Thread: Spain’s Immigration System Runs Amok – Spain’s Decline

Spain’s Immigration System Runs Amok – Spain’s Decline


From the desk of Soeren Kern on Wed, 2008-09-17 11:42

More than 920,000 new immigrants arrived in Spain during 2007, according to data just published by the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE). This comes on top of the 802,971 new arrivals in 2006, the 682,711 new arrivals in 2005, the 645,844 new arrivals in 2004, and so on. The politically sensitive figures were released during the middle of the summer holidays, presumably in an effort to avoid their detection by the vacationing general public.

All in all, Spain now has a total of 5.2 million immigrants, who make up more than 10 percent of Spain’s population, which has swelled from 40 million in 2000 to just over 46 million as of 1 January 2008. According to the Fundación BBVA [doc] research institute, Spain now has the largest number of immigrants in the developed world after the United States.

But the biggest significance of the new data is not that there are a lot of new immigrants in Spain, which is perfectly self-evident to everyone in the country. What the fresh numbers show is that there are now over one million new illegal immigrants in Spain; this less than three years after Socialist Prime Minister José Luis RodrÃ*guez Zapatero tried to “fixâ€

[quote="zeezil"]
What the fresh numbers show is that there are now over one million new illegal immigrants in Spain; this less than three years after Socialist Prime Minister José Luis RodrÃ*guez Zapatero tried to “fixâ€

[i][quote]Sarkozy’s warning was prescient (or perhaps just a dose of plain common sense), because by rewarding illegal immigrants with Spanish (and thus European) documentation, Zapatero unleashed what is known as the “call effectâ€

[quote]For example, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said: “We see the damage caused by the phenomenon of massive regularization. Every country which has conducted an operation of massive regularization finds itself the next month [in a position that] does not allow it to master the situation anymore.â€

Sep 19, 3:10 PM EDT

Spain: Jobless immigrants paid to go home

By DANIEL WOOLLS
Associated Press Writer

MADRID, Spain (AP) -- Spain will pay jobless immigrants to go home under a decree approved Friday, more evidence of how its once-booming economy has quickly gone bust.

Labor Minister Celestino Corbacho said the Cabinet approved the measure under a fast-track procedure and it will take effect in about a month.

The plan targets tens of thousands of non-European Union citizens who have been laid off in Spain and are entitled to unemployment benefits. It offers them a lump sum payment of 40 percent of that money once they renounce their work and residency permits, and the rest once they get home.

The voluntary program applies to people from 19 non-EU countries with which Spain has signed bilateral accords under which social security benefits accrued in one nation can be paid in the other.

Those who sign up for it must agree not to return to Spain for three years, with the promise they will be able to recover their work and residency permits after that.

Spain is grappling with ever-swelling jobless ranks in an economy that had posted more than a decade of solid growth but is now flirting with recession. Unemployment is now an EU-high of 10.7 percent, according to the bloc's statistical agency.

The government said in July it believed some 10,000 jobless non-EU citizens - out of a total of 165,000 recorded as of that month - would go along with the plan

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/ ... TE=DEFAULT

Immigrant protest turns violent in southern Italy

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/ ... TE=DEFAULT

Failed asylum seekers to be paid to go home

- The LocalFailed asylum seekers to be paid to go home .... Immigrants to be issued ID cards ... Home Swede home For tens of thousands of homeowners in Sweden, ...

www.thelocal.se/8595/20070925/ - 46k - Cached - Similar pages