Until When Are You Staying?

Published on July 10, 2014

Story by

Daniel Tordable

Translation by:

Matthew Lye

SocietyEU-TOPIA: Time to VoteEU-TOPIA: Brussels

How long will you be stay­ing for? This is one of the phrases young peo­ple who come to Bel­gium hear most, in search of what they be­lieve is the El Do­ra­do of work. So say Laura and Est­her, friends, but they share much more than the good times and the bad: both are young Span­ish em­i­grants that one day, tired of not find­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties in their home­land, rushed into the ad­ven­ture. They ex­plain that the ar­rival of im­mi­grants from South­ern coun­tries has in­creased the cri­sis. And they no­tice the grow­ing re­jec­tion, by much of so­ci­ety: "they al­ways ask you 'When are you going? When are you stay­ing until?".

Laura is work­ing, but is part of the un­der­ground econ­omy: "I work in a restau­rant with a con­tract for 30 hours, when in re­al­ity I do 60, and take home half the salary in an en­ve­lope." And ap­par­ently, the black mar­ket is quite com­mon. "I know many oth­ers in my sit­u­a­tion," she con­fesses. High taxes and the abun­dancy of new­comer labour from South­ern Eu­ro­pe makes the per­fect breed­ing ground for many em­ploy­ers to take ad­van­tage, cir­cum­vent­ing the Trea­sury and pro­vide pre­car­i­ous con­tracts. It is very dif­fi­cult to quan­tify the prob­lem, but es­ti­mates sug­gest some 300,000 peo­ple affec­ted.

Est­her's case is dif­fer­ent. She is a nurse, has been in Bel­gium for a year and a half and has a good job. "The con­di­tions are bet­ter than in Spain, not only be­cause of the salary," she ex­plains; but the be­gin­ning, she re­mem­bers, was hard. "When you come here you have three months to find a job, if not they send you a let­ter telling you that you are going to be evicted," she says. That in­cludes, she em­pha­sises, the po­lice being able to come to your home. In her case, this sit­u­a­tion did not occur be­cause she found work just be­fore the dead­line, al­though "the Coun­cil Ad­min­is­tra­tion told me they were going to send the po­lice." Last year, 323 Spa­nish res­i­dents re­ceived the evic­tion. Not ex­actly a de­por­ta­tion, strictly speak­ing, it is rather a kind of 'ad­min­is­tra­tive death'. The basic prin­ci­ple of the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) on the free move­ment of goods, cap­i­tal and labour re­mains the least ques­tioned in re­la­tion to per­sons seek­ing em­ploy­ment.

These are just two of thou­sands of cases across the EU. In fact, the lan­guages which ​​are heard the most in the Bel­gian streets, after French and Flem­ish, are Ital­ian, Greek, Por­tuguese and Castil­ian Span­ish. 

WHAT IS HAP­PEN­ING?

There is no need to re­peat the data. Im­mi­gra­tion has be­come a reg­u­lar oc­cur­rance in 'old Eu­rope', max­i­mized by the eco­nomic cri­sis. The coun­tries most af­fected by it, Gre­ece, Por­tu­gal, Ita­ly or Spain, which have youth un­em­ploy­ment rates hov­er­ing around 50%, lose human cap­i­tal head­ing north. Some talk of a lost ge­ne­ration.  It is es­ti­mated that about 8 mi­llio­n mi­grant work­ers in the EU, ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion from Pablo Simón, pro­fes­sor at the Free Uni­ver­sity of Brus­sels (ULB). Many of these 8 mil­lion are ex­ploited and il­le­gal im­mi­grants. Young peo­ple have al­ways been the most ad­ven­tur­ous when it comes to em­i­grat­ing but Car­los Var­gas, a re­searcher at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ox­ford, stressed to cafeba­bel.​com that "the cri­sis has deep­ened" and that means that they ac­cept jobs for which they are over-qual­i­fied. In many cases, waiv­ing their rights. Mean­while, the Banco de Es­pa­ña's Mario Iz­quier­do, told the mag­a­zine that there is a di­rect re­la­tion­ship be­tween the cri­sis and em­i­gra­tion, but clar­i­fies that not only young Spaniards go, but "also im­mi­grants from other coun­tries who had come to Spain".

