On the afternoon of Tuesday, April 9, Congress debated whether or not to admit for processing a Popular Legislative Initiative (IPL) aimed at massively regularizing foreigners residing in Spain. That same afternoon, Amadou, 40 years old, born in Mali, arrived in the Canary Islands by boat more than two decades ago, with more bumps than a fairground vendor and tired of fighting with bad luck, was working on a move in Madrid at around the clock. without contract. Amadou is not his real name. He fears that appearing in this report openly will further harm his already precarious condition. He doesn't want photos either.
Finally, Congress approved, with all votes in favor, except those of Vox, the initiative, which will thus continue its parliamentary journey. This does not mean that there will be an automatic and massive regularization of foreigners, like the one that, in 2005, under the government of the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, brought to light more than 580,000 foreigners who were working in the shadows. It only implies that the request is going to be discussed. Several political parties, including the PP and the PSOE, have already warned that they will include amendments that, most likely, will reduce or limit the text of the proposal, which, in principle, aims to grant documents to all foreigners living and work in Spain from November 2021. However, whatever happens, the initiative has served, at least, to remind the more than 390,000 people who, according to the promoters of the measure, meet these conditions.
Amadou, given that things do not work out, does not trust too much. But he says that who knows, because he will hold on to anything. His life in Spain is a master's degree in how to survive at the drop of a hat. And a succession of bad decisions, necessity and bureaucratic crimes that end in dead ends. He worked selling CDs at first, in 2004, but soon focused on construction. During the times of the economic bubble he used a friend's documentation (“they don't recognize us from the photo, we black people are all alike to you”) in order to work illegally in Burgos on a construction site. They caught him. They reported him. They fined him.
The crisis arrived, he returned to CDs, to distributing advertising, to selling bags, to moving, to tinkering, to loading and unloading in Mercamadrid, he worked as a cook in one restaurant, as a cleaner in another, he was denied an application temporary work permit because he had falsified his identity... In 2018 he again used the ID of another acquaintance to work on another construction site in Barcelona. With that vicarious identity he managed to earn the title of first class officer! But they caught him again. And to once again deny him a residence permit due to roots when he requested it for the second time.
He feels trapped in an absurd loop: he falsifies papers because he has no papers and they deny him the papers because he has falsified the papers. He assures that many employers would hire him tomorrow if he had permission because he is a good
ferralla
(specialist in placing the necessary iron framework of the concrete structures of buildings) and that with the correct documentation in his pocket he would earn close to 2,000 euros a month and I would stop the damn moves and the shared rooms. He says that his case is in the hands of a lawyer and that he trusts that it will be resolved in a few months and that he will finally obtain the documentation. To the question of where he has lived, he chains in response a string of places that is a way of drawing up a crazy biography: “Delicias, Vallecas Villa, Vallecas Puente, Arcentales, Valdebernardo, Atocha, Entrevías, Pavones, Villa de Vallecas again, Burgos, Puente de Vallecas again, Barcelona, Moratalaz, Rivas, Rivas Futura…”
He has never rented a house in his name. He has never returned to Mali since she left. He doesn't have anything because he doesn't like to buy things that he doesn't know where to leave. “I only have a bicycle and a refrigerator that I keep in a friend's storage room,” she says. And he adds that he feels cheated by the life he chose, and that if he could talk to the 20-year-old Amadou, he would advise him to stay in Mali. He fantasizes about having papers and earning the title of first officer again, this time with his real name. “If I had the papers, that would be easy,” he says.
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A March 2022 report from the
Por Causa
association , specialized in immigration, maintained that at the end of 2020 nearly 500,000 undocumented foreigners lived in Spain. That number has been increasing since then, according to the study. Whether this labor pool grows or decreases is directly related to the labor market. In fact, in 2013, coinciding with the economic crisis, it was almost non-existent, according to the aforementioned report. The study provides the following data: six out of every 10 irregular immigrants currently are women; seven out of 10 are Latin Americans; Only 11% comes from Africa; 27% of all this half a million people work in domestic service, and 24%, in the hospitality industry.
Zoraida's life
Nor did Zoraida Gaviria, 49, Colombian, follow the Congressional debate that April afternoon in which, in theory, part of her future in Spain was at stake. Ella Zoraida was working as an intern in a house in Madrid, and she found out about the initiative hours later, on the news. Her proposal seems fine to her, but she thinks more about others (especially the other women she knows) than about herself. Zoraida, fortunately, trusts in another solution already on track.
Owner of a restaurant in Cali, she drowned in debt and unpaid loans when the pandemic emptied the streets of customers. They threatened to evict her. “And it was my turn to close. And it got very tough in Colombia, with prices skyrocketing. There was not enough money to pay the rent,” she recalls. Her children, now older than her, aged 24 and 29, advised her to emigrate. In Spain she knew only one person: the mother-in-law of one of her children. At three in the afternoon on November 8, 2021, she landed in Madrid with 1,300 euros borrowed that she returned as soon as she passed border control. She was left with 50.
The city terrified him because of its size and its unknown. He stayed for a couple of months at his mother-in-law's house. He looked for work without success. The 50 euros lasted him those two months in which he did not spend anything other than the price of the metro or bus tickets. “Not even a little bottle of water. In the end my mother-in-law had to leave me another 10 euros.” Someone told her about a nun, Mother Pilar, in a church in Chamartín, who helped Latina immigrants. “You had to go on Tuesdays and I went. There was a lottery and, if you got your ticket, they assigned you an internship job. I was lucky. She touched me. On January 26, 2022 I started working on a house. Until today".
The Nuestra Señora del Sagrado Corazón parish, supervised by the tireless mother Pilar, connects families looking for a live-in worker and undocumented Latin American women residing in Spain. The church monitors working conditions and demands that, after three years, as required by law, immigrants can take advantage of residency permits with a contract made by the family. Zoraida has a few months left. She describes in an expressive phrase what it means to not have papers: “We are invisible.” She explains it: “You can't have a bank account, you can't rent a house, you can't return to your country for fear that they won't let you return later. "I, for example, couldn't do it when my parents died." Nor can they walk down the street without looking back or to the sides: “I always go afraid that someone will stop me, I don't go to many places for fear that the police will be there, you don't go to clubs to have fun for fear that Something happens and you are without papers. “Fear stops you from doing many things.” That is why she lives doubly locked up in the house where she works: without the possibility of looking for another job - although she assures that they treat her very well - and without being able to go out much in case she runs into trouble or the police. “You have to put up with it.”
Amadou and Zoraida, each on their own, aspire to what Daouda Sarr achieved, a Senegalese who arrived in France in 2002 at the age of 32. He went to Spain, ended up in Almería, started working in the greenhouses of El Ejido and in 2005 he benefited from the massive regularization of the Zapatero Government. He says that that turned him into a different person, that his life was different from that day on. The first thing he did with the papers in his hand was, precisely, stop putting up with it and ask for a raise. Instead of 20 euros a day he demanded 35. And they paid him. It was the first of a succession of small personal victories that will end, as Darr tells it, the day he can return to Senegal to work his own land.
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