What's The Matter, Lost Your Sense Of Humour?

When thousands of Spanish football fans made monkey chants every time a black player touched the ball, this was of course hysterically funny and only a few humourless hypocrites failed to get the joke. Equally, who could forget the fine, subtle irony displayed by the Spanish basketball team pretending to be Chinese by stretching their eyes? But then a French puppet show makes a joke about one of Spain's poor defenceless millionaire tennis players and this is an unacceptable affront and official government complaints must be made to the French authorities.

Modern Day Slavery In Almería

This depressing report from the Guardian on conditions in the greenhouses of Almería appeared a couple of weeks ago. Much of the report doesn't come as a great surprise to anyone a little bit familiar with the way in which a good proportion of Europe's vegetables are produced using immigrant labour working and living in often appalling conditions. Much of this came to light several years ago following the racist pogrom in the town of El Ejido. Whether you are aware of the issue or not, the accompanying video is well worth watching.

What I didn't know about until today was the dreadful response of the local media to the Guardian's report. Via David Jackson's blog I came across the articles which the local Voz de Almería has run on the issue. Unable to acknowledge in any way that much of the wealth of the region has been built on the exploitation of immigrant labour, they attempt to characterise the report as sensationalist journalism and portray the exploiters as if they were the victims. This, together with the typical and pathetic "there are problems everywhere" attempt to minimize the importance of what happens in the region.

Apart from the portrayal of the conditions which immigrant workers have to put up with, one of the most interesting aspects of the video is the effective confirmation that there has been a deliberate policy in Spain of directing illegal immigrants to areas like Almería where the government knows they will be working. Obviously for very low wages and without any rights. When you hear politicians who complain about the regularisation process that was carried out a few years ago for paperless immigrants, you have to remember that what those politicians seek is a situation just like that which exists in the greenhouses.

A Question Of Identity

The American Embassy in Spain has now withdrawn some travel advice from its web page warning of possible problems with the Spanish police for black Americans. The issue got wide coverage here, just as the Obama family visit was about to begin, and has provoked a predictable reaction amongst many Spaniards. However, it's not at all hard to see why many American visitors might find themselves stopped by the police here. I've noticed in the last few months in Madrid a significant increase in the number of random identity checks being carried out by police. Although the word 'random' doesn't really describe the nature of these checks, those chosen by the police are almost always those whose appearance suggests they might be immigrants.

A favourite spot seems to be the Avenida America bus and Metro station, but there are also plentiful reports of police waiting outside the exit of Metro stations in areas with a high immigrant population. Despite official denials, it's very clear that the pressure on police to seek out immigrants without papers has been stepped up. To the extent that even the police unions have complained of being given quotas which they have to meet. I've also seen on the web several complaints from Spaniards who are outraged at such an evidently discriminatory policy. Now none of this sits very comfortably with the complacent official denials yesterday that race could ever play a part in police treatment of citizens. Obviously the police don't want to be stopping legitimate tourists all the time, but with such a policy it's not hard to see how it can happen.

Despite this reality, and the coverage that has been given to it, the reaction of so many to yesterday's news is the comfortable and common one of decreeing that any manifestation of racism in Spain is just an invention of the hypocritical anglo-saxons. The objective has been to ensure that the advice gets withdrawn rather than to ask whether there might be any legitimate reason for its existence. I was in Valencia railway station on Monday morning seeing off a couple of members of my family who had been here for a brief visit. Beside the queue to get onto their train there stood a couple of national police officers. A train pulled in and hundreds of people came streaming out from the platform onto the station concourse. The black guy was stopped by the police and taken to their little office.

Racism Takes Centre Stage In The Catalan Campaign

There are already some clear signs that racism will be part of the campaign in the Catalan elections to be held later this year. The most notorious example came in Badalona, where the Partido Popular distributed a nasty anti-Romanian leaflet. That the PP councillor behind this racist crap turned out to have a Romanian babysitter for his children should come as no surprise. It fits neatly into the "I don't think there should be so many of them here and what's more my Polish/Bulgarian/Romanian woman doesn't clean my house properly" kind of discourse.

It's not just about the PP either, because sadly we still haven't seen the end of the saga over the attempts in the town of Vic to exclude immigrants without papers from the municipal census. Although it appeared that Vic had fallen into line after the government told them that they couldn't do this, a statement from a European Union commissioner criticising Spain's policy led to Vic adopting a new measure. They threatened to report any illegal immigrant trying to register to the authorities. The intention is less one of upholding the law, it's much more about deterring immigrants from registering.

