memo leaked to Spanish media this week is purported to have instructed one particular police station in the Madrid area — not in Lavapies — to arrest 30 undocumented immigrants per week.
Spain's sizable immigrant population already faces soaring unemployment in a souring economy and a government pushing jobless foreigners to go home. Now they complain they are also being harassed by police who are allegedly under pressure to fulfill arrest quotas.In Lavapies, one of Madrid's most multicultural neighborhoods, home to many North Africans, Latin Americans, Asians and people of other origins, immigrants say they are constantly asked for their papers to prove they are legal residents.
"Here, you will never see an immigrant without papers. They are afraid to go out on the street," said Abdel Kader, a 72-year-old Moroccan retiree who has lived in Spain for 40 years.Santo Aybar, a 33-year-old Dominican, said police "go to the subway station at seven in the morning and ask everybody for their papers."They ask to see my papers all day: at breakfast, at lunch and at dinner," Aybar said. "They treat us like trash, as if we were criminals."The Interior Ministry has denied there is any quota system. But police unions complain they are under pressure to make arrests, and say officers pushed to meet their targets have ended up simply stopping foreign-looking people at random at train stations and bus stops."Our officers want to crack down on crime, not on people trying to go to work," police union spokesman Alfredo Perdiguero said Tuesday.Such a tactic aimed at immigrants would reflect how drastically things have changed in Spain, and how quickly. Just two years ago, Spain's economy was on fire, and it relied heavily on immigrant labor in the all-important construction sector. Now the real estate bubble has burst, the economy is in a recessionary spiral and the jobless rate nationwide is 13.9 percent — and almost 22 percent among immigrants.The government has even launched a program offering jobless legal immigrants lump-sum payments of their unemployment benefits if they agree to go home for a few years until the economy recovers.Immigrants complain they are being made scapegoats for hard times after helping Spain create much wealth and become one of Europe's economic success stories.Spain's known immigrant population is nearly 5 million, about 11 percent of the total population.
Being in the country without a residency permit is not a crime but rather a misdemeanor. Those caught are arrested and fingerprinted and can be held for 24 hours. Then they are given an expulsion order but in many cases this is not acted on, Perdiguero said.Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, addressing Parliament on Tuesday, denied there was any kind of written or verbal order mandating a quota for arrests of people without papers."The main goal of the ministry's expulsion policy is none other than to focus on those foreigners, legal or illegal, who commit crimes in Spain," the minister said.In Lavapies, not everyone is convinced of that assertion.
"There have been a lot of police around here in the past few months. But when the press reports what is happening, they leave us alone for a few days," said Ahmed Alimi, a 48-year-old Moroccan who has lived in Lavapies for 20 years.
Raul Jimenez, a spokesman for Ruminahui, an association for Ecuadorean immigrants, added: "It is clear that there has been a toughening of how immigrants are treated, because there is no other way to understand this."
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