Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [132]
This had an immediate and dramatic effect. Suddenly, the occupants of arrival cities could buy their apartments, lease shop spaces, start small businesses, and form families that weren’t hampered by ambiguous national status. Children of migrants attended school as Spaniards. Moroccan neighborhoods (and many South and Central American ones) could become, in practice, Spanish neighborhoods with polyglot cultures. It meant that the boom created active citizens rather than rootless foreigners scrambling for money—and it meant that the subsequent Spanish economic collapse and unemployment crisis would be faced in a sensible and humane way, without turning the outskirts into disaster zones.
“It changed everything when that happened,” Lisaneddin Assa told me as he packaged meat for his customers one Tuesday. When regularization happened, Moroccans across his neighborhood rushed out to buy their flats. “It leveled the playing field—it gave us equality with the Spanish citizens of Parla. Suddenly we could do things like start a business or buy a flat or even put up a building.”
But the Spanish government was farsighted enough to realize (or more precisely to learn from the precedents of its neighbors) that simply registering citizenship or allowing property ownership, though a crucial step, is not adequate to make the arrival city work in the long term. They realized that actual material assistance would be required, a strong presence of the arrival nation’s government in the communities of its new ex-villagers. So the Zapatero government, beginning in 2008, launched a program costing two billion euros over two years to make the rural-to-urban transition work, a fund that would pay for special education, immigrant reception and adjustment, and employment assistance. It also included programs in arrival cities devoted to finding and building homes, obtaining access to social services and immigrant-targeted health care, integration of women, equal treatment, community participation, and community building. This is in some ways an even more controversial program, since it creates the impression that immigrants and their offspring receive more personalized and higher-quality social services than those offered to native-born Spaniards, no matter how poor or deprived, and the inequality became an issue in the 2008 national elections. In the years of economic devastation that followed that election, though, Spain’s arrival cities avoided crisis. While migrants suffered very high unemployment after the collapse, places like Parla did not become centers of social unrest, because the larger communities had firmly established business networks and support systems. Because they were citizens rather than outsiders, the Moroccans did not become an underground threat.
“We realized that in Germany and France there are these marginalized areas where the migrants don’t feel part of the society, and we realized that we have time to address this issue in advance,” says Antonio Hernando, the Zapatero government’s immigration spokesman. “We’re spending this money to strengthen social public services where there are high immigration levels and to create services to mediate between the host society, the city of arrival, and the migrants themselves … There may be some services that Spaniards don’t agree with, but as long as they comply with the law, that’s the only condition we put on them. These migrants are working legally now and paying the taxes that finance the pensions for a million Spanish people. They are the financial foundation of our country’s welfare programs, so we need to make sure that in return, they have the same rights and livelihoods as other Spaniards.”
When the Spanish economy entered recession in 2008—and it was an earlier and more dramatic downturn than elsewhere in Europe, owing to a speculative property bubble in Spain’s coastal regions and suburbs—the response was a novel inversion of the asylum policy. With the majority of its arrival-city residents legally in place, Spain offered those who were unemployed