Authors: Giles Tremlett
The building boom encouraged by the growing housing bubble (which, in turn, was a result of cheap credit available in the newly created euro currency zone) meant that those who arrived in the middle of the decade had pretty much the same job-seeking exper ience as Carmen. Many were working within a week of stepping off the plane with a tourist visa in their passport.
‘The reality of the situation overwhelms the provisions of desk-bound sociologists,’
El País
commented as the total number hit 3.7
million, or 8.7 per cent of the population, by the end of 2005. A decade of continuous growth meant there were jobs for all. The social security payments of immigrant workers provided an unexpected bonanza for the state, postponing a looming pensions crisis.
A few years ago a friend in Madrid observed that, although he knew there were hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the city, he rarely saw them. ‘Where are they?’ he asked. ‘They are working – and saving,’ was the answer. But that was before the economic bust. In 2012 unemployment amongst immigrants is running at almost one-third. Along with Spanish youth (with 46 per cent of the under-twenty-fives out of work), they are suffering worst. Some are giving up and heading back to booming Latin America. Many leave still owing money to Spanish banks which gave them mortgages and then repossessed their homes at half the price – leaving them with no home but a large debt. Spanish law does not allow you to cancel the debt by handing the keys back. In a rare show of political muscle, Ecuadorean immigrants have turned on the banks and are currently trying to get a law passed through their home parliament in Quito that would prevent them being chased for debts if they go back.
Spaniards claim not be racist. Many genuinely are not. Indeed some immigrants may not have counted on Spaniards being so nosily welcoming. ‘
¡Bebé bien!
’ ‘Baby fine!’ is the scowling, hurried answer given by the young Chinese mother who runs our corner shop. She is interrogated on a daily basis by dozens of clients who insist on asking about her new-born infant. This is one of five Chinese-run shops to have appeared on just four blocks of our street in half a dozen years – along with three grocery stores owned by Pakistanis or Ecuadorians. The former are immeasurably better than the poorly stocked Spanish mom-and-pop stores that preceeded them. And all open late into the night. Madrid, and especially its restaurants, has become immeasurably better because of them.
Spaniards often explain that the memory of emigration is still vivid here, and this explains why racism has failed to take a hold.
José Andrés Torres Mora recalls how his father, a migrant worker, had wept and begged before a German consul after being told he must return to Malaga to get his papers – a place he could not afford to travel back to. ‘It is believed that about a third of Spaniards who emigrated to Germany went without papers,’ he wrote in
El País
as a debate began to rage about how many immigrants in Spain were there illegally. ‘In the sixties, after a civil war and twenty-five years of dictatorship, some 2 million Spaniards had to emigrate, and many did so illegally.’
Any visit to a first division soccer stadium reveals, however, that casual racism is rife. Black players are routinely greeted by racist chants. I heard ‘Monkey! Monkey!’ being hurled at Real Madrid’s Brazilian defender Marcelo Vieira on a recent visit to Atlético de Madrid’s Vicente Calderón stadium. My Atlético-supporting elder son hung his head in shame. Perhaps his generation will desist.
Overt racism is beginning to show its face elsewhere too. Proof of its existence can be found, for the moment, in smallish items in the local news: a racist mugging; an attack on an immigrant girl; or racist insults from police officers. I have yet to see a police officer of non-Spanish origin, though the armed services has recruited vigorously amongst immigrants. In simple terms, that means they can die for Spain but cannot tell Spaniards what to do.
Racism is also slowly creeping its way into political discourse – even if it remains far behind the levels shown in other European countries from Scandinavia to Italy. It is not surprising that this should have happened first in Catalonia. In a region where defence of identity is a largely unquestioned part of mainstream politics, the arrival of people from other religions and cultures was always going to present a bigger challenge than elsewhere. Nor is it surprising that Vic, the romantic heartland of Catalonia, should be at the centre of it. In municipal elections in 2007, an openly xenophobic and anti-Muslim party, Plataforma per Catalunya came second in Vic. Interestingly, although its founder had a past as a pro-Francoist Spanish nationalist, it defined itself as an ‘identity’ party. It even called its junior wing ‘Identity Youth for Catalonia’.
By the time regional and town-hall elections were held in 2010 and 2011, race had become a major question in Catalonia – and was just beginning to appear in other parts of the country. A Catalan People’s Party politician, Xavier García Albiol, suggested some Romanian gypsies be run out of his home city of Badalona – and was voted in as mayor. The nationalists from Convergència i Unió, meanwhile, wanted to introduce a points system that would see those who learned to speak Catalan more likely to win permanent residency rights. All parties, except those on the far left and the separatists of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, embarked on a pursuit of the burqa and face veils – even though few were to be found on the streets.