Vic has now been joined in this policy by another municipality, Sant Andreu de Llavaneres. This latter case gives the game away, it's a wealthy place with a low percentage of immigrants and where many of those from outside come from the European Union anyway. Despite this the PP and the conservative nationalists of Convergència i Unió have united to remind any illegal immigrants in the area that they are just there to tend the gardens of the richer inhabitants.

This kind of behaviour is nothing to do particularly with Cataluña, as I'm sure we'll find out next year when more regional elections are due to be held in Spain. It's just that the PP does so badly there that there is little they will stop at in return for a handful of votes. It's an ugly warning signal given that there has still been relatively little backlash against immigrants during the crisis. Anyone who has seen the dismal portrayal of immigration as only being a problem in the UK election debates will be aware of what some will try to do here.

Vic Changes Course, Torrejón Still Discriminates

The administration of the town of Vic has announced that they are withdrawing the plan to deny illegal immigrants the right to register as residents on the local padrón. This turnaround has been a result of the massive media attention, the government making it clear that such a policy is not legal, and the pressure put on some of the local councillors by their party leaderships. It has been a depressing episode which has focused huge attention on a supposed "problem" of illegal immigrants precisely at the time when there are fewer arriving in Spain than at any time in years. The whole affair shows that race and immigration don't necessarily become hot political issues because of public concern, illegal immigrants instead make a handy scapegoat for opportunist politicians. The PP's candidate for the elections later this year in Cataluña has quickly made it clear that she intends to use race in an attempt to improve the PP's miserable electoral performance in the region whilst the nationalists of CiU compete with their own proposal to award points for integration. Meanwhile the PP at national level has revived their idea of an integration "contract" that they tried to use to electoral benefit in the last general election.

The change of policy in Vic is not the end of the matter, the town of Torrejón de Ardoz near Madrid maintains their own policy that directly discriminates against immigrants. The insistence by Torrejón's administration that their measure is only aimed at those with tourist visas borders on mendacity. Some people may imagine that the majority of illegal immigrants in Spain have arrived on boats crossing from Africa, but the reality is that far more will have turned up at Barajas airport in Madrid, entering as tourists because no "illegal immigrant" visa exists. Someone who is here as a genuine tourist is unlikely to waste their holiday standing in a queue at the local ayuntamiento. Torrejón has also been using the amount of square metres occupied by each person as a criteria for refusing registration, a policy which it seems was not applied before to Spanish residents but which if it were to be applied generally would count as a direct attack on the poor of all nationalities. It doesn't help the PP's lies in the case of Torrejón that the local party has issued propaganda boasting about how their measures have reduced the number of immigrants living in the town. By displacing them to neighbouring municipalities of course.

José Maria Aznar was sounding off in typical fashion in an interview this morning blaming Zapatero's government for an imagined policy of "papeles para todos" for the problem. In fact the current regulations concerning access to the padrón were drawn up by a certain M. Rajoy who was serving at the time as the minister of public administration in a government led by one J.M. Aznar. It has nothing to do with the regularisation of illegal immigrants carried out by Zapatero's administration. The latter measure was one of the best things that Zapatero's government has done, it gave contracts and rights to hundreds of thousands of illegals whilst ensuring in the process a very healthy boost to the social security fund. Obviously many of the PP's supporters preferred to have a huge source of cheap, insecure labour in the form of the illegal immigrants; a situation that Aznar's administration happily tolerated. Places like Vic, and Almeria where there have also been complaints about immigrants having rights, have done extremely well from the labour of illegal immigrants. If there is any problem with payment for provision of local services then maybe those who pocketed the profits should be asked to make a contribution?

Vic Sets An Ugly Precedent

The decision by the town of Vic not to permit immigrants without residence papers to enrol on the municipal padrón (list of residents) has provoked a strong protest. The national government insists that the policy is illegal, as all residents have the obligation to be on the padrón regardless of their legal status. It's not just about being on a list, the ability to register also affects access to basic public services. Vic is the political base of an openly xenophobic political movement called Plataforma per Catalunya, but sadly it is not this party which is responsible for the new policy. The town is run by a coalition between Convergencia i Unio, Esquerra Republicana and the Catalan wing of the PSOE (PSC).

