http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/16/ ... php?page=2

Spain cooling on immigrants
By Dan Bilefsky Published: February 17, 2007

ALCALÁ DE HENARES, Spain: Bianca Grancea's first New Year's Day in her adopted country was supposed to be a new beginning. Instead, it ended in murder.

The 26-year-old Romanian had recently immigrated to Spain and was looking forward to celebrating with her husband, Ion, who had entered three weeks earlier as a tourist and had found work — illegally — as a security guard at a public skating rink.

Early New Year's morning, he ordered a young Spaniard out of the closed rink, using Romanian because he could not speak Spanish or understand the youth's angry taunts: "Romanian scum."

Twenty minutes later, the police and witnesses say, the 18-year-old youth, Francisco Arteaga de la Calle, returned with 11 friends and stabbed Grancea in the heart and the back. A Spanish street cleaner said a police officer had stood nearby without acting, although the officer denied having seen the incident. De la Calle has been charged with murder and is awaiting trial; the others have been released.

"If the victim had been a Spaniard, things would have been different," said Bianca Grancea, who has since been reduced to begging to support her 6-year- old son. "But because I am a Romanian migrant, I am invisible."

The killing has shaken the Romanian community in this sleepy university town of 200,000 people, where 5 percent of the population is Romanian. Nearly 400,000 Romanians live and work in Spain — the third-largest foreign community, after Moroccans and Ecuadorans.

Gheorghe Gainar, the leader of the Romanian community in Alcalá de Henares, said he feared that the killing was an extreme example of a brewing anti-immigrant backlash. In recent weeks, he said, the words "Romanians go home" have been sprayed on buildings in the neighborhood.

"There are elements of society in Spain who are now saying that immigrants will invade us," Gainar said.

Spain has been among the most open countries in the European Union, admitting 650,000 immigrants last year alone and granting residency permits to 560,000 more who were in the country illegally — a move loudly criticized by other EU countries.

Immigration experts say the country's liberal attitude reflects openness after the insularity of the Franco years, when the country was a nation of emigration. The thriving Spanish economy, spurred by the country's accession to the EU in 1986, also has encouraged people to come here. Thousands work legally in construction or as household aides. Thousands more work illegally in the country's giant shadow economy.

"Spain has had a laissez-faire attitude to immigration, and we have had none of the debates about multiculturalism raging in the rest of Europe," said Rickard Sandell, an immigration analyst at Real Instituto Elcano, a Madrid-based research institute. "But people are beginning to ask questions."

Sandell said the recent influx of 30,000 African migrants to the Canary Islands had had a psychological effect. The diplomatic dispute this week between Spain and Mauritania over a trawler with 372 migrants aboard did not help matters.

Violent clashes this month between Spanish youths and Latin American immigrant gangs in the Madrid suburb of Alcorcón also fanned fears that the country's open immigration policies had gone too far.

In an October poll by the Madrid- based Center for Sociological Investigation, a majority of Spaniards cited immigration as their top concern, ahead of terrorism, unemployment and education.

"For every 10 delinquents we used to have here, we now have 40," complained Sebastián Pelegrin, 58, a 30-year resident of Lavapiés, a large immigrant neighborhood of Madrid where streets are lined with Arab kebab shops and Bollywood film-rental stores. Pelegrin, who said he had been mugged twice by knife-wielding migrant youths, contended that illegal migration was creating a generation of unemployed, disenfranchised youths.

Consuelo Rumí, secretary of state for migration in the Socialist government, said that changing attitudes were understandable given Spain's rapid transformation into a nation of immigration. In this country of 40 million people, there are 3 million foreigners; in 1996, there were 500,000. "That is an explosion," Rumí said. "And when people are confronted with a new phenomenon, they become worried. It is normal. But when you ask if immigration is necessary, a majority of Spaniards say 'yes' because we need workers."

Yet concerns about immigration are influencing government policy. Under pressure from unions, which fear an influx of cheap labor from Eastern Europe, the government recently decided to wait two years before opening the job market to workers from the EU's latest entrants, Bulgaria and Romania, which joined on Jan. 1. The restriction followed similar moves by other EU countries, including Britain, Ireland and Denmark, which fear that their welfare systems might collapse under the strain of migration. Rumí said such obstacles were necessary to safeguard the Spanish labor market. "We are taking measures to ensure that an invasion doesn't happen," she said.

Far from the bustle of Madrid, in the town of Palos de la Frontera, the paradox of Spanish migration can be found in a strawberry field that stretches as far as the eye can see.

While some Spaniards worry about immigrants from Eastern Europe, strawberry growers in this town in the verdant agricultural province of Huelva, about 100 kilometers, or 60 miles, south of Seville, complain that a shortage of Romanian workers could undermine their crop this year. Exporters say they need at least 14,000 fruit pickers and lament that bureaucratic hurdles recently stalled the arrival of 3,000 Romanian workers, forcing them to get emergency permits to hire Moroccan strawberry pickers instead.

Luis Romero, an exporter, said he depended on strawberry pickers from Romania, preferring women to men because they handle the fruit more carefully. He said using Spanish labor was no longer an option because most Spaniards shun menial work. Busloads of eager Romanian workers have arrived in recent weeks, but Romero has turned them away because the new legislation means they cannot work without permits.

"If I didn't have these Romanian women to pick my strawberries, then I would go out of business — the industry would be dead," he said, pointing to a group of women in kerchiefs, bent over a long row of strawberry plants protected from wind and rain by white tents.

Watching proudly over Romero's five million strawberry plants is Cristina Stamate, a 32-year-old Romanian, who six years ago traded a chic suit and a high-profile job as a public relations executive in Romania for white gloves, rubber boots and a six-month strawberry-picking contract.

Stamate, who now travels to Romania to help Romero recruit workers, said she decided to pick strawberries because the €34, or $44.66, she earned for a six-hour shift was more than twice what she earned back home.

She quickly adapted to living in cramped conditions with fellow pickers — who included doctors and computer programmers — and, she said, has since used her savings to buy a house in Romania and a car. She has decided to settle in Spain. "I feel lucky because I have lived the American dream in Spain," she said in fluent Spanish. "I no longer pick strawberries. This country has been good to me."

Back in Alcalá de Henares, Bianca Grancea is struggling to put her husband's death behind her. She said she was trying to find work to cover the €7,000 cost of shipping Ion's body back to Romania for burial. Tired of begging, she is looking for a job as a cleaner.

"After this ordeal," she said, "I want to go back to Romania."