So­lutio­ns

Many young peo­ple re­port that they feel lost and are de­mand­ing for more in­for­ma­tion. IN­TE­GRA­BEL tries ​​to give ad­vice. "We are a meet­ing point, a place to make con­tacts," said its gen­eral sec­re­tary, Luis Mo­li­na. She states that there are many cases of Span­ish im­mi­grants "al­most forced to leave due to the level of un­em­ploy­ment" that de­spite hav­ing a good ed­u­ca­tion and being adept in sev­eral lan­guages​​, are faced with a very com­pet­i­tive land­scape. "I call it jok­ingly the Ho­lly­wood of Eu­ro­pe, be­cause many peo­ple come here and there is a lot of com­pe­ti­tion," he says. So some are forced into the black mar­ket. To these peo­ple, Luis would say, "do not ac­cept it or get out of there," even though, he ad­mits the needs that youth peo­ple ex­pe­ri­ence are more than un­der­stand­able.

Juan López, Sec­re­tary of In­sti­tu­tional Re­la­tions of the Span­ish So­cial­ist Work­ers' Party (PSOE) in Eu­ro­pe, recog­nises the prob­lem. He be­lieves that we must act in four areas: more in­for­ma­tion, in and out­side of Spain; adopt a com­mon im­mi­gra­tion pol­icy in Eu­rope, stan­dard­ise uni­ver­sity and pro­fes­sional de­grees and ex­tend the pe­ri­ods of res­i­dence in other coun­tries from 3 to 6 months dur­ing pe­ri­ods of acute cri­sis.

For his part, Pablo Simón, demon­strates the lack of in­for­ma­tion. He con­sid­ers it a pri­or­ity to put pres­sure on the in­sti­tu­tions to en­sure force­ for co­or­di­nated ac­tion to end this sit­u­a­tion. Just be­fore the Eu­ro­pean elec­tions which, in­ci­den­tally, co­in­cide with the Bel­gian fed­eral and re­gional ones, he sees an op­por­tu­nity be­cause "in this elec­tion pe­riod we can make noise to try to at­tack the prob­lem."

Like many young peo­ple, the 15-M move­ment also came from Spain. Its mem­bers in Bel­gium do not be­lieve that im­mi­grants are the prob­lem, but the at­ti­tude of the Bel­gian and Eu­ro­pean au­thor­i­ties. Be­cause of this they are ap­palled by the pos­si­bil­ity of 'ad­min­is­tra­tively killing' cit­i­zens, elim­i­nat­ing their basic rights. So, they de­cided as an As­sem­bly to lodge a for­mal com­plaint with the EU against the ex­pul­sion of EU cit­i­zens by Bel­gium. "We want them to be aware of the prob­lem," pro­claims Sara La­fuen­te, a mem­ber of the group, hop­ing that things will change. "Hope is the last thing to go," she says.

Changes in the com­plex re­al­ity of Eu­ro­pe are dif­fi­cult and slow. Eu­rope is an en­tity of gi­gan­tic pro­por­tions that moves slowly. It seems nec­es­sary to es­tab­lish a more co­he­sive and ef­fec­tive and clear im­mi­gra­tion pol­icy among the 28 mem­ber states of the EU com­mu­nity. Mean­while, time passes, and in Brus­sels and in many other places, you will still hear the Span­ish ac­cent among the voices of em­i­gra­tion. That of Laura, a chef in a fancy restau­rant; that of Es­ther, a geri­atric nurse or Ma­nuel, a mu­si­cian seek­ing em­ploy­ment while dream­ing of em­u­lat­ing his idols and who does not lose his smile while shar­ing a de­li­cious Bel­gian beer to the rhythm of a blues tune, in one of those bars which still has an old juke­box.

THIS AR­TI­CLE IS PART OF THE SPE­CIAL EDI­TION DED­I­CATED TO BRUS­SELS, "EU-to­pia: Time To Vote", a pro­jec­t of Ca­fé­ba­bel in co­lLA­bo­ra­tion with the Hip­pocrène foun­da­tion, THE EU­RO­PEAN COM­MIS­SION, THE MIN­ISTRY OF FOR­EIGN AF­FAIRS AND the EVENS foun­da­tion.

Translated from ¿Hasta cuándo te quedas?