The leader of Plataforma per Catalunya, Josep Anglada, is unsurprisingly delighted with the decision which plays directly into the hands of the anti-immigrant party and simply feeds the myth that immigrants do better out of public services than the local population. Now the racists can present themselves as having been vindicated. Meanwhile both Esquerra and the PSC are putting pressure on their local councillors to backtrack on the decision. Vic is probably not alone, as reports start to surface of other municipalities that have more quietly tightened their own requirements.

No English Friendly For Madrid

It didn't take long for this item to make it into the Spanish press. It's hardly a surprising decision, the Spanish football authorities preferred to look the other way and pretend that no racism was involved rather than acknowledge what had happened the last time England played at the Bernabeu stadium, so there is little reason to believe that the same thing won't happen again. I anticipate multiple comments along the lines of "oh it's so unfair, here go the anglos again calling us racists when they're more racist than we are" in the Spanish media where this gets reported.

Apartheid A La Madrileña

Here's the recipe for traditional Madrid style educational apartheid. First take one school, let's call it "San Roque", whose pupils are mostly of gypsy or immigrant origin. The school has reasonable facilities and even a bit of spare space for more pupils. Then take another school just 300 metres away, we'll call this one "Cristóbal Colón", where the pupils are mostly of Spanish (non-gypsy) origin. This second school is crowded and lacks key facilities such as a library. What to do about such a situation? San Roque offered to take excess pupils from Cristóbal Colón but such a mixture wouldn't work for the Comunidad de Madrid - most definitely an unequal opportunities administration. So the solution adopted is to put the gypsy and immigrant kids into the cramped school without facilities, and therefore leave the other one free for the Spanish kids. Swap the names of the schools and problem solved.

Rajoy Plays The Race Card Again

When he's not blaming Zapatero for the economic crisis, Partido Popular leader Mariano Rajoy has another favoured target; immigrants. Yesterday Rajoy directly attacked foreigners working in Spain by linking the number of immigrants claiming unemployment benefit and the number of Spaniards who travel to France every year to work on the grape harvest in that country. He suggested that immigrants should have no right to claim such benefits by claiming that the government budget was for “los Españoles”.

Sometimes with people like this who are a bit slow on the uptake you need to state the obvious. If there are immigrants claiming unemployment benefit in Spain it's because they have paid their social security contributions while they have been working here. The same contributions which are also paying the retirement pensions of several hundred thousand Spaniards. The last government which Rajoy formed part of was content to leave close to a million immigrants in a situation of absolute insecurity, without papers or social security and easy prey for unscrupulous employers. The regularisation of many of these immigrants led to a huge increase in the numbers paying social security contributions.

Meanwhile the explanation for the number of Spaniards going to France to work is equally simple, the conditions they are offered there are much better than those in Spain. They can be paid double what is on offer in their home country and have in fact been travelling to France to work on the harvest for years, this is not a new phenomenon resulting from the crisis. A PP which is increasingly attached to neocon economic policies at the very time when those same policies are unravelling at speed is naturally going to be unable to see the wood for the trees. The tried to play the xenophobic card in the general election campaign and if yesterday is anything to go by they will continue to try and use it to their advantage as the economic situation worsens. They have nothing else to offer.

Some Of My Best Friends Are Chinese

I don’t believe it, it must have been my general indifference towards the Olympics that meant that this one passed me by. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Spanish basketball team presents its “respects” to the Chinese nation!


In Spain, as in China, there is a certain resistance to losing face so incidents like this get made much worse by the excuse machine going in to overdrive to try and explain away what has happened. So we are told that they did this picture as a “gesto cariñoso”. Now I know that Prince Philip once told a group of British volunteers in China that they would go slitty eyed if they stayed any longer in the country, but he at least has the excuse of being a Royal and is therefore expected to say stupid things.

I have a piece of advice for the Spanish football federation. The next World Cup will be held in South Africa. If any of your sponsors suggest that the players black up their faces and dress as Zulu warriors to show the South Africans how much they love them, confiscate their passports and leave them in Madrid. Believe me, it's for the best.

Dangerous Games With Immigration

Maria Teresa de la Vega, one of the vice presidents of the Spanish government took a swipe at the Italian government the other day over the anti-gypsy pogroms around Naples. It was a welcome statement, that Berlusconi’s government should try and make foreigners responsible for crime in Italy is, apart from being inaccurate, a major insult to all of those who have spent so many generations of effort building up domestic organised crime in that country. You would have thought that Silvio himself might know a thing or two about that. In any case, soothing diplomatic statements had to be issued along the lines of “When we called you a bunch of xenophobic bastards, what we really meant to say was that you are some of the warmest, most hospitable people we have ever encountered.”

