The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

Border Crossings

By JASON DePARLE
Published: June 10, 2008
MADRID — With the United States riven by calls to legalize millions
of illegal immigrants, Americans might consider the possible effects
by looking at southern Europe, where illegal immigration has
abounded and so have forgiveness plans.

In the last two decades, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece have run
at least 15 legalization programs, including a Spanish effort three
years ago that was among the Continent’s largest. With little
domestic opposition, Spain legalized nearly 600,000 of the African,
Latin American and eastern European workers who helped power its
economy and brought this once insular land the strengths and strains
of diversity.

Immigrants say their prized work cards have brought higher wages,
peace of mind and reunions of separated families. But critics say
legalizations have attracted more illegal migrants — with spillover
risks to nearby countries — and warn that an economic slowdown now
puts Spain and its foreigners at odds.

Among the beneficiaries of the legalization policy are Ignacio
Cantos and Sandra Delgado, a husband and wife from Ecuador who left
four children and an economic crisis in search of Spanish jobs.
Legalization has raised their pay and ended their fear of the
police, who once jailed Mr. Cantos for lacking work papers.

It has also ended their separation from their youngest child, Allan,
a gap-toothed 8-year-old sent with his siblings to live with their
grandparents when he was 3. Since arriving in Madrid in March, he
has been twirling his mother’s earrings and stroking her hair as if
worried that she is a mirage.

“I would never leave my children a second time,” said Ms. Delgado,
38, a nanny who has been raising others’ children while aching for
her own. “I’m sorry I did it.”

Though both husband and wife favor legalization, they differ on the
critics’ main complaint — that “regularizations” attract more
illegal migrants.

“I don’t think so,” said Mr. Cantos, 43, a truck driver who argued
that migrants moved out of desperation, not legal expectations. “I
didn’t even know what a regularization was.”

But Ms. Delgado said repeated amnesties could act as a
magnet. “People are thinking they’ll be able to get their papers
almost immediately, ” she said.

The United States has an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, a
record number. Its last mass amnesty program, which began in 1987,
legalized 2.7 million. President Bush proposed an immigration plan
that would give some workers a path to legalization. But it died
last year under assault from people who said it would lead to more
illegal immigration.

Europe has held at least 20 legalizations in the past 25 years,
giving residency papers to about four million people. Italy and
Spain account for about two-thirds of the total, to the
consternation of northern Europeans who see the south as the
Continent’s weak back door. With free movement across much of
Europe, legalized immigrants can easily head north, alarming those
worried about job competition, welfare costs, cultural clashes or
terrorist threats.

Southern Europe’s tolerance for illegal immigration has several
explanations. Its aging populations and booming economies created a
need for foreign workers. Its proximity to northern Africa and
eastern Europe places it close to countries that supply them. And
its economies have traditionally depended more on off-the-books
workers.

No country has run more legalization programs than Spain, which has
carried out six since 1985. As recently as a decade ago, immigrants
made up less than 2 percent of the population. Now they are more
than 10 percent. About 40 percent come from eastern and northern
Europe; 38 percent come from Latin America; and 20 percent from
Africa.

Despite the rapid change, until recently there was little political
conflict, with legalizations occurring under both conservative and
socialist governments. Spain even offers immigrants free health
insurance, whether they are legal or not.

“The attitude toward unauthorized migrants is much more relaxed than
in the United States,” said Joaquín Arango, a sociologist at
Complutense University in Madrid.

The acceptance has been attributed to newfound prosperity, the need
for workers, the progressive culture of post-Franco Spain and the
shared language with Latin Americans, which spares Spain a major
source of tension in the United States.

But with the economy slowing, attitudes appear to be changing. The
unemployment rate among foreigners is now 14.7 percent, compared
with 8.7 percent among Spaniards. Nearly 40 percent of the recent
jump in unemployment has occurred among the foreign-born.

“People are starting to say: `We don’t need immigrants. They should
return to their country,’ ” said Sebastián Salinas, a lawyer with
the immigrant rights group Acobe.

Immigration emerged as an election issue in Spain this year for the
first time. Mariano Rajoy, a conservative challenger to Prime
Minister José Luiz Rodríguez Zapatero, said the 2005 legalization
had attracted more illegal immigrants and increased social
tensions. “We are heading toward a situation of enormous problems,”
said Mr. Rajoy, who narrowly lost.

Likewise, with Italy’s economy faltering, Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi recently promised a new crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Mr. Cantos, in moving to Spain, traded one set of problems for
another. One of 11 children born to poor farmers, he finished most
of high school and landed a job collecting insurance premiums. But
he lost it in 1999 when bank runs, a currency plunge and soaring
unemployment sent hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians to Spain,
which they could enter without visas at the time.