Perhaps the most absurd example of this was in Tarrés, a delightful little village just a few miles from the Cistercian monastery at Poblet. With just 108 inhabitants, Tarrés has no Muslim inhabitants, but that did not stop parish councillor Daniel Rivera from tabling a debate on banning burqas and face-covering niqabs from the handful of municipal buildings – basically the town hall and the swimming pool – in 2010. ‘It’s true that there are no Muslims living in the village now, but this would be a preventive measure in case they come,’ he said when we met in the nearby provincial capital of Lleida. Rivera’s xenophobic Partit per Catalunya was a breakaway from the Plataforma party in Vic. No one was quite sure how he got elected to the Tarrés council – as he did not live there – and, in the end, the village refused to debate his idea. ‘Not so long ago all the old women in Tarrés wore
head-scarves
too, but they have disappeared without anyone banning them,’ said a local waiter, Arnau Galí. ‘The problem here has always been emigration, not immigration.’ But Lleida formally passed a ban that year, with women found wearing burqas in publicly owned buildings liable to fines of up to six hundred euros. Socialist mayor Angel Ros insisted that this was progressive politics. ‘This is about equality between men and women. The burqa and the niqab are symbols of the political use of a religious dogmatism that had begun to appear in Lleida,’ he told me, referring to a fundamentalist imam, Abdelwahad Houzi, who was stirring things up
in a city whose Muslim population had reached 21 per cent. ‘This is not Islamophobia. When the right does this it is guided by xenophobia, but we are guided by equality,’ Ros insisted. In fact he seemed more guided by a race amongst local politicians to be the first to impose a ban. Soon these were being slapped into place across the region – from Barcelona to Tarragona.
On Lleida’s Nord street, home to Houzi’s mosque and a smattering of halal butcheries, Abderrahim Boussira, an Algerian who ran the Western Union store from which immigrants sent money home, said the fuss was disproportionate to the problem. ‘I’ve been here twenty years and I have never seen a woman in a burqa,’ he said. But Khadija Rabhi, an elegant, Moroccan-born shop owner with her hair in a hijab headscarf, said there were a few burqa wearers. ‘Some are Spanish converts. The Qur’an says we should dress modestly. But people have different interpretations. I wear a headscarf, and if I was not allowed to wear it, I would prefer to move to Morocco – even though Lleida has always been my home.’
‘It is not as if everyone in Lleida was worried about this,’ said Abdelraffie Ettalydy, head of an immigrants’ association. ‘In five years, I have only bumped into one of these women once.’ But Houzi’s followers did not escape his criticism. ‘They are simple people who say: “We are Muslims, so we are better than them”. That is why the mosque has become a problem for the city, and now for Catalonia and Spain as well.’ In a Spain traumatised by the Madrid bomb attacks, the Lleida example is a grim sign of things to come. The mayor may think he is being progressive – but a large section of the city’s population believes it has been targeted purely because of its religion. Further conflict seems inevitable.
Racist parties are crowing. ‘Measures we proposed three or four years ago that were greeted with cries of “racism” are now being passed by town halls,’ said Joan Terré, a town councillor for Partit per Catalunya in Cervera. He is right. In 2010 the People’s Party, with backing from Convergència i Unió, passed a motion through Spain’s senate that called on the government to prohibit women
from wearing burqas and face-covering niqabs anywhere in public. The non-binding motion had to be carefully phrased to avoid the ban applying to the tens of thousands of Christian
nazarenos
who don hooded robes and parade through Spanish cities every Easter. ‘At this rate we will end up with more bans than burqas,’ quipped the then immigration minister, Celestino Corbacho, himself a former Catalan mayor. The Socialist government simply ignored the motion. But the Partido Popular is now in power. It has yet to be seen whether the government led by Mariano Rajoy will impose a blanket ban. The prime minister fits the
retranca
stereotype of his native Galicia perfectly. He is a master of political ambiguity whose ability to convince people of differing, or even opposite, beliefs that he agrees with them is legendary.
