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Yet there is something different about Parla. Its streets do not have the barren, empty look of those in Evry or Kreuzberg; they are lined with busy Moroccan-owned shops and cafés, the young people seem to be going somewhere, and the bright colors and haphazard development of a thriving arrival city add piquancy to the ground level in a landscape of five-story apartment buildings. In many of its busy streets and squares, it feels as though the best aspects of a Moroccan town and a Spanish city have been fused.

The underlying difference between Parla and its French and German counterparts is that the town’s government realized early on that it was becoming an arrival city and understood the implications of this change. So did Spain’s national government, in part because the Spanish immigration experience followed the French and German precedents by 40 years. So, when its economic boom around the turn of the century caused the immigrant population to expand at record-setting rates—from 0.2 percent of the population in 1990 to 9.6 percent, or 4.5 million people, in 2008—Spain did not respond by blithely assuming that its rural-to-urban migrants would automatically become functioning urban citizens, as France did, or that they were simply non-citizens who could be ignored, as Germany did. Instead, it made investments in their citizenship and prosperity. And when economic crisis ripped across Spain, these investments may have prevented a catastrophe.

This long-term investment in the arrival city did not happen immediately. During its first years of immigration, from 1991 onwards, Spain attempted to close its borders and ban immigration (even as its economy was beginning to demand large numbers of skilled and unskilled workers). During the 1990s, Spain’s arrival cities began to take the shape and to develop the problems of those in other parts of Europe. Parla’s residents in those years were overwhelmingly non-citizens, and they often lived marginal lives. There was an underground economy and high crime rates, and the town was attracting the politics of the Spanish far right and of North African nationalism.

Beginning with the election of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his moderate-left Socialist Party government in 2004, Spain embarked on Europe’s first policy initiative aimed specifically at the arrival city. First, in 2005, it tackled the dangerous obstacle of citizenship with an amnesty program that put almost 700,000 undocumented but fully employed immigrants on the path to full Spanish citizenship. This wasn’t a new policy. Beginning in 1986, Spain had issued at least four amnesties, culminating in a 2000 law that created a permanent mechanism to incorporate full-time employed immigrants into citizenship. (That law was opposed by the right-wing Popular Party government but passed by Parliament against its will.) Zapatero’s 2005 law was in a way a mopping-up, designed to ensure that all the residents of Spain’s arrival cities would be legal, tax-paying citizens.26

It was followed, in 2007, by an even more ambitious program, engineered in cooperation with the government of Senegal, designed to deter dangerous illegal sea crossings by migrants and end illegal immigration to Spain. While amnesties offering regularization of “illegal” immigrants have been used throughout the Western world in the postwar decades, Spain’s program was part of a new approach designed to make regularization an option in advance, incorporating rural-to-urban transition into the employment system. Under this program, tens of thousands of Africans every year were granted work permits, allowing them to enter the country legally and work for a year; if their employment contracts were extended, they were allowed to bring over their families and so embark on a path toward citizenship—an effort to prevent the fragmented families and underground lives of the European arrival city and to allow Spain to add half a million immigrants to its economy each year without creating a marginalized class