An overview of migration policies in Spain and Catalonia

In the 1990s, Spanish immigration policy ‘was reactive and ambivalent, allowing informal access to the territory despite the measures established by law’, and to such an extent that the Spanish model during that period was labelled as ‘tolerated irregularity’⁷⁰ (López-Sala, 2013, p. 40 citing Izquierdo 2008). During the 2000s, the incremental growth of the foreign-born population went hand in hand with the broadening (and increased complexity) of Spanish immigration policy-making, at different governmental levels. At the same time, the particular distribution of power within the Spanish state meant that different governments and administrations (at national, regional or/and local and autonomous community levels) contributed to the array of policy responses deployed. In this respect, there are three important ideas that are worth highlighting.

First, it is important to consider the role played by municipal and regional levels in immigration policymaking. Hence, during the 90s and the first half of 2000s, it is important to take into account that it took more than a decade to move from an integration policy approach based on ‘partial measures’ to far more planed

70 To exemplify the expression, once the first Foreigners Law was enacted in 1985 - and its correspondent regulation in 1986 - it meant that since 1986, more than one and a half million workers in an irregular situation could legalize their status by legalizations that were periodically launched both by right-wing and left-wing central governments (in the years 1986, 1991, 1996, 2000, 2001 and 2005) (Bruquetas-Callejo et al., 2011; López-Sala, 2013).

instruments favoring migrant participation and social equality at upper governance levels. Hence, researchers have highlighted the crucial role played by officials at the local level in dealing with the challenges posed by inmigration. In fact, different authors underscore the point that up until 2004 the elaboration of integration policies occurred at the regional and local level because, until then, the central government’s main focus was on a labour-based approach towards inmigration (Bruquetas-Callejo et al., 2011; López-Sala, 2013; Treviño and González Ferrer, 2016). It is also stressed that ‘the sub-national level became the locus of integration policymaking as a consequence of the division of tasks between levels’ established in the system of autonomous communities (Bruquetas-Callejo et al., 2011, p. 308)⁷¹.

Regionally, the Catalan regional government (Generalitat de Catalunya, in Catalan) was quicker in defining settlement and integration policies than the central government.⁷² Therefore, in the mid-1990s Catalonia was a pioneer within Spain in defining a policy approach to migrant integration while at the same time municipalities at local level (around Spain) were promoting policy approaches to the immigration phenomenon that would become mainstream by the beginning of the 2000s, at a national level and also in other autonomous communities (Bruquetas-Callejo et al., 2011; Martínez de Lizarrondo Artola, 2009). In practice, the array of ways in which immigration challenges were managed at the municipal level was broad. This miscellany of approaches has also been connected to an inequality of both treatment and access to rights that remained dependent on the municipality of residence. The research shows that this was specially the case in regions such as those in Catalonia, which received an important share of total in-flows (Miret i Serra, 2009;

Nadal et al., 2002; Treviño and González Ferrer, 2016).

71 The national policies defined in ‘Plan GRECO’ (Programa Global de Coordinación y Regulación de la Extranjería y la Inmigración, 2000) and the first PECI (Plan Estratégico de Ciudadanía e Inmigración) 2007-2010 approved in 2007; the second PECI 2011-2014, and the last initiative that, so far, was published in 2011) would later support what had been the ‘de facto’ distribution of responsibilities towards local and regional levels for the policy measures involved in integration (Bruquetas-Callejo et al., 2011).

72 Indeed, while the first Plan for Social Integration of Immigrants launched at national level was pushed by civil society and subnational level governmental actors in 1994 (preceding the GRECO Plan), some authors indicate that in fact this plan ‘was inspired by – if not patterned upon - the 1993 Catalonian Plan’ (Bruquetas-Callejo et al., 2011, p. 309).

Second, within the frame of Spain-Catalonia historical relationships, authors have shed light on the use of immigration policy-making at the regional level as a mechanism to build up a Catalan national project (Domingo, n.d.; Gil Araújo, 2006).

Since the beginning of the democratic period after Franco’s dictatorship, often the complexities of this relationship can be observed in the power grounded in the distribution of competences between governance levels. At the time of writing this dissertation there was a deep constitutional crisis affecting political public institutions in Catalonia and Spain⁷³. Despite this, during the period in which this research mainly focuses on, the New Statute of Autonomy (approved in 2006) represented a

‘significant qualitative leap forward in terms of legal recognition of competence on immigration’ (Miret i Serra, 2009, p. 60 my translation). In the New Statute of Autonomy the Generalitat de Catalunya is defined, for the first time, as a government with exclusive competence in the field concerning first reception of migrants; in the ‘development of the policy of integration’; and with the competence to legislate and govern for the ‘social and economic integration of migrants as well as for their social participation’ (Miret i Serra, 2009, p. 60 my translation).