The initial protest was also welcome for other reasons, because the Spanish government recently has shown alarming signs of adopting a different discourse on immigration. I have the feeling that someone in the PSOE, shortly after the general election in March, told José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero that his party had lost votes to the opportunist attempts by the Partido Popular (PP) to play with the issue of immigration. First of all we got the appointment of Celestino Corbacho as minister in charge of work and immigration. His appointment was accompanied by plentiful press messages on how he had handled the town of L’Hospitalet as mayor with a bit of a “tough love” attitude towards the immigrants who made up a sizeable proportion of the towns population.

More recently things got worse as it seemed that the Spanish government was giving its support to a new directive from the European Union on immigration which was going to make the expulsion of illegal immigrants a top priority. Included in the measure are proposals to significantly lengthen the time during which member states are allowed to hold illegal immigrants in detention centres. The proposal is really a response to those European leaders such as Sarkozy and Berlusconi who have discovered to their delight that they can use fears raised by immigration to their political benefit. It is depressing to see the Spanish government giving any kind of encouragement to this, especially after resisting the temptation to play along with anti-immigrant sentiment during the election campaign itself.

Attempts by parties on the left to mimic the right on this issue always end up playing into the hands of the racists as each successive measure leads to demands for ever harsher legislation. The political history of France over the last 20 years shows this quite well. What you end up with are measures which can be notably headline grabbing and malicious in their treatment of immigrants but which make no real difference to anything else. The PP have of course seized on the government’s change of direction with a predictable “you called us xenophobes and now look at what you are doing” response. For once they could be right. Meanwhile the Italian government has issued a fairly sarcastic note of congratulations to Spain for reducing so successfully the flow of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. That a significant possible cause of the reduction is that more are probably drowning on the journey is not a point likely to be made by any of those concerned.

Carnival Time For Mariano

You remember a few weeks ago when a group of morons dressed up as the “Hamilton Familly” (sic) whilst others hurled racist abuse at Lewis Hamilton? We were assured that it was all a big joke because the morons in question were just dressed up for Carnival and therefore couldn’t possibly be racists.


Well the man playing the solo in the photograph above has obviously learnt something from this incident, and nobody should assume he meant any harm when he said on Wednesday that “the rights of immigrants mustn’t prejudice the rights of the Spanish”. I mean, come on, he was just having a joke, a bit of a laugh with his costumed friends. If you don’t get it then you obviously have no sense of humour.

Spanish General Election 2008....The French Connection

The admiration of Nicolas Sarkozy expressed by a significant section of the political right in Spain has been evident over the last two or three years. The attraction is clear; a leader who can use straight talking right wing populism to electoral advantage is bound to appeal to those who instinctively reject the idea of a more centrist approach. Whenever any of Sarkozy’s admirers in the Partido Popular (PP) write about the man, you quickly sense a kind of “why can’t we have a leader like that?” longing in their words.

Well now PP candidate Mariano Rajoy has decided to try and fill that gap, and in the process take his party’s electoral campaign into new territory. The last week has seen the PP temporarily abandon their attempts to portray the country as being on the verge of economic collapse, instead the party has focused their campaign around immigration and crime. Inevitably, the borrowing of Sarkozy’s campaign methodology has meant that the race card had to be played with a proposal to make immigrants sign a contract obliging them to respect Spanish customs. When I suggested on a Spanish forum a couple of years ago that a PP desperate for votes would happily use racism in the election campaign I was scoffed at. Being vindicated doesn’t make me feel any better in this case.

There has since been a lot of amusing speculation on what the relevant Spanish customs to be respected could be. We don’t yet know whether the list includes ignoring traffic lights and talking loudly in cinemas. There have also been some much less funny insinuations from members of the PP. An anonymous scumbag from the PP suggested that “hygiene” was one of them, whilst Madrid super-sub Manuel Pizarro claimed that “not stealing” was another such custom. How he then explains the presence of almost 50,000 prisoners with Spanish nationality in Spain’s jails is something he hasn’t been able to help us with so far. In addition, the proposed contract contains the obligation to pay taxes, so the well established Spanish custom of massive tax fraud in the construction and sale of property is therefore one which is not available to the humble immigrant.

