How Spain Thrives on Immigration

The open-border policy under Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero is driving a Spanish economic and social revival.

Imagine what would happen if a prosperous Western nation threw open its borders, allowing immigrants to flood in virtually unchecked. Soaring unemployment, overstretched social services, rising crime, even rioting in the streets? Not in Spain.

Over the past decade, the traditionally homogeneous country has become a sort of open-door laboratory on immigration. Spain has absorbed more than 3 million foreigners from places as diverse as Romania, Morocco, and South America. More than 11 percent of the country's 44 million residents are now foreign-born, one of the highest proportions in Europe. With hundreds of thousands more arriving each year, Spain could soon match the US rate of 12.9 percent.

Three years ago while in Spain, I pulled over outside of Madrid to ask a trucker for directions and the trucker replied in perfect Castilian except that he had a strange accent.

When I asked him where he got the accent, he said he was Romanian.

I see no problem with such immigrants other than the fact that they can dilute the historical Spanish character of the country. The Muslim immigrants, however, spell big trouble for Spain's future.

The best solution for Spain is to encourage immigration from Latin America.

perhaps because about three-fourths of immigrants come from Latin American and European countries with languages and cultures similar to Spain's.

And the government says immigrants' tax and social security contributions exceed by more than 20 percent the cost of the public services they use.

Compared to its neighbors, though, Spain has had special reasons to welcome outsiders. As recently as the mid-1990s it was an economic backwater with an aging population and per-capita income only 80 percent of the EU average, vs. 96 percent now. But lower interest rates and a healthy dose of aid from Brussels sparked a demand for labor.

Okay, here's a simple review.

Many of the people coming to Spain are coming from places with a similar culture and language. They aren't asking for special ballots to vote. They aren't asking for a change in Spain's education system to accomodate them. They aren't trying to change Spain into the kinds of failed countries from which they came.

If they are paying taxes and Social Security, then they are different from the illegal immigrants in the United States. I have no doubt that many of our legal immigrants are also paying more in taxes and Social Security than they are costing us in entitlements. Those who are here legally do not have the same impact as those who are here illegally.

Spain started as a country in deep economic trouble, and they are receiving huge amounts of aid from the EU. If some outside agency pumped billions of dollars of free money into the United States' economy, we could appear to undergo a boom by bringing more people from other countries to work. However, no outside agency is going to send billions of dollars of aid to the United States. Furthermore, we don't start as a economic basketcase looking for some solution to longstanding problems. Massive immigration may be part of a solution for Spain's problems, but if we don't start with the same problems, then the same "solution" is going to be a problem and not a solution. Unlike Spain, we don't have "special reasons to welcome outsiders."

I'm happy that Spain is finding solutions to problems that plagued that country in the 90's, but the notion that those solutions would be good for this country is wrong. We don't need more immigration, and we certainly don't need more illegal immigration.

Bill

If anything, the worry is that Spain is a bubble waiting to burst. Construction, which accounts for 18 percent of the economy and is a major employer of immigrants, is slowing noticeably after a decade-long boom. A steep decline could trigger social conflict, which so far has been minimal -- perhaps because about three-fourths of immigrants come from Latin American and European countries with languages and cultures similar to Spain's.

There are reason to keep one's eyes on the Spanish economy. A crash (which appears imminent) can have serious effects:

Euro helps topple Spanish property

Quote from the article:

The current account deficit has reached 9.5pc of GDP, a sign of extreme over-heating. Spain is now the second biggest net contributor to global demand after the US, far outstripping China, astonishing for a country of only 40 million still living in the shadows of the Franco regime a generation ago.

More than 800,000 homes were built last year, beating France, Germany, and Italy combined, leaving a glut of property hanging over the market. House prices have risen 270pc over the past decade to an average price of €276,000, but began to slow sharply late last year. Household debt has risen to 133pc of disposable income from 75pc in 1995.

Manuel Romera, director of Madrid's Instituto de la Empresa, said: "I can see a mortgage crisis building. We have a serious property bubble in this country and everyone is in denial; it's worse than the US." Re/Max International said it had cut prices by 25pc on holiday homes in saturated regions earlier this year. Some four million foreigners own property in Spain.

I go there a lot, and this is not entirely true. The Latin American immigrants fit in well, although there is an adjustment curve; just because they speak Spanish, it doesn’t mean that their societies are the same as Spain. Unfortunately, some of them are active in the drug trade and that is a definite problem, along with the recruitment by organized crime of young women from Latin America (and Africa) who are put to work on the streets as prostitutes. In general, however, they do well and most waitresses, elderly care workers, etc. are now Latin Americans. As in the US, most of the men work in construction or as dishwashers, etc.

Rumanians who are not gypsies do well, as do Poles - there is a very large Polish community there.

And that leaves us with Muslims. They do not do well, the Moroccan and Middle Eastern neighborhoods are filthy, dangerous - and spreading like wildfire as more and more Muslims slip into the country. They are pressuring for special accomodation in schools, and public schools in Muslim areas have become dangerous, hostile environments, particularly for female teachers. And of course the Saudis are funding mosques all over Spain, even in places where there are virtually no Muslims, so it’s easy to see what the plan is.

But the liberal press would rather have its collective teeth pulled out than admit that.

