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Immigrants, workers and citizens -A vision of migration from Spain |
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Summary |
| Contributed by: |
Colectivo IOE |
This is a book about immigration in Spain. It is a very good summary, and the authors are very well-known in Spain.
IMMIGRANTS, WORKERS AND CITIZENS - A VISION OF MIGRATION FROM SPAIN
For decades, the inhabitants of towns and villages in the Spanish state saw their relatives and neighbours leaving, those people who had decided to try their luck in other parts of the country or abroad. The promise of an Eldorado on American soil or the appeal of thriving post-war Europe induced millions of people to become emigrants, with their heart, their expectations and even their possessions that were then accumulating divided up between two different societies. Meanwhile, in other areas of the country, mainly around the large towns where investment and jobs were concentrated, the arrival of workers and immigrant families was producing changes in the social structure and cultural composition of the population. The recent arrivals, from those provinces of Spain left behind by the process of “modernisation,” contributed crucially to the growth of these development areas. Sometimes they integrated themselves fully and permanently into social life. At other times they felt like a mark of distinction and where possible were returning to their regions of origin.
Much later on, less than two decades ago, you started to notice the presence of other people on the streets of our towns and cities. In the coastal areas, older people of fair complexion started to settle, who hardly ever mixed with the natives, and who spoke nothing more than their language of origin. After these retired people and European stockholders, a younger generation of people arrived who did speak Castilian, although with the accents of their various countries of origin: it was the Latin Americans abroad who opened the door to the subsequent economic immigration. Their presence became obvious in some parts of Spain, especially in Madrid, Barcelona and on the east coast. But much more striking was the presence of people who showed physical features clearly different to those of the natives: Asian, Arabic and black foreigners became a common sight in town squares, on public transport and in the countryside of several regions. The traditionally emigrant Spain was becoming a recipient of foreign immigrants.
It was more than a decade ago that talk of this new phenomenon started, as much in the first investigations which inquired into an unknown field, as in the mass media. In both of these, frequently or otherwise, news of the immigration “avalanche” or of the awful living conditions of some of the foreigners was appearing together with other news which had a bearing on the human content and incidents of those who were arriving in the slums of the “First World” looking for crumbs from the priviledged society’s banquet. In addition, the Central Government stepped in and arranged things according to the North’s interests.
Since then, things have continued to change: the media generated a public opinion, that is to say people on the streets started to think and take up a stance in the face of the immigration phenomenon, there was talk of -and some people suffered- racism and xenophobia, campaigns were launched in favour of tolerance, and rules and official policies were modified, but to date the majority of the population still have ideas which are not in keeping with the nature and real dimension of foreign immigration.
In the last decade the investigation undertaken has allowed us to move forward with our understanding of this new reality. However, as is to be expected when a new field of study is opened, it has been done in a sporadic fashion, and at times unsystematically or with a purely descriptive focus. In the middle of the 1980s it was by no means easy to come across statistics referring to the foreign population, at times it was even necessary to produce them accordingly; nowadays on the other hand, there are publications of an official nature which offer in a systematic manner, almost all of the information available. We are still far from the ideal situation but some improvement has been made of foreign immigration. Similarly, monographic investigations have been appearing with reference to specific colonies, which allow us to understand in detail the processes which generate the migratory trends from certain countries further away than the raw statistical information indicates. Despite these steps forward, it is not easy to find texts which systematise all of the information available, and which combine an all-embracing vision without failing to offer a meaningful explanation of that vision.
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