Financial crisis reveals vulnerability of Spain's immigrants - Feature

Valencia/Madrid - For Patricio P, an unemployed Ecuadorian immigrant to Spain, a soft drink is an unaffordable luxury these days. "We buy food with coupons we get from a charity organization," says the 40-year-old father of three, who lost his job at a construction site in April, in the eastern city of Valencia, as Spain's recession deepened.

"The coupons can be used for milk or a piece of chicken, but not for extras such as soft drinks or pastries."

Patricio, who shares a three-room flat with his wife and children, sister-in-law and her child, gets 400 euros (590 dollars) in monthly unemployment benefits, while his wife earns 500 euros as a cleaning lady.

The family's mortgage payments alone amount to 1,200 euros per month.

"We live off our savings, but I don't see how we are going to manage like this for long," Patricio told the German Press Agency dpa.

Yet, he does not intend to follow the example of some of his countrymen and return to Ecuador.

"There is not much work there, and when there is, you get paid peanuts," he explains.

Patricio is one among hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been hit hard by Spain's worst economic crisis in 60 years.

While there are signs of Europe emerging from the recession, the latest figures underscore the fragile state of recovery. November data showed that Spain's economy shrank by 0.3 per cent in the last quarter and 4 per cent on the year after it took a hammering from the global economic crisis.

Unemployment among immigrants stood at 28 per cent in May, double the rate among Spaniards.

The recession has exposed the vulnerability of Spain's immigrant community, which has soared within two decades from less than 2 per cent of the population to more than 10 per cent.

The largest groups include more than 500,000 Romanians, more than 500,000 Moroccans, more than 400,000 Ecuadorians and nearly 300,000 Colombians who reside legally in the country.

Spain has more than 200,000 migrants from West and Central Africa, according to Madrid's Pan-African Studies Centre.

Immigrants worked in large numbers in the construction sector, which was one of the main engines of the economy before the crisis. More than half of the jobs created in that sector since 2002 were filled by migrant workers, according to government figures.

The collapse of the housing sector left many immigrant men dependent on the incomes of their spouses, who may have then lost their jobs as housemaids or cleaning ladies as the crisis deepened.

The situation is creating so much stress within families that many marriages break up, said psychologist Juana Molano, who works with immigrants.

The crisis has played a role in driving an estimated 800,000 migrants to work in the informal economy, which contributes about 20 per cent of Spain's gross domestic product.

Undocumented immigrants are the worst off as they never held formal jobs entitling them to unemployment benefits even for a short period.

Hundreds of migrants live in shacks and scavenge for food in garbage bins near southern towns, which can no longer offer them employment as agricultural labourers, news reports said.

Spain's economic crisis is being felt in far-away countries such as Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia, where the money sent by emigrants constituted an important economic resource.

Money transfers from Spain's immigrants to their 12 main countries of origin in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia declined by 7 per cent in 2008.

Some migrants in Europe now survive with money sent by their relatives in Africa, said Antumi Toasije, director of the Pan-African Studies Centre.

The economic crisis has slowed the influx of migrants to Spain, with the numbers of Africans detained after crossing by sea dropping in the first six months of 2009 by half, to about 5,000.

Relatively few of the immigrants in Spain, however, have taken up a government offer of paying them unemployment entitlements in a lump sum if they return to their home countries.

Immigrants who are most tempted to return home include Equatorial Guineans, whose once deeply impoverished homeland has been swamped with oil money in recent years, Toasije told dpa.

Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang remains one of the most ruthless dictators in Africa, but his country now offers lucrative jobs in the administration and business sectors, Toasije says.

Many Guineans with connections or professional expertise are now thinking of returning. They face a "morally difficult choice" between poverty in Europe and comfortable lives in their country of origin, where they would have to refrain from criticizing human-rights abuses while allowing their presence to boost Obiang's image, Toasije says.

An estimated 2,000 Guineans have already chosen "money over democracy" and gone home in the last four years, he estimates.