Amusing... considering the Spanish newspapers run back to back articles complaining about the "undocumented" (immigrants) that keep on arriving from Africa. For example, last weekend about 600 of them arrived at the Canary Islands. Remember that the total population of Spain is not much above 40 million, and that these arrivals happen several times a week. These immigrants need immediate health care, don't have a cent, need food, housing, clothes... don't speak the language and are in no hurry to get jobs.

The truth

I have family in Madrid and they tell me that they are overrun by immigrants and quite concerned about the growing influence of Islam. Most people they know would be glad to send them all back to where they came from.

The problem in Spain is that their leader, the idiot Zapatero, actually wants to admit MORE Muslims, and is clearly protecting the ones already there, whether legally or illegally. It’s his “dialogue of civilizations,” don’t you know?

Spain has a large black African immigration, most of which comes from Muslim countries and many of whom are actually fleeing from the Arab Muslims. They come across the Straits in little boats and many of them die on the way, or end up getting caught and put in huge encampments on the Canary Islands until they can be returned. But the problem is that many of their original countries don’t want them repatriated, so this has created an enormous problem for Spain. Sub-Saharan Africans are a lot more noticeable than North Africans (Moroccans) and hence easier for immigration authorities to identify. Spain actually had an African colony once upon a time from which they got legal immigrants, mostly middle class African Christian kids who came to study and then married Spaniards. But now African immigration is almost entirely illegal, a wildly out of control situation of Muslims fleeing from other Muslims and from hunger and war in places that don’t even want to take them back.

Three years ago while in Spain, I pulled over outside of Madrid to ask a trucker for directions and the trucker replied in perfect Castilian except that he had a strange accent. When I asked him where he got the accent, he said he was Romanian.

I was just going to reply to this thread remembering an article I read last year about migrant work in Spain and how they were bringing in Romanians for strawberry farming. All legal at that time (Romania joined UE this year so up until now they were in need of visa) and majority of them were college graduates. What amazes me is the percentage of college educated immigrants working these types of jobs, immigrants mostly coming from the Balkans. This is who should be allowed to come to US (and they are actually the ones who go by our governing laws when applying for visas here) and not the invasion south of the border. If that makes me a racist, so be it, but I am more concerned with the quality and the education level which these immigrants are able to bring into our country and their dismay for welfare because of how they were brought up (to be self-reliant).

From "Suicide of the West" by James Burnham (pg. 304):

To debate whether the Rostow "theory of history" [that nations, and specifically the Soviet Union, become unaggressive once they achieve material prosperity] is true or not would be a foolish waste of time. Translated from the ideological, what Professor Rostow is saying is: "The stronger our enemy gets, the better for us; and if he gets strong enough - preferably as strong as we or stronger - we shall have nothing to worry about." Nobody needs to be told what a ridiculous statement that is. But what Professor Rostow is up to has nothing to do with truth and falsity about the real world . He is brewing a drug to enable our minds and his own to leave the real world and take refuge in that better world of his ideology where tigers purr like kittens and turn in their claws to the United Nations.

It is as if a man, struck with a mortal disease, were able to say and to believe, as the flush of the fever spread over his face, "Ah, the glow of health is returning!"; as his flesh wasted away, "At least I am able to trim down that paunch the doctor always warned me about!"; as a finger dropped off with gangrene or leprosy, "Now I won't have that bothersome job of trimming those nails every week!" Liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution; and this function its formulas will enable it to serve right through to the very end, if matters turn out that way: for even if Western civilization is wholly vanquished or altogether collapses, we or our children will be able to see that ending, by the light of the principles of liberalism, not as a final defeat, but as the transition to a new and higher order in which Mankind as whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions, and discriminations of the past.

I do not want to minimize the importance and value of this function - which is the principle function of modern liberalism; the explanation, in fact, of its widespread present influence in the West, far beyond the circle of those who regard themselves as liberals. It is one of the cardinal works of mercy to comfort the sick and dying, "to let him die at ease, that liveth here uneath."

That’s all a hoax. Immigration is needed in countries with predominantly relative low-tech industries, such as Spain, in order to keep the competitiveness of the economy. They are simply cheap labor.

The construction sector is the paradigm of Spanish “industry”:

- is based in a heavily regulated soil market which assures prices will rise

- is also based on the collusion of political parties, which grant the construction permits; and the old figure of the Spanish oligarch, one step behind politicians

- a sector which is relatively low tech: no accumulation of knowledge is needed, therefore it’s easier to create a business as long as you know the right people who grant you contracts.

- most of the workers don’t need a deep formation: you can hire almost anyone and easily fire him.

Among others.

Please, take also into account that any person has fixed expenditures which cannot be reduced beyond a certain limit even if the earnings are lowered. More persons with lower salaries mean more social security contributions, water, gas and electricity expenditures, gas consumption (heavily taxed), industrial food consumption, etc; than increasing the salaries to the actual Spaniards.

That is, the average Spaniard, the “pagan” we say, because he/she is the one that really “pays” (paga), loses because the Spanish industry does not evolve into a higher tech one (which is good for Germany, BTW) whilst the government and the oligarchs are earning lots of money simply because a sharp increase population, which is also, cheap labor.

Moreover, many immigrants that got jobs thinking that they were their fist step in a modern and vibrant society are disappointed when years later they are still at the same level, earning the same, whilst prices continue to rise. We all speak Spanish so you can hear them complain:

“My cousin 15 years in the States and is already the owner of his house!”

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