In addition, the PP has proposed measures on genital mutilation and the wearing of the veil. The PP president of Melilla then emphasised the discriminatory nature of the proposals by saying that Muslims in the North African enclave would be exempt from such measures because they are Spanish citizens. Turning to crime, the PP has suggested lowering the age of criminal responsibility and stiffening prison sentences. Many of the measures have been directly lifted from Sarkozy’s presidential campaign, along with the rhetoric about representing those who “get up early in the morning” to go to work for the good of their country. The obvious objection to this notion is that a large number of those who get out of bed early to clean the streets and offices for the luckier ones are the very same immigrants who are the target of this opportunist campaign.

Whilst Sarkozy was able to exploit the backdrop of the unrest in urban suburbs in France for his campaign, the PP in Spain has no similar situation. The vacuous nature of much of what they propose is illustrated by the fact some of the measures are already incorporated into law, and others are simply irrelevant to the issue they pretend to address. We do not walk the streets in Spain in fear of gangs of 12 year old criminals, the cases of genital mutilation are (thankfully) extremely low and issues caused by women wearing the veil are also few and far between. Of course the key in Sarkozy style politics is to offer dramatic sounding bogus “solutions” for issues that play on people’s fears, hence the emphasis on foreigners and crime; even better if you can associate the two in the public perception. That the solutions offered make no difference at all to anything (or even create problems where none existed before) should be evident to anyone who has studied Sarkozy’s progress in recent years.

The opinion polls have more or less returned to their previous positions after what seemed to be a brief surge in pro-government sentiment following the PP’s disastrous handling of their electoral list. Although votes count everywhere, with both main parties almost level the election could be decided by small swings in a relatively small number of electoral demarcations. The campaign has taken a nasty turn, and given that we are not yet in the official campaigning period it is easy to imagine that it could still get nastier.

Marked For Life

Ok, it's time for this blog to get back to what it does really well - taking the piss out of Esperanza Aguirre! Don't run away, there is a serious point behind this post. A few months ago I wrote a guest post on racism in Spain for the blog Notes From Spain (while its owners were getting severely stressed out on holiday in Thailand). Almost in passing I mentioned the educational policy of the regional government in Madrid, which encourages the ghettoisation of immigrant children in the public school system of the region. In one of the comments to that post, Katie from España Profunda confirmed my suspicion about Aguirre's policies with first hand experience of having worked in a public school in Madrid.

Well El País today provided further confirmation with a report showing that 80% of immigrant children in Madrid are now being educated in the public system, whilst 2 out of 3 Spanish pupils are going either entirely private or to the unreasonably heavily subsidised concertados. It's not an accidental policy. Tonight I read that Aguirre now wants all pupils in the public schools to wear a uniform. She's clearly not satisfied with the fact that enough of these pupils have darker coloured skins or speak strange languages, she needs something else to identify their second class status. Someone should tell her, gently if possible (harshly if not), that this sort of stigmatisation hasn't been popular since the end of the Second World War.

On a more frivolous note, I was quietly proud for a while - despite the end of Google Bombing - that the words "Pauper President" had such success in identifying Aguirre in Google searches. Unfortunately some people have started using them about other politicians, what a liberty.

Looking For Trouble In Alcorcón

Some truly disturbing events took place this weekend in the town of Alcorcón, near to Madrid. A dispute between two teenage couples degenerated later into a massive brawl between two groups composed mainly of South American and Spanish youths. As a result of this brawl, one young Spaniard was stabbed. That might have been the end of it, but it seems that some of the Spanish involved decided to turn it into something more serious, using the stabbing incident as a pretext.

On Sunday as many as 1000 Spanish youths were on the streets of Alcorcón allegedly seeking a confrontation with gangs of South Americans. In reality they spent much of the day in scuffles with riot police and managed to create a situation where immigrants in the town were afraid to leave their homes. The police response has been a little curious, they arrested 7 people following Saturday night’s brawl – all South Americans. Then, faced with 1000 Spaniards seeking to organise their own mini pogrom, and attacking the police in the process, the result was only 2 arrests! One family involved had to be escorted from their own home by the police to protect them from the mob.

It seems that far right groups are already involved in what is going on and are attempting to organise a demonstration for this Saturday. It’s a very ugly situation, and what makes it even more disturbing is the number of people here who find excuses for the behaviour of the racists. Despite the police making it clear that they were not involved, much of the talk about the incidents focuses on organised Latin American gangs. Somehow the blame ends up with those who are actually the victims.