The European Union takes its first digital steps to facilitate the inclusion of immigrants. Brussels has decided to finance the MICADO project with 4.3 million euros, the objective of which is to create a mobile application that allows a newcomer to community territory to obtain information to join the regular social systems, in the field of housing, education, medical care or work. The program, in which 15 local entities, universities and technology companies participate, seeks to "put in contact the authorities and administrations and civil society and local communities with asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants" and "allow communication, essential orientation and navigation within their new living environments ”, according to the project's website.
The application will offer this information in the main native languages of the migrants in a comfortable and interactive way, explains the professor of the Rey Juan Carlos University, José María Álvarez Monzoncillo, one of the promoters of the project. "It does not make sense to simply upload a PDF file with the measurements collected in an official gazette, that would be impractical and would not be of much use." In this first phase - in addition to the official languages of the EU - Arabic, Chinese and English have been chosen. For this, both the nationalities of the migrants in each of the regions participating in the pilot, as well as the perceived difficulties in their learning, have been taken into account.
In Madrid, the most present foreign nationalities are Romanians (18.2% of the total), Moroccans (9%), Chinese (7%), Colombians (4%) and Venezuelans (5.4%), according to data from the Community. “Romanian has great similarities with Spanish so that people from Romania usually experience less difficulty in learning Spanish quickly. For this reason, the pilot has focused on populations of Moroccan and Chinese origin who express more difficulties, ”explain sources from the promoters of the project.
Behind this program are five local entities (the Community of Madrid, the cities of Antwerp, Vienna, Bologna and Hamburg); five universities, one for each of these entities (in Spain it is the Rey Juan Carlos University) plus the Technical University of Vienna; five organizations such as the Professional Association of Political Scientists and Sociologists of the Community of Madrid, the Hamburg Institute of International Economics or the Belgian technological organization Digipolis, among others; and a technology partner: the Austrian company Synyo. The European Commission gave the project the highest rating in 2019.
Development, however, is not proving easy. "We have encountered numerous obstacles," explains Álvarez Mozoncillo. First of all, we had to define what we considered an immigrant, to whom the application would be directed ”. In addition, they have run into the dispersion of competences, which vary according to the different countries, "and are neither coordinated nor centralized". There have also been technical problems, especially in the organization of databases and the programming languages on which they are built. "One city council has them in PDF, another in Excel sheets ...", he says.
Finally, there is data protection. MICADO will collect personal data of immigrants such as "personal and biographical background of immigrants (education, professional skills, etc.)" and make them accessible to public authorities for the provision of specific integration measures. This compilation, ensures the consortium, will be done "in a consensual manner", and for this it must take into account not only community regulations (especially the General Data Protection Regulation (
RGDP
), but also local laws.
Currently 23 million people from non-EU countries live in the European Union, 5.1% of the 447.3 million citizens, according to Eurostat data. In Spain this figure rises to 5.8 million, of which 3.5 million are in a free movement regime. The most common nationality is Romanian, with just over a million people, followed by Moroccan (811,530) and British (381,448). The covid caused that in 2019 the irregular entry of people into the EU was limited to 124,000, the lowest figure since 2013, according to Frontex data. The decline in entries through the eastern and western Mediterranean contrasts with the sharp increase in the so-called Canarian route, through which more than 22,000 people entered in 2019, three times more than the previous year. It was not, however, the main route of entry,given that 27,000 immigrants entered the Balkans, an increase of 78%.
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