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Abstract:
The immigration policy of the Spanish government in the last years was based on controlling the illegal immigration and the attempts to rate the migratory flow. The alarming increase of the unemployment level in Spain in the last year and the decrease with 3,9% of the level of the gross domestic income in just two years determined the Spanish state to invoke "safeguard clause" in the area of free movement of workers. Thus the European Commission approved on August 11th 2011 the restriction of the Romanian workers access until December 31st 2012.
Key words: immigration policy, Spain, free movement of workers, safeguard clause
Spain's General policy regarding immigration
For many years the massive entry of immigrants on the Spanish labour market, especially in unqualified work places like agriculture, hotel services, constructions and domestic services happened with an insignificant intervention from the Spanish government.
In the year 1993 a quota system was created by means of which the regulation of migraiton was wanted. They tried to create some levers where the migratory flows would be aimed towards the departments that had workers deficiency. However, when implementing it, this system confronted with many difficulties from adminsitrative ones to bureaucracy and lack of coordination of the institutions. Due to the differences that were created between the quotas size and the real needs of the labour market, it got to the phenomenon of informal economy increase by the emergence of many businesses over the quota level and at the same time of many workers operating without legal forms.
In 1995 Spain had only 500,000 foreign citizens who lived on its territory, namely 2% of the total population. In comparison, at the half of the year 2011, in Spain there were 5,144,269x foreigners with registration certificate in the documents of civil status or resident card, that is to say 10.94% of the total population (47,021,031 inhabitants)2.
Until 2000, the Spanish Government did not have many initiatives in the sense of controlling the migratory flows. Still, the demand for workers in some economic departments was accompanied by a series of initiatives thought to manage the manpower migration from abroad in a more ordinate manner and at the same time it was consolidated the fight against ilegal immigration and the...