Anger brews among Spain's immigrant slums

Madrid - Six years ago, university graduate and company employee Jean O. (not real name) left his native Cameroon to study in Italy on a scholarship. He later got a job with a non-governmental organization (NGO), but fell out with it and decided to look for better opportunities in Spain.

The Spanish authorities' refusal to grant him a residence permit left him in a legal vacuum - unable to work, and living in constant fear of identity checks by the Madrid police.

The 39-year-old African has now lived on the edge for several years, subsisting on begging and NGO handouts, often sleeping in the open and seeing his health deteriorate - a situation which, he points out, would fray anyone's nerves.

"The other day, a policeman pushed me on the street, and I pushed him back," Jean says. "The judge said I seemed to have been the attacker, and I now need to report regularly in court."

As Spain's economic crisis deepens, more and more immigrants and Spaniards are at risk of falling into circumstances as precarious as Jean's, and there are a lot of frayed nerves.

Most recently, the killing of a Senegalese immigrant by a local man sparked two nights of riots in a low-income neighbourhood of the touristic southern town of Roquetas de Mar. The rioters were black Africans, who had been known as a peaceful group so far.

The sight of migrants burning vehicles and clashing with riot police reminded Spaniards of the events in the nearby town of El Ejido, where the killing of a Spanish woman by a Moroccan unleashed a "hunt" for immigrants in 2000. Around 80 people were injured.

Officials and NGOs in Roquetas de Mar, however, said the town's problems had nothing to do with the fact that a quarter of its 70,000 residents were immigrants.

The long-contained frustration over growing unemployment, poverty and drug trafficking simply exploded, analysts said.

"The same would have happened in a poor neighbourhood with (only) Spanish residents," said Juan Miralles of the association Almeria Acoge, which works with migrants.

Immigrants are, however, particularly vulnerable to the economic crisis that has brought growth down close to zero and unemployment up to more than 10 per cent, said Ignacio Diaz de Aguilar, president of the Spanish Commission of Aid to Refugees.

While nearly 20 per cent of people born in Spain can be considered moderately poor, the percentage rises to 25 per cent among residents born outside the European Union, according to a recent study by a foundation pertaining to the Caixa bank.

Immigrants from Romania, Morocco, Ecuador, Colombia and other countries already make up about 10 per cent of Spain's population of 45 million.

Many foreign-born people who have settled more or less permanently in Spain and even have Spanish citizenship initially came illegally.

Efforts to fight illegal immigration now focus on the thousands of Africans making dangerous boat crossings to the Canary Islands. Increased maritime surveillance in cooperation with African countries, repatriations and the economic crisis have reduced, but not stemmed the tide.

At the same time, the government has tried to divert immigration into legal channels. Spain brought in some 200,000 migrant workers for sectors such as agriculture, construction and services, often on a temporary basis, in 2007.

In the recent months, immigrants have been hit hard by the partial collapse of the construction sector, which had been one of the main engines of Spain's economic growth.

Yet when the rising unemployment prompted Labour Minister Celestino Corbacho to propose that Spain stop importing foreign workers, he sparked a storm.

Not only was Corbacho accused of encouraging xenophobia by linking unemployment with immigration, but agricultural companies protested that Spaniards would never accept to do the hard work of picking citrus fruit or strawberries.

The southern province of Huelva alone needed to bring in more than 5,000 agricultural labourers from Morocco, Romania and other countries, the companies said.

Other employers favoured undocumented immigrants who accepted the work on even lower salaries, anthropologist Francisco Checa observed.

Representatives of Spain's black community accused the authorities of "institutional racism," which led them to abandon low-income neighbourhoods in places such as Roquetas de Mar, where many agricultural labourers live.

"If the situation is not remedied, there will be a much more serious explosion" of violence, Checa predicted.
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