Given the degree of alienation obviously felt by both Muslims in Lleida and some of the 11-M train bombers, it seems obvious that Spain has a lot more to do before these immigrants feel properly accepted. The building of new mosques, already a subject of controversy in many places, may soon become a focus for conflict. Even amongst the Latin Americans, who are culturally so close to Spaniards, there is now concern that a new PP government will force some people out. As family members struggle to find work in 2012, Carmen Tejada is worried it will crack down on immigrants without jobs. Her joint Peruvian-Spanish nationality has to be renewed every ten years. ‘I know people who are having to go home because they can’t renew their Spanish passports,’ she told me recently. ‘If you haven’t got a job, they make it more difficult.’ She wonders whether she should not have opted for sole Spanish nationality when the opportunity had presented itself.
The arrival of the mild-mannered but tenacious Rajoy brought an end to a period characterised by growing social tolerance and expansion of the welfare state. Zapatero’s social revolution – with the introduction of gay marriage, attempts to distance the Church from education and looser laws on both divorce and abortion – may have enraged the more conservative parts of Spanish society, but it had been broadly welcomed. It was part of a thirty-year advance of social liberalism that had even turned
Spain into a refuge for those living in more conservative countries. One of the Zapatero government’s last acts was to award Spanish nationality to Ricky Martin, a global music star of
Puerto
Rican origin, who was reportedly looking for a country where he could feel comfortable being married to a male partner.
Zapatero’s social successes contrasted, however, with his catastrophic handling of the economy. In 2008, just after he won a second term in office, the economy nose-dived. The global credit crunch and fall-out from the collapse of Wall Street financial services firm Lehman Brothers tipped Spain into recession. But that only revealed a far worse problem – a vastly inflated housing bubble that immediately burst. Suddenly there were 700,000 unsold newly built homes on the market. Residential building ground to a halt, pushing hundreds of thousands of construction workers out of jobs. The boom, egged on by corrupt town halls and bankers too willing to lend money to real-estate developers, also left deep problems in the financial sector. Worst of all, it exposed the parlous state of Spain’s education system, which had dumped one-third of its pupils onto the labour market with no qualifications. While unskilled labourers could find jobs on building sites, that was not a problem. But as Spain struggled to rein in its deficit, public spending on new motorways, high-speed rail lines, airports and museums – the shiny monuments, including many a white elephant, of successful Spain – also dried up. With no building sites or public works programmes to go to, a mass of unskilled workers struggled to find jobs.
Late in 2011, as Spain dropped back into recession for the second time in three years, I sat on a bench in the sunlit square of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Benalup, a charming
pueblo
in the
bull-rearing
country of Cadiz. A few years earlier it had boasted the highest number of top-of-the-range cars in the province. By November 2011 it had Spain’s highest unemployment rate – approaching 40 per cent. Just a few years earlier 80 per cent of Benalup had worked in construction. ‘I just wish I had stayed at school,’ said Juan Carlos Gutiérrez, a nineteen-year-old who – after being held back two years – never progressed beyond the level of a
fourteen-year-old. ‘They don’t even know how to write a sentence properly,’ town councillor Vicente Peña complained. ‘People here blame the town council when things go wrong, but what about parents and schoolteachers? Surely they share the blame,’ another councillor, this time a socialist, said. A look at the distribution of school drop-out rates around Spain reveals just how damaging the so-called
ladrillo
(brick) boom was to the country’s educational and long-term prospects. For the rate was highest not in the poorest regions, but in those – like Andalucia, Valencia, Murcia and the wealthy Balearic Islands – that built the most.
Ladrillo
had another poisonous effect as a catalyst for the unhealthy, often corrupt, relationship between town halls and construction companies who raped the once beautiful Mediterranean coast. The dam holding that corruption out of sight finally burst in March 2006. It did so, inevitably, in Marbella, a place administered by those politicians who had learned their trade from the biggest rogue of all, former mayor Jesús Gil. Police arrested the mayoress – a second-rate folk-singer called Marisol Yagüe – and a dozen town councillors from three separate parties. The town hall was so rotten with corruption that a board of administrators had to be appointed to run it. They inherited a planning nightmare, with thousands of illegal homes under threat of being bulldozed. Evidence at the trial points to a very simple system which Gil’s former right-hand man, Juan Antonio Roca, used to run the town. He took in money from builders and handed it out, in regular instalments, to councillors. When he fell out with a mayor he made sure the councillors on his payroll voted him out. Those councillors also saw to it that illegal building licences and contracts for town services went to Roca’s friends. Yagüe received some 1.8 million euros over three years. The relationship was so close that when she wanted yet more plastic surgery, Roca picked up the bill. Even one Marbella judge – who allegedly had part of his new house paid for by Roca – joined those accused of corruption.