Europe, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Migration & Refugees

RIGHTS-SPAIN: Conditions Getting Tougher for Immigrants

Tito Drago

MADRID, Aug 14 2009 (IPS) - Immigrants in Spain are getting a raw deal from state institutions and at the same time from small and medium business owners, who not only take unfair advantage of them, but sometimes also physically ill-treat them.

The government has toughened its laws on immigration, and foreigners continue to be harassed by the police.

“They badger us at the subway exits and doorways to telephone booths, restaurants or discos, demanding documents and detaining people who aren’t carrying them,” said Irma Pérez, the head of the Federation of Associations of Paraguayans in Spain (FAPRE).

Pérez led representatives of four associations that lodged a complaint of police harassment with the justice system this week. Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba denied there were any such practices.

Immigrants also suffer at the hands of their employers, some of whom treat them in inhuman fashion. For example, on Jul. 25 in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, Luis Beltrán Larrosa, an Uruguayan worker without a residence permit, had a heart attack and collapsed, whereupon his employer dragged him out into the street and left him there on the ground.

His son, Pablo Larrosa, reported the incident to the justice system and told Radio Club Tenerife that several bystanders witnessed the scene, called the hospital and saw that the ambulance team found him alive and rendered assistance, but to no avail. The doctors also found bruises on the victim’s body, he said.


Another appalling case took place in early June in the city of Gandia, on the Mediterranean coast between Valencia and Alicante, where an undocumented immigrant lost an arm in an accident at work. The boss threw the arm in a rubbish container and abandoned the injured man 200 metres away from the hospital.

Organisations defending immigrants’ rights are also deeply concerned about their treatment in internment centres for foreigners run by the Interior Ministry, where undocumented persons are held until they are expelled from the country, a process that may take months.

Spain’s legislation on undocumented immigrants has become so strict that in 2008 it was the European Union country that granted the fewest asylum and refugee visas. It processed only 16 percent of applications, and of those granted refugee status to seven percent, for a total of barely 160 people.

According to the 2008 census by the National Statistics Institute, the average immigration rate between 2000 and 2007 was four times that of the United States and eight times that of France. That was when an open-door immigration policy was in place, and an amnesty was even offered to illegal immigrants in 2005.

A total of 5,220,600 foreigners were counted in the 2008 census, 11.3 percent of the country’s total population, and at the end of the first quarter of 2009 the number rose to 5,598,691 people, or 12 percent of the total.

Now, with the highest unemployment rate in the EU at 17.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009, and joblessness among foreigners twice as high as that among Spanish workers, migration to Spain is slowing, and the Spanish government in September 2008 approved a return bonus programme for unemployed non-EU workers.

The 2008 annual report by human rights watchdog Amnesty International says that torture and ill-treatment at the hands of those responsible for enforcing the law continue to occur “frequently” in Spain, where regimes of “incommunicado detention” are in use for terrorism suspects.

The London-based organisation maintains that Spain is on a level with Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and Uzbekistan in that its justice system has no remedy for complaints of torture and ill-treatment by detained immigrants, and accuses the government of socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of not responding to these charges.

When this month’s parliamentary recess is over, the government will table a reform of the law on aliens, proposed by the Ministry of Labour and Immigration, which includes a measure to increase the maximum period of detention of undocumented persons in an internment centre from 40 days to 60.

Conditions for reuniting families will also be stiffer. Immigrants in Spain who want to bring their families to this country will have to wait until they have been residents for five years, instead of three.

Borders will continue to be strengthened on land and sea, through bilateral agreements with other countries as well as by increasing the number of security forces and providing more equipment, to prevent entry of undocumented immigrants.

Immigrants’ associations are organising protests against these measures.

“We shall march on foot from Barcelona to Madrid to defend the immigrants who come to our country, whose rights are not respected,” Hugo Colacho, head of the Federation of Immigrant Associations of Vallés (FAIV), in Barcelona, the capital of the province of Catalonia, told IPS.

FAIV’s plan is to walk the 700 kilometres between the two cities in less than 50 days, with the participation of thousands of people belonging to organisations for the defence and support of immigrants, Colacho said.

These include the Council of Immigration Organisations (CODEIM), Americas-Spain Solidarity and Cooperation (AESCO), SOS Racismo and FAPRE, whose representatives will participate in a General Assembly of Immigrants’ Associations from all over the country Oct. 28 in Madrid.

The Episcopal Commission on Migration of Spain’s Roman Catholic bishop’s conference issued a press release after a Jun. 25-26 meeting in Madrid, expressing “profound concern over the proposed laws, arising from EU directives, which may on occasion affect the dignity of our migrant brothers and sisters and their families, and the individuals and institutions that work for their integration into our society.”

 
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