By Tito Drago
MADRID, Mar 16 2001 (IPS)

The coming week will be crucial for immigrants in Spain, because if the government does not agree to amend a law on aliens that orders mass deportations, the opposition will turn to the constitutional court in an attempt to get the law overturned.

Deputy prime minister Mariano Rajoy, who is also interior minister, said Friday that the law would not be altered.

He also submitted to parliament the draft text for the rules for applying the law, and said that on Monday, he would present the document to the trade unions, business groups and non- governmental organisations (NGOs).

While Rajoy was speaking, groups of immigrants trickled in from various provinces to gather outside Madrid and prepare for their march into the capital on Sunday, when they will hold a demonstration demanding recognition of their rights, and papers to live and work legally in Spain.

The government is at loggerheads with the opposition and human rights groups on two main issues: the recognition of citizen rights for immigrants, and the regularisation of the situation of immigrants who are already living and working in Spain, but who lack residency and work permits.

There are an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 immigrants in Spain who lack an entry visa and residency permit, and are thus unable to obtain authorisation to work legally.

According to the law on aliens passed in December 1999, as of January this year, all undocumented immigrants must leave the country or be deported.

In the case of Ecuadoreans, the government offered to pay round- trip tickets for undocumented immigrants to fly to Ecuador, obtain a visa from the Spanish consulate there, and fly back to Spain once they have obtained the document.

Some 1,200 people have already returned to Ecuador to get a visa, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Heinz Möller told the Madrid daily El Pais. Another 8,000 to 10,000 Ecuadoreans will be eligible for the round-trip journey, he added.

However, under the current law, another 50,000 to 60,000 immigrant heads of families classified as “illegal” by the Spanish government and as undocumented or “irregular” by human rights groups will not have that possibility, said the minister, who cited figures from Spain’s Interior Ministry.

Spain’s ombudsman Enrique Múgica, the Catholic Church, the two main labour confederations and dozens of rights groups have repeatedly asked the centre-right government of José Maria Aznár to grant residency permits to those immigrants who are already in Spain, instead of deporting them.

They are also demanding that the immigrants’ rights to assemble, strike and hold protests be recognised.

The main opposition force, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), plans to file a lawsuit with the Constitutional Court questioning the constitutionality of the law on aliens if the government does not agree to modify the law by Mar 23, the deadline for filing a suit.

From a technical point of view, the government can give in to the demands without actually amending the law, simply by changing the regulations governing its application.

PSOE secretary-general José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said Friday that “the law is inapplicable, and even denies rights that the government recognises in practice,” such as the right to hold public demonstrations – which, for example, will be exercised by the participants in the march on Madrid on Sunday.

While the controversy rages, recent events involving immigrants have moved the public in Spain. On Friday, police found the corpse of an Iraqi man on the Mediterranean coast near the city of Melilla, a Spanish enclave in North Africa.

The police also detained five Iraqis who were travelling with the victim, and who along with him had been dumped overboard by those driving the boat in which the would-be immigrants were riding.

The police say the Iraqis were victims of an organised band of traffickers, who tossed their illegal human cargo into the sea when they feared discovery.

Across the Mediterranean, in a town in the southern Spanish province of Murcia, eight youths were arrested for their alleged involvement in an incident last week in which a warehouse where immigrants had set up residence was doused with gasoline and set on fire, and in which an Ecuadorean and a Bulgarian were beaten with chains and baseball bats.

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