Spain: New Aliens Law
01 November 1999
A new Aliens Bill, superseding the existing legislation, was debated by the Spanish parliament in November. The previous Aliens law, dating from 1985, and the corresponding Regulations approved two years later, has been the main legal instruments used by the Spanish Government in its dealings with immigrants. The ethos underlying the legislation was essentially one of bureaucratic and police control of immigration. The failure of the legislation, and the fact that it gave rise to a considerable number of cases of unjust treatment of migrants, led almost all parliamentary parties to put forward several amendments. After one-and-a-half years of parliamentary debate, all sides arrived at a consensus on a text which was approved for transmission to the Senate by a plenary session of Congress on 25 November.
The new Bill represented an advance in certain areas, such as family reunion, the need to justify visa refusal, and the introduction of a means for regularising the situation of overstaying immigrants who had completed two years' continuous residence, and would now be granted temporary permission to remain. Moreover the new law clearly stated certain fundamental rights of immigrants (of free association, assembly, freedom of expression, health, social security and so on) which had previously been covered by a variety of other enactments. Despite these improvements, the new Aliens Bill was fiercely criticised by numerous migrant support groups for its failure to break with the ethos of the earlier law, in its implicit presentation of immigration as a potential danger that had to be controlled and was permissible only when necessary and in accordance with the national interest. In other words, migrants were still perceived as a mere "labour reserve", so that their entry is legitimate only if they obtain a work contract for a post that no Spanish national would fill - the residence permit being linked explicitly with the work permit.
The Government, however, declared at the last minute that it found the more progressive parts of the new Bill unacceptable, and citing the effects of the recent accords at the Tampere EU summit, it proposed a radical revision of the text before its passage to the Senate. In just four days, having secured the support of the Catalan conservative group Convergencia i Unió, it was able to return to Congress with a much more restrictive text than the one that had already been approved on 25 November. The revised version was shorn of all the features that had made the bill attractive. Thus, for example, the provision for regularising the status of overstayers, which represented a recognition of the existence of "undocumented" migrants, was reduced to cover only those who had previously received temporary leave to remain and had had this renewed on at least one occasion. Immigrants without permits were deprived of fundamental rights including the rights of association, assembly, forming trade unions and striking. The obligation to explain the refusal of a visa was restricted to family reunion residence visas and employment visas. Procedures for expulsion were streamlined and all immigration-offence penalties were increased. In an early protest at the Government's attitude, the 17 voluntary-sector organisations and two trade unions represented in the official consultative Immigration Forum withdrew from that body on 10 December.<