forced and massive deportation of undocumented immigrants.

But there are no guarantees that the government will not begin expulsions, even in the short term, unless demands to modify or ease the law are successful.

Excerpt: