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€