Tensions Rise With Spain’s Tide of Illegal Immigrants

Ahmed Mortabit braved the Mediterranean in a rickety dinghy, bobbing north a day and a night before reaching this region where pine meets cactus in southern Spain.

Thick, dusty sheets of plastic shelter farm plots for 60 miles along the coast, broken here and there by hilltops, fertilizer sheds and plastics factories.

Three years later, his hands nicked and scraped from picking peppers, cucumbers and melons in the hothouses that beckon illegal immigrants, Mortabit is close to realizing his dream: a Spanish visa that will unlock the door to the rest of Europe.

“I don’t want to return to Morocco humiliated. If I get a visa, it will all be worth it,” said Mortabit, 31, a former soldier who hasn’t seen his wife and two children for three years.

But the plastic flapping in the wind near the collection of crumbling huts where he lives with other farm workers reminds him of his precarious position.

Mortabit’s hope of bringing his family here--or returning home with money to live with them--is in the balance as Spain forges a new immigration policy.

Parliament approved an amnesty for illegal immigrants late last year that authorized visas for anyone able to prove he had arrived before July 1, 1999. At least 80,000 people submitted applications by the July deadline.

The government faces a tough balancing act. It needs immigrants to offset Spain’s shrinking population and fuel its economic boom with cheap labor. But it must also deal with chronic unemployment that has left 15% of Spanish workers jobless.

The governing center-right Popular Party, headed by Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, is under pressure from conservative organizations and party members in the El Ejido area to crack down on illegal immigrants.

Since winning reelection by a comfortable majority this year, Aznar created the country’s first Immigration Department but has not indicated how he envisions future immigration policy.

“We need a growing number of immigrants,” Aznar said in his first speech to Parliament. But he warned that policy must be based on Spain’s capacity to shelter immigrants.

In May, Aznar traveled to Morocco, where he endorsed the idea of investing in the North African nation’s economy as an incentive for potential immigrants to stay home.

In June, Spain’s Parliament started debating a new immigration law, but it is not clear whether lawmakers will end up making it easier or tougher for immigrants to come.

Experts estimate Spain will need 12 million immigrants over the next 30 years to keep the population from shrinking below its current level of 39.4 million. Spain has the lowest birth rate in the world at 1.07 children per woman, well below the 2.1 needed to maintain the population.

Twenty-five years ago, Spain had only 165,000 registered immigrants and few illegal residents. Now, it has 750,000 legal immigrants and many more illegal ones, most of whom live along the southern coast and in the main cities.

In recent years, Spain has spent millions trying to keep out unwanted immigrants. It has erected elaborate fences patrolled by soldiers to keep people from crossing into the Spanish African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

Civil Guard officers also patrol areas of high immigrant activity by boat, car and foot.

But El Ejido and the rest of the southern province of Almeria illustrate the potential profits for Spain from letting in cheap, unskilled labor.

Almeria produced 2.6 million tons of vegetables in 1998 and exported 1.4 million tons--more than five times the level of a decade earlier, according to the most recent government figures. The 1999 harvest was believed to be even larger.

The exports, including 285,000 tons of peppers, 275,000 tons of tomatoes and 240,000 tons of cucumbers, earned $921 million and made the region Europe’s prime vegetable exporter. Its vegetables are in supermarkets in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Canada and the United States.

But the conservative farmers of El Ejido, accustomed for generations to a morning brandy, Sunday soccer and the Catholic church, are unsettled by Muslim butcher shops and neighbors who face Mecca to pray.

“Either they’re going to have to change their habits or we’re going to have to do some major adjusting,” said Paco Garcia, a hothouse owner taking a cigarette break after stacking crates of yellow peppers picked by his two Moroccan employees. “We’re at home here. I don’t see any reason for us to change.”

More are coming, mostly arriving in unstable fishing boats and other small craft. Many don’t make it. Nearly every week a boatload sinks in the treacherous Straits of Gibraltar. At least 200 have drowned this year alone, including six pregnant women.

Several thousand people have been arrested sailing to the southern coast or to the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory in the Atlantic.

The influx has resulted in an army of illegal immigrants, who in the El Ejido area outnumber jobs by roughly 8 to 1. The surplus of idle immigrants has caused a jump in shoplifting, assaults and muggings in El Ejido, Police Inspector Gabriel Perez said.

“In the 1980s this was a town where you knew your neighbors and nobody locked their doors,” said Perez, head of immigration law enforcement for the 75-man force. “Now you can feel the tension in the streets.”

He said El Ejido had never had a murder until last February. Three slayings in quick succession sparked widespread rioting by Spanish residents of the town, where almost everyone was at least a friend of a friend of a victim.

The third victim was a 24-year-old Spanish woman stabbed at an open-air market. Hours after police arrested a mentally ill immigrant in the slaying, 2,000 club-wielding youths burned immigrants’ cars, shacks and shops, forcing them to seek safety in the hills or flee the area altogether. Hundreds of Moroccans lost their identity papers and proof of residence in the fires.

The mobs also smashed cafes that catered to immigrants and stormed the office of an aid group that helps immigrants obtain visas, smashing doors, computers, desks and even walls.

Regional and national officials sent 600 police officers to quell the violence. Many remained to beef up security.

In the following weeks, arsonists burned a newspaper stand owned by an immigrant and 20 telephone booths frequented by immigrants for calls home.

Spanish youths wielding chains and clubs have attacked Moroccans in many areas such as the Atlantic port town of Huelva, where immigrants gather in the spring to pick strawberries. Attacks have occurred as far away as Barcelona, Spain’s major northeastern port on the Mediterranean.

Clashes also have flared recently between Moroccans and Chinese immigrants who share the downtown Madrid neighborhood of Lavapies.

Mortabit’s fragile life here supports the even more tenuous existence of his wife and children back home in Morocco. The 4,000 pesetas--about $27--he earns each day he finds work must provide for them as well. He spent his family’s savings of $1,900 to pay the smuggler who got him to the Spanish coast.

To save money for sending home, Mortabit lives at a collection of huts with 12 other immigrants. There is neither electricity nor running water.

His yard is strewn with torn plastic sheeting, rusty scrap metal and tin cans left by other immigrants who sheltered there after fleeing the rioting mobs.

Mortabit, a heavily muscled former infantryman, said he ran when he saw the El Ejido mob hunting immigrants. But he said he will fight the next time Spaniards turn to violence.

“You have to stand and fight sometime,” he said, motioning to the rocks and sticks he would use as weapons. “At some point I will have to show these people we’re not animals, but men.”