Global Issues
Spain Slashes Funds for Integration of Immigrants
The Support Fund for the Integration of Immigrants in Spain has been drained of resources, and as a result there is no funding for social insertion, employment and education programmes for the immigrant community.
The situation has drawn harsh criticism from social organisations and opposition parties. The Support Fund was established in 2005 to support the reception, integration and educational development of immigrants, and it finances training, employment creation and intercultural mediation programmes carried out by NGOs, autonomous regional governments and municipal councils.
But the Ministry of Labour and Social Security eliminated the fund's entire resource allocation in the 2012 general budget, approved Mar. 30 by the right-wing government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
The national budget was cut by 35.9 billion dollars for the rest of 2012, an average spending reduction of 17 percent compared with 2011.
'Municipal councils and autonomous communities (regions) were using the money to hire staff like social workers and expert immigration lawyers to work with immigrants,' Mamen Castellano, the head of Andalucía Acoge (Andalusia Welcomes), an NGO that works on behalf of immigrants, told IPS.
In 2011 'the fund was already drastically downsized,' she said. 'Staffing levels for immigrant assistance at the local level were cut to the bone.' In 2010 the fund received 261 million dollars, but in 2011 the socialist government of former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004- December 2011) only provided 88 million dollars, as the impact of the economic crisis grew.
'The suppression of the Support Fund is one of the hardest blows delivered to public policies for integration in recent years,' said the Spanish Federation of SOS Racismo (SOS Racism), an NGO, in a communiqué.
SOS Racismo predicts that the disappearance of the fund will paralyse 'hundreds of municipal and regional integration plans,' and said its removal contravenes European Union agreements, such as the European Agenda for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals, established in July 2011.
According to SOS Racismo, 'economic crises have different timescales to those needed to evaluate the extent of integration of an immigrant population that in recent years has seen its employment and family expectations frustrated.'
Immigrant aid associations and related NGOs said the cancellation of the fund would be detrimental to their own assistance activities, at least for this year. 'We are concerned about the suspension of this fund, because it will lead to the disappearance of funding earmarked for integration projects' at the municipal and regional levels, Castellano complained.
In the view of immigrants' associations, without the actions for integration and social cohesion that were paid for by the fund, immigrants will face an increased risk of marginalisation and exclusion. The deputy spokesman for the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC - Republican Left of Catalonia) party, Oriol Amorós, called the suspension of the fund 'an attack on social harmony.' 'At times of crisis, investment in social cohesion is more essential than ever,' Amorós said.
© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service