DAR AL HARB - SPAIN / AL-ANDALUS: LESS ENTHUSIASM FOR IMMIGRANTS IN SPAIN

Spain cooling on immigrants

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.

...


Pertinent Links:

1) Spain cooling on immigrants