Authorities “on guard” against illegal arrivals

PALMA
THE Spanish Government has said that at “no moment has it dropped its guard” in relation to the arrival of boats containing illegal immigrants off the coast of Majorca, especially in the south and southeast of the island.

The Government's representative in the Balearics, Ramón Socias, added that in the case of detection systems failing, every effort would be made “to seize all those who entered on to Spanish soil in an illegal fashion”.

Socias made his remarks shortly after a new study found that there are now two million Spanish homes where at least one resident is foreign born.
Of these, one million have no Spanish-born residents at all.
The study carried out by the National Institute for Statistics (INE) found that 25 percent of married immigrants living in the country have a Spanish-born husband or wife. And of the 750'000 children of immigrants resident in Spain, 86 percent live in their country of origin.

The National Survey of Immigrants was carried out by the INE for the first time last year. In total, 15'500 immigrants of different nationalities were interviewed.

According to the study's preliminary results, there are 2.16 million homes in which at least one member, over the age of 16, has been born outside of Spain.

These break down into 1.02 million homes formed solely of immigrants and 1.14 million composed of immigrants and non-immigrants.

RACIAL TENSION
Some 64.9 percent of immigrants were working in their country of origin before they came to Spain, the study found.
Some eight out of 10 immigrants live in Spain separated from their children.
The study found that of those immigrants who join the Spanish armed forces, about half leave shortly afterwards.
About 73 percent of those employed in the construction sector stay in their job. Only in the administrative sector (84.3 percent) and the technical and professional sector (84.3) do immigrants remain in their jobs longer.

The Spanish government also repeated its concerns over the rising number of racially motivated incidents.
Last week in Alcudia, a number of shops tried to ban Romanians from their premises after an alleged wave of robberies and this week, Spain has been shocked by a video posted on the Internet of a group of drunken teenagers verbally abusing and threatening an elderly Chinese couple at their store in Barcelona.

The security services have revealed that such racially incited incidents are becoming increasingly common across the country and that they are going to need greater resources and specially trained personnel to respond to the situation.