Recession is testing Spanish tolerance of high immigration

Un relato bastante cierto y muy duro que ha sido publicado en Economist el 4 de este mes.

IT WAS a familiar cry against immigration. There is just not room for everyone, proclaimed Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, leader of the People’s Party (PP) in Catalonia, where an election is due later this year. Her complaint has come a bit late. Spain’s decade-long surge of immigrants has already come to a dramatic halt. The number of foreigners of working age began to fall in the second half of 2009. Recession has proved far more effective than policy at stemming the flow. A country in which unemployment has just gone over 4m and is heading towards a 20% rate is a poor bet for migrants. Indeed, the job outlook makes further falls in 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 coalition of Catalan nationalists, separatists and Socialists running the town hall at Vic, in Catalonia, put foreigners at the centre of debate with a controversial plan to keep some immigrants off municipal registers of residents. The Vic plan was similar to one already in place in Torrejón de Ardoz, a PP-run Madrid suburb.

This has provoked uproar in a country that prides itself on being immigrant-friendly. Municipal registers guarantee access to free health and education. The government is not going to consent to town-hall chicanery just to stop immigrant families getting health care or education for their children, said the Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. As 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 illegal immigrants. Now several parties are vying to sound tougher. They include the PP and Convergence and Union (CiU), the mainstream Catalan nationalist party. The law must be changed, says the PP’s national leader, Mariano Rajoy, who says there are too many illegals. CiU, meanwhile, proposes an ill-defined system of rewards for well-behaved immigrants.

Critics say this is all unnecessary scaremongering. A decade-long boom has seen Spain’s immigrant population swell from 2% of the total to 12%, or 5.6m. Immigrants were big contributors to Spain’s economic success. As new workers poured in, Spain arrived at levels of immigration similar to other big European countries, but in a quarter of the time. Integration has been only a partial success. There are almost no immigrant police officers. Black Africans still find some nightclubs closed to them. But friction is minimal. Even in Vic, where an anti-immigrant party came second in local elections, a poll puts immigrants (who make up 23% of the population) 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 average. Spain might have a quarter of a million fewer unemployed people had it shut its doors when serious job losses began in 2008. That is the number of immigrants who came in to find jobs that never materialised.

Some have tried and failed to make immigration a political issue before. But a sea-change in political attitudes may be coming. Joaquín Arango, of Madrid’s Complutense University, points out that the PP is an exception on the European right in that it has not turned immigration into a political battlefield. It would be natural for the right to behave more as it does elsewhere, he says. For the moment, Spaniards remember their own recent experience of emigration; they show no taste for big rows about immigration. But recession and the competition for jobs could alter that.