Europe’s magnetic south

Spain's immigrants are generally well treated, but they are not integrated into society

THE two most striking facts about immigration in Spain are how recent the phenomenon is and how well the Spaniards have reacted to it. The worry is that the two may be linked. Will the hospitable reaction disappear when the newcomers are no longer so new?

For generations Spain, especially its poorer parts, such as Galicia, sent people out into the world. Only in the past dozen years or so has the world been sending more back than it received, and only in the mid-1990s did migrants start arriving in large numbers. As a result, though foreigners now constitute about 6% of the population, the proportion is still smaller than in most other west European countries. Moreover, despite areas of concentration in central Barcelona and Seville, and parts of Madrid, such as Lavapies and Cuatro Caminos, there are few ghettos. In 2003 four-fifths of the immigrants lived in six of Spain's 17 regions - Andalusia, Catalonia, Madrid, Valencia and the Balearic and Canary islands.

They come from all over: among the 191 people killed in the March 11th bombings were 47 people from a dozen different countries. At that time of day - the bombs went off on commuter trains early in the morning - these people were going to work, just like most of the Spaniards who died; they were not tourists.

Of the 2.7m foreigners in Spain, about 22% are from the EU 15, another 13% from other (mostly east) European countries, 39% from Latin America and 20% from Africa, including the Maghreb. Ecuador sends most (14.7% of the total), then Morocco (14.2%) and Colombia (9.2%). Those, at least, were the figures in January 2003 for both legal and illegal immigration, based on the population register, which illegals can sign without fear of deportation, and must if they want medical treatment or schooling for their children.

Bye-bye babies

Spain needs immigrants, not least because it will soon face a labour shortage. In 1976, about 700,000 babies were born in Spain . This year, as in each of the past 20 years, the number will be between 400,000 and 450,000. Demographers expect the group of working-age Spaniards to start shrinking around 2010, after which the demand for labour can be met only by immigration.

But even if plenty of Spaniards were available - and at present Spain has the second-highest unemployment rate in the EU 15 - most will not do a lot of the jobs that need doing. Immigrants will. Thus they can be found picking strawberries in Huelva in the south-west, tending other vegetables under the sea of polythene that covers most of Almera over to the east, and everywhere working on building sites, looking after the elderly, washing dishes and satisfying the lust of men who seek the services of prostitutes. Once established, they often start to specialise: in Catalonia, the Chinese tend to go into textiles, the Pakistanis into the distribution of gas cylinders, and so on. Some also come to Spain to retire - which is why more houses in Majorca are said to be owned by Germans than by Spaniards.

But in general immigrants in Spain behave much like immigrants everywhere else. That means they put more into the kitty than they take out. They are net contributors both to the tax and to the welfare system, according to the OECD, and they have already turned round the fortunes of the pension system, even if the respite is temporary: today's immigrants will themselves one day retire. For the moment, though, they are economically a boon.

Still, the immigration system is a mess. Last year, after talks with employers and others, the government decided it would offer about 10,000 permits for workers under contract. In the event, only about 3,500 of these were taken up. Any employer who needed labour found it much easier and less bureaucratic just to go down to Atocha station in Madrid, or similar places elsewhere, and pick up a paperless immigrant. Yet, though fewer permits were issued for contracted workers, the total number of work permits actually issued turned out to be nearly 130,000. Why? Because most of them were given to the relations of people already legally resident, or to asylum-seekers (15,800); or to people who had been legal but needed their papers renewed (21,500); or to others who had lived illegally for three years, after which they could apply to become legal (67,000). The remainder (25,000) received short-term work permits for seasonal work.

The system clearly needs to be reformed in order to reduce the number of these unplanned arrivals, which lead to many people living in a legal penumbra. The EU reckons 800,000 illlegals were resident in Spain last year. Several analysts, such as Rickard Sandell of the Elcano Royal Institute and Jordi Sanchez i Picanyol of the Jaume Bofill Foundation, think Canada's system has much to offer Spain, allowing a better match between supply and demand and giving government more control over the flow of immigrants.

Without that control, some of Spain's immigrants will certainly remain vulnerable to exploitation and even attack. Despite a few incidents, very little organised racism seems to exist at present. Perhaps that is because Spain is not at heart a racist country. As José Varela Ortega of the José Ortega y Gasset Foundation points out, the expression “bloody foreigners” simply does not exist in Spanish. But at least some French students of immigration see in Spain a situation ripe for a racist party like France's National Front.

Fortunately, the growth of immigration in Spain has coincided with a period of economic prosperity. A recession might well produce a backlash against those who have found it hard to fit in. They would probably not be the Latin Americans who can speak Spanish, and who often look like Spaniards. More likely, they would be French- or Arabic-speaking Moroccans.

Al-Andalus revisited

The claim is often made that the centuries of Moorish rule in pre-1492 al-Andalus - which comprised most of modern Spain and Portugal, excluding the kingdom of Asturias in the north - were a period of great religious harmony, commercial success and cultural fertility. The Moors certainly left their mark on Spain, and not just in the Alhambra in Granada and the Great Mosque, now a cathedral, in Crdoba. Poetry, art and scholarship also flourished in what was a genuinely Spanish, albeit Moorish-influenced, civilisation.

Today an Islamic revival of a kind is under way in parts of Spain, notably Granada, where a new Grand Mosque opened last July, for the benefit not just of Moroccans and Syrians but of the 1,000 or so local converts from Christianity too. But that does not mean that Spaniards really have a great affinity with Muslims. Moroccans are undoubtedly culturally closer to Spaniards than they are to, say, Germans. But tales of the Moorish period tend to be romanticised, and anyway it was all a long time ago - except, it should be said, to Osama bin Laden, who has long held the loss of al-Andalus to be one of his main grudges against the Christian West.

That in itself might have been enough to make some Spaniards suspicious of the 600,000 Muslims in their midst, roughly 60% of whom are thought to be Moroccan. But after the events of March 11th and the arrest of several dozen people, most of them Moroccan, it would be odd if some Moroccans were not also suspected of worse. In fact, they are. According to El Pais, the country's biggest daily paper, the security services have identified over 300 potentially dangerous Islamists in Spain. Most of them are presumably Moroccan.

Many Moroccans in Spain are well aware of the dangers. Mustapha El M'Rabet of the Association of Moroccan Workers and Immigrants would like to see the teaching and practice of Islam much more integrated into Spanish life, and would like much greater regulation of the imams and their 250-odd mosques, many of which are no more than garages. He would also like to see much more being done for the Moroccans his organisation tries to help.

The government has a part to play in all this. It should certainly promote the integration of immigrants into Spanish society and do everything possible to prevent another outrage like that of March 11th. But it must also gain control of immigration and bring order to the labour market. None of these tasks is easy in itself. Together they look Herculean. Yet mass immigration is plainly a permanent fact of life for Spain. It would be tragic if it were accompanied by the emergence of a racist political party, or if Spanish society, generally harmonious, were to become intolerant of foreigners.

Spain's immigrants are generally well treated, but they are not integrated into society.