Escaping Dire Straits for Promise of a Better Life

Author: 
Stephanie Borkum • Special to Arab News
Publication Date: 
Mon, 2003-07-14 03:00

ANDALUSIA, 14 July 2003 — Before Promise, a 26-year-old Nigerian woman, crossed the straits of Gibraltar from Morocco in a flimsy dinghy, she carefully wrapped her mobile phone in plastic bags. This lifeline to her family who sent her to find a better life in Europe would survive the journey even if she did not — she says she cannot swim.

Almost a year later, sitting in a clean, tiled flat belonging to the Church in a small Andalusian coastal town, Promise describes how it took her three months and $7,000 to get from her home in Benin City, Nigeria to Morocco, using the well-worn smuggling chain. “I waited in Morocco for five months for the sea to calm down. In Tangiers I paid 30 euros a day to rent a room and still had to find money to eat.”

The smuggling network Promise talks about developed in direct response to the European Union’s drastic measures to seal its frontiers in 1991, when it imposed visa requirements on 110 of the world’s poorest and unstable countries. Tangiers now swarms with smugglers operating like unofficial travel agents — with strings attached. “I was told that Spain does not deport pregnant women,” says Promise bouncing her 6-month-old baby girl on her leg.

While Promise and the other women sharing the flat would not say how they lived in Morocco, one worker from the Spanish migrants’ advice network Cadiz Acoge told Arab News: “Many women are told repeatedly that their boat is not ready, that they will get arrested by the Moroccan police if they go outside of their sordid hotel room. Often the only choice they have to survive the wait is prostitution.”

In August 2002 Promise was three months pregnant. It was time for her to travel. It normally takes half an hour to cross from Tangiers to Tarifa on the ferry and costs 24 euros. Promise paid $1,500 for this last lap of the journey into Europe, risking her life with 35 others aboard a patera, a raft-like dinghy. It took all night.

The three women with whom Promise shares the flat also come from Benin City, although they did not know each other before and crossed to Spain on different pateras. They too were three months pregnant. Under Spanish law, they should have been subjected to “devolucion”, a form of immediate repatriation for entering Spain illegally. They were saved by the fact that they were pregnant. Two of the babies who have since been born in Spain have fitting names: Blessing and Gift. But the majority of their fellow passengers would not have been so lucky. “Devolucion” is used mainly for Moroccans who make up the largest numbers of migrants using the pateras. “Moroccans get taken straight to the port at Algeciras and put on a ferry back to Morocco, they don’t even get a chance to have a shower and wash the sand off from the beach,” said Victor, a volunteer worker from the Tarifa-based Asociacion Pro Derechos Humanos.

As summer comes around again, Promise’s story is being repeated by other young men and women. The warm weather and calm seas bring the start of both the tourist and the smuggling season. While the local bus stations fill up with foreigners and their rucksacks, luggage-less migrants, recently arrived off pateras, fishing boats and lorries, come down from the hills, out of hiding. Their aim is to get out of the area to disappear into the pool of migrant labor and the submerged Spanish economy: Agriculture makes up 30 percent of Southern Spain’s economy and thrives on cheap undeclared labor. But the National Police are at the local bus stations checking departures and the Civil Guard search lorries in the port at Algeciras and along the Malaga road.

The European Union spends millions of Euros on what it knows to be a futile attempt to keep migrants out. Cutting-edge technology like night vision cameras, heart beat sensors and gamma scanners to detect human presence in lorries and containers, combined with low-tech sniffer dogs and barbed wire fencing, do nothing to deter people from making the journey to Europe. It just decreases their chances of survival.

Spain’s militarized Southern coastline provides a grim example. The EU subsidises a radar system, a helicopter and a warship to control 115 kilometers of coast, the easiest part to cross as it is only 12 miles from Morocco. So people have to take a more circuitous and dangerous route. The consequences lie in the cemetery at Tarifa. A cordoned-off piece of land marks the spot where nameless bodies washed up on the Costa de La Luz are buried. “The Straits of Gibraltar are becoming the mass grave of Europe,” said Victor from Asociacion Pro Derechos Humanos.

This year Spain has earmarked a further 27.3 million euros to expand by 2005 the External Surveillance System (SIVE) to the whole of the Andalusian coast and to the Canary Islands, another point of entry for migrants. One week before the local elections in May, Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar announced tough new reforms to the Ley de Extranjeria (Spain’s Immigration Law), the fourth change in less than 3 years. “I don’t want Spain to fill up with illegal immigrants,” he said, perfectly in tune with the tone of other EU leaders.

In June, the European Council at Thessaloniki, Greece, reiterated its determination to combat illegal immigration by sealing its borders and repatriating those who get through. These words were backed up by large budgets to set up a visa database linking consulates abroad to the system. This is in addition to the Schengen Information System, (SIS) where the details of illegal immigrants including failed asylum seekers are placed so that they cannot try and enter Europe again, at least not legally.

Aznar, like his European counterparts, wants to put an end to human anomalies like Promise. After almost a year in Spain she still has no legal status but is hopeful that she will be given a one year temporary residence and work permit, on the basis of exceptional circumstances. This expectation, that eventually Spain will regularize the status of someone who entered Spain illegally, is what Aznar intends to stamp out. Like all the other European leaders he sees this possibility as a “pull factor”.

The old disused prison in La Pineda district, Algeciras, is being revamped. It will be used as a detention center for up to 250 people. One of the new proposed reforms to the Ley de Extranjeria is to extend the 72 hours time limit a migrant.

What are the prospects for Promise, the other women and their babies? From being the better-off minority in their own country they are on the bottom of the pile in Europe. “We will do any work,” says Promise. “We’re beggars and beggars can’t be choosers.”

Once their papers come, they need to find an employer who will employ them legally. If not, within a year they will join the permanently illegal migrant population, always looking over their shoulder to avoid arrest and expulsion.

Spain and the other EU countries have practically closed down all legal ways of migration into Europe. The resulting increase in illegal immigration and people smuggling is of the EU’s own making.

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