Insiders or outsiders? Argentinean immigrants in Spain

Abstract

Immigration and citizenship laws mark the boundaries of the imagined community that is the nation. However, these boundaries are not stable constructs: quite the contrary, they are sites of constant struggle and change. This paper discusses the evolving status of Argentinean-born immigrants in Spain since 1985 in these two bodies of legislation. After a brief introduction to the history of population exchanges between Spain and Argentina throughout the twentieth century, I draw from official statistics and Spanish legislation to discuss how changes in the legislation have impacted the arrival and settlement of Argentineans in Spain since 1985, when the country joined the European Union. I then analyse material gathered in more than 30 in-depth interviews conducted in the fall of 2006 and explore respondents' efforts to preserve the political privileges that Argentineans traditionally enjoyed in Spanish immigration and citizenship legislation. I conclude that further work is needed to understand the impact of the changes introduced in these two bodies of legislation in the face of increased immigration flows, particularly in the contexts where colonial histories and the europeanisation of national institutions collide.

Keywords:

• Spain
• Argentina
• migration
• citizenship
• borders
• law

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Professors David Ley, Dan Hiebert and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice on earlier versions of this manuscript. I am also grateful to Alex Aylett and Sarah Zell for their generous comments and editing suggestions. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the meeting of the Association of American Geographers (San Francisco, April 2007), the UCLA Graduate Conference on Migration and Race (Los Angeles, April 2007) and the Ethnicity and Democratic Governance Conference (Montreal, October 2007). Fieldwork research from which this essay draws from was founded by way of a University Graduate Fellowship, University of British Columbia. Any errors of omissions are entirely my responsibility.

Notes

1. Among the most compelling arguments are those made by feminist political geographers and scholars in postcolonial studies. See for example the collection edited by Staeheli et al. (2004), Luibheid (2005) or McClintock (1995).

2. A number of scholars have noted that immigration and nationality laws are key sites for the study of national projects, marking the limit between those who are included in the nation and those who are excluded from it, defining the parameters for the selectivity of foreigners, and even working as population policies (Favell 2001, Ley and Hiebert 2001, Gil Araujo 2006b).

3. According to the 2008 electoral census, there were 264,952 Spaniards registered in Argentinean consulates. The second biggest Spanish community abroad was in France with 160,631 members (Oficina del Censo Electoral 2008).

4. For a discussion on the differential treatment of immigrants from the Global South and from Europe, see for example de Lucas (1999) or Santamaría (2002).

5. Prior to the change in the Spanish nationality laws in June 2007, only the daughters and sons of Spanish-born citizens who had not come of age could obtain Spanish citizenship through the ius soli option. On the other hand, Italian citizenship can be obtained by up to fourth generation descendants of Italian citizens, provided that the process starts with the person closest to the Italian-born emigrant.

6. Sephardic Jews are a subgroup of the Jewish family. They were originally from the Iberian Peninsula, and had to leave Spain or convert to Catholicism under the rule of the Catholic Isabel de Castilla y Fernando de Aragon after 1492. In 1497, they were also expelled from Portugal.

7. This respondent is referring to the food that the Argentinean government sold to Spain between 1947 and 1955, at the height of the economic crisis that followed the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The supplies included wheat, corn, meat and cooking oil that the Argentinean Government agreed to sell to Franco's Government at a low price, despite the opposition of the international community. Voices against this trade warned that this was a form of support towards the dictatorial regime. International pressures and the worsening of the relationships between the Spanish and the Argentinean Governments led to a decrease in the trade after 1950 and its final cancellation in 1955 (Cisneros and Escude 2000).

8. Nuñez Seixas (2002) has argued that despite the importance given to absentee voters in Spanish electoral campaigns, the actual impact tends to be lower than expected, mainly due to lack of participation.