Advent of Romanian migrants changes small town in Spain
COSLADA, Spain – The odd thing about Coslada, a shabby dormitory town outside Madrid, is not that there are so many Romanians – there are plenty of them elsewhere in Spain. It’s that so many of its growing Romanian community are Seventh Day Adventists. Past migration patterns tend to predict future movements, sociologists say, and the thousands of Romanian Adventists thriving on the Castilian Plain neatly illustrate migrants’ tendency to go to places where they already know someone. Romanians also like to come here because their language has similar roots to Spanish, and efforts by Spain to curb the movement of labor when Romania joins the European Union on January 1 may not do much to deter new arrivals. «In the beginning, not so many people came, perhaps 50 or 100, but then, bit by bit, others came too, as they all knew each other,» said Bosnea Viorica, an Adventist who recently arrived in Spain and now works as a nanny. In three or four years, Coslada has been transformed by the arrival of 12,000 Romanians, who now make up a seventh of its population, bringing with them Romanian restaurants, butchers’ shops, bakeries and an Adventist church. About half are Adventists, even though the denomination is a tiny minority in Romania. With Romania and Bulgaria joining the European Union on Monday, fears that unmanageable numbers of would-be nannies and builders would follow Viorica’s lead spurred the Spanish government to impose a two-year moratorium on free movement of labor. Most other older and richer EU states, except for Sweden and Finland, have imposed similar restrictions. At least 300,000 Romanians have arrived in Spain over the past few years, adding to a wave of migration that has pushed the number of foreign residents up to 9 percent of the population in a country largely homogenous until the 1990s. Latin roots The Romanian language’s Latin roots make it easy to learn Spanish, but a big reason many go to Spain and not elsewhere is that so many are already here, said Rickard Sandell, immigration analyst at think tank Real Instituto Elcano. «Migration is heavily network-dependent,» he said, adding that it was unclear whether the government’s attempt to restrict the labor flow will make much of a difference as Romanians do not need visas to enter the country: «If they want to come here and work irregularly, they’ll still be able to do that, as they did before.» Spain’s buzzing economy means black-market work, as a construction worker or as a maid, is easy to find. Romania’s government says its citizens will not flood Western job markets, arguing they are too attached to home and family. But 2.5 million Romanians have already emigrated and the Open Society Foundation estimates a further 11 percent aged 18 to 59 would like to go in the next year. Despite Spain’s short history of immigration, the issue provokes little of the anguished public debate familiar in other European countries, and a senior government adviser recently said Spain had room for another 20 million people. «Spain has been a model country, with a very open attitude to immigration, maybe because of the fact immigration is very new here,» said Miguel Fonda Stefanescu, president of the Federation of Romanian Immigration Associations. The government sees immigration as a prime factor in Spain’s decade-long economic boom. But it knows the labor market’s appetite is not limitless, and frets about immigration’s rise to the top of Spanish voters’ lists of worries in opinion polls. Locals in Coslada do not speak of problems with incomers, although a volunteer for a group working with migrants remembers an anti-immigrant demonstration several years ago and is worried by their tendency to keep to themselves. «We’re trying to build bridges between Spanish people and Romanians, because there’s often little contact,» said Agustin Gonzalez of the Obatala Association, speaking next to a building bristling with satellite receivers for Romanian TV.