Mr. Cantos joined them in 2001 after borrowing the air fare from a
sister in Los Angeles. (She had moved there illegally and become
legalized, but warned him that the border was now too dangerous to
cross.) He found piecemeal work in Madrid passing out leaflets, and
Ms. Delgado, needing money, reluctantly followed.

Life was miserable. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment with seven
other migrants. They went to work fearing arrest. Ms. Delgado had
lived in Madrid for two years when Spain put into effect the
legalization, which covered only migrants with jobs. Of the 570,000
successful applicants, two-thirds came from five countries: Ecuador
(21 percent), Romania (17 percent), Morocco (13 percent), Colombia
(8 percent) and Bolivia (7 percent).

The government argued that underground work reduced tax revenue and
gave lawbreaking employers a competitive edge, through lower labor
costs. But officials say their main goal was social, not economic.

“If you practice exclusion, you risk the future of your country,”
said Jesús Caldera, who ran the program when he was labor
minister. “You risk terrorism, violence.”

Still, there have been costs. The slowdown in construction has idled
Mauricio Velasco, a housepainter from Ecuador, who now draws
unemployment benefits. Jorge Salinas brought his mother from
Bolivia, but she soon needed a kidney transplant, which the Spanish
government provided without charge. His mother, Miriam Vaca, 70, now
gets free dialysis treatments three times a week. “The ambulance
comes to get me,” she said. “They are very, very kind.”

French, German and Dutch officials criticized the Spanish move,
fearing an increase in illegal immigration that would cross their
borders. Some domestic critics said the program also attracted
illegal workers dwelling elsewhere in Europe.

“They came by land, air and water,” said Ana Pastor, a legislator
from the conservative Popular Party. “There was a massive influx.”

Lorenzo Cachón, a sociologist at Complutense University, analyzed
the program’s “call effect” by studying municipal records. Most
immigrants in Spain, legal or not, register with local governments
to obtain benefits like health insurance. Their numbers grew 20
percent the year after the program was announced, compared with 3
percent the year before.

“That means the maximum call effect is 17 percent,” he said. In
practice, he said, much of that growth came from migrants already
living in Spain, who registered as part of legalization. “I consider
that a small call effect.”

He, like most scholars, said migrants were mainly lured by jobs. But
the region’s history of repeated legalizations, he added, may add to
the pull. “It produces in the imagination of the immigrant the
possibility that there might be a regularization, ” he said.

A 2007 report by the Council of Europe, an organization of European
states, concluded that the Spanish program may have had a
small “pull effect” but called it a “positive experience from which
many European states can learn.”

For the Cantos family, the program brought an uphill fight. Mr.
Cantos paid $1,200 to a lawyer who never filed his application,
which he discovered only when stopped by the police. Finding him
absent from the list of pending cases, they jailed him overnight and
started deportation proceedings.

Ms. Delgado did get her papers filed, only to discover that her
employer failed to sign them. She says her boss “forgot” — drawing
quotation marks with her fingers and rolling her eyes — “because she
knew I wanted to travel back to Ecuador, and she didn’t want me to
go.” She won a long appeal, and Mr. Cantos was legalized as her
spouse.

Their combined income quickly rose about 30 percent, as employers
had to pay more to keep them. With annual earnings of about $44,000,
they make about 20 times what Mr. Cantos made in Ecuador as the
family’s sole provider.

Mr. Cantos said legalization had brought him “a sense of peace,” as
he no longer feared arrest. But Ms. Delgado wears the willed smile
of a woman trying to hide her sorrow. Her visit to Ecuador reminded
her of how much she had missed of her children’s lives. “You go back
and you don’t find them the way you left them,” she said.

Their income allowed the couple to bring just one child to Spain,
and they brought their youngest, Allan. Arriving in March, he found
the weather cold, the food strange. Puzzled by his parents’ fourth-
floor walk-up, he said, “The houses are high.”

Fearful of losing his mother again, he grows jealous when his father
hugs her. He exploded one night when he heard his parents laughing
in the next room.

“He ran out of the bathroom and said, `You two are happier without
me!’ ” Ms. Delgado said. “He still asks us to this day, `Why did you
leave us behind?’ ”

With another willed smile, she added, “We’re so happy to have at
least one of them back.”

http://www.nytimes. com/2008/ 06/10/world/ europe/10migrate .html?
_r=1&ref=world& pagewanted= all&oref= slogin#