Notwithstanding these developments, more than ten years after this New Statute of Autonomy was approved, some commentators still consider that a lack of clarity remains between the Spanish central government and Catalan regional government in relation to which body is the competent body in relation to some issues (Markus González Beilfuss in Pinyol-Jiménez, 2016, p. 51).

Two important policy documents can be seen as arising from both the new statutory context in 2006 and the historical background of immigration policymaking in Catalonia. First, there was the signing of the National Agreement for Immigration (Pacte Nacional per a la Immigració) in 2008, after a broad participatory process initiated in 2007 to debate and formulate this document. Second, there was the approval on May 7, 2010 of the ‘Law on welcoming people immigrating into and

73 This major crisis started after the Spanish right-wing party Partido Popular challenged the new version of the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia. The Statute had been agreed by the Catalan Parliament, the National Parliament and the Senate. Subsequently it was aproved in a referendum during June 2006. There was a subsequent legal judgment and curtailment issued in 2010 by the Constitutional Court. In this light, the crisis of refuge and asylum politics in Spain was widely contested in the Catalan public and political sphere during the first half of 2017, in what can be understood as an expression of wider contestation of issues through migration policy-making.

returning to Catalonia’ (Llei d’acollida de les persones immigrades i retornades a Catalunya) hereafter referred to as the Welcoming Law. This law, together with its set of rules, was approved in 2014 (Decree 150/2014, of November 18) and was concerned with the reception services of immigrants and those returning to Catalonia.⁷⁴ The Welcoming Law gives a legal framework and competences to foster migrants’ civic participation at the local level, especially for those municipalities with more than 20.000 inhabitants.

Third, when analysing migration policy-making in Catalonia and Spain, there are gaps between the policy discourse and the actual measures implemented when it comes to consider how integration purposes and civic and political rights interrelate.

In this respect, as Østergaard-Nielsen found when analysing citizenship models in Spanish and Catalan migration policy documents (covering the period 2005-2010), there are two main characteristics of both governmental approaches. These are, ‘first, the promotion of a civic citizenship, where migrants are encouraged to participate actively in political and social affairs; and second, that this active incorporation takes place in the local context’ (Østergaard-Nielsen, 2011, p. 26). At the same, the author also noticed that promoting a ‘localized civic membership’ when it cannot be accompanied by local voting rights is fundamentally flawed (Østergaard-Nielsen, 2011, p. 26).

Moreover, bearing in mind that for the Catalan regional government integration policies have been put into practice with a sharp focus on the consideration of language (Catalan) as a key tool towards social inclusion, there have been critical voices. Hence, some have argued that this prioritisation has been at the expense of other aspects that are related to integration, such as citizen participation, or that democratic values or equal opportunities would be expected to be shared (Pinyol-Jiménez, 2016, p. 52).

74 Besides these documents, the Catalan government has defined six plans related to migration, integration or citizenship since 1993. The last plan covers the years 2017-2020. Access to all these

plans in:

http://treballiaferssocials.gencat.cat/ca/ambits_tematics/immigracio/politiques_i_plans_dactuacio/antec edents/ [last accessed 28 February 2018]

There is one final remark necessary before proceeding to the next subsection. Recent research analysing the local management of immigration by municipalities belonging to the autonomous communities of Andalucía, Catalonia and Madrid undertaken during 2012-2013 shows a reinforcement of the autonomous communities ahead of municipalities. However, this re-autonomisation of the normative side of immigration policy, together with the economic crisis and the decline of migrant in-flows, has been matched by a more peripheral position of immigration management within the administrative structures dedicated to immigration of autonomous communities such as Catalonia (Treviño and González Ferrer, 2016, p. 80). In accepting this finding, and examining these developments from a temporal perspective, it needs to be understood that the fieldwork of this present research took place during a period in which there was a transition of roles in this area. In particular, the leadership at municipal level that had been crucial was loosing strength when compared to other recent periods. The next two subsections deal with the main actors and motivations of co-development understood as a public policy in Catalonia.

4.1.2 Measuring development policy-making: the Golden age of