### Entry to Spain's labour market: the case of Catalonia

Having examined the economic and social processes that underpin emigration from Thiaroye-sur-Mer and Rufisque, this section focuses on another essential component of the West Africa-Europe migration regime, that of the Spanish labour market. Spain halted clandestine migration through the Strait of Gibraltar in 2003 and into its enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco during 2005. It significantly reduced illegal entries to the Canary Islands when the number of fishing boats from West Africa peaked in 2006. More recently, it was dealing with another wave of sub-Saharan migrants in Isla de Tierra, an uninhabited Spanish rock close to Melilla (El País 2012). All of these routes are dangerous and deadly, placing greater pressure on the Spanish government to block them. However, shootings of migrants who attempted to enter Ceuta and Melilla, deportations in North Africa to remote desert areas, and shipwrecks arriving in Spain's waters from as far as Guinea reveal a danger created by the EU's border regime and its clients in Africa as well as the natural hazards of desert and sea (Traoré 2007). This section focuses on the ‘successful’ migrants who bypass the deterrents, either by crossing the intercontinental boundary without documentation, or by exceeding the period or terms of legality set out in visa arrangements (see previous section).

To recap, this analysis of the migration regime is centred on clusters of migrants in particular locations, rather than a single route. My informants in the autonomous region of Catalonia started their epic journeys in numerous West African towns and villages. Most step-wise migrants' first point of arrival was in the Canary Islands or Andalusia, after which they were flown to Catalonia by the authorities, or reached it through further steps. At the end of 2008, 17.5% of the working population in this region were foreign-born, more than twice the national average (Pajares 2009, 4). Barcelona, its capital, was a well-known target for Senegalese migrants. The Wolof ‘Barça mba Barzakh!’ (Barça or the afterlife) exclamation is well-known in Dakar and is connected with local enthusiasm for the successful football team. At this time, Barcelona enjoyed a higher growth rate, at 8.4% from 2006–2007, than the Spanish average of 3.9%, and employment was also higher. However, its boom ended in the global economic downturn at the end of 2008, which caused 228,300 job losses in construction across Spain, followed by losses in industry and services, whilst agricultural jobs increased by 14,000 (EIU 2009a, 14–16). Agricultural centres in Catalonia therefore grew in importance as poles for undocumented labour.

In Barcelona, a trader from the Casamance region in the southern part of Senegal has occupied a series of buildings, periodically being moved on by the police. In 2008, he secured an apartment building with an adjoining restaurant and housed migrants from Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Equatorial Guinea and Uganda. He explained that 10 years ago, people came legally, but now most Africans he met had arrived on fishing boats. He would lend his residence papers to undocumented migrants (interviews, 17, 18, 20 August 2008). Africans, mainly from the North and West, comprise the largest immigrant population in the Catalonian provinces of Girona, Lleida and Tarragona, totalling over 11,000 people in 2008 before reducing to less than 8000 in 2011 (INE 2011). Immigrants who do not have residence papers or who have entered illegally and received expulsion orders may register on the Padrón (Municipal register). Because registered migrants were entitled to healthcare at this time, it was thought that the figures were reasonably accurate (Sandell 2006, cited in de Haas 2008, 34). A report by ACCEM (Spanish Catholic Commission on Migration), however, estimated 1500–2000 unregistered migrants in Salt, a municipality of Girona in which African telecentres, restaurants and other businesses are predominant. The overall foreign population there increased from 6.1% in 2000 to 37.5% in 2007 according to the town census. The study found that almost half of the unemployed migrant population were unregistered (Benabid 2008, 2–3). They are likely to have entered the country without detection.

One migrant from Cameroon reached Catalonia through a typical step-wise journey. It took him around five years to reach Spain, often delayed by long treks to circumvent checkpoints, or by stops in border towns where he would earn the money to pay smugglers. He passed through Chad, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, avoiding officials, working and sending remittances to pay for his mother's medication, but eventually he saved enough funds for the crammed boat journey across the Mediterranean and survived it. On arrival, as with other migrants, he was detained for 40 days, then was released and issued with a deportation order (interview, Barcelona, 26 February 2008). In another case, a groundnut farmer from Gambia was driven to migrate when his crops would not sell. He sought work in several West African countries and while working as a seaman in Senegal, he was offered a free passage to Spain from Diogué, located at the estuary of the Casamance River and close to the border with Guinea-Bissau. Boat migrations from Casamance increased when patrols were intensified around the Dakar region in 2006. When asked whether he felt danger on the boat, he explained: A French trawler escorted us for around two days, giving us food to prevent us from being detained in Morocco. They decided they can't leave us in the sea to die and they can't let us go to jail in Morocco. They brought us near to the Spanish coast and called the Spanish authorities. (Interview, Barcelona, 25 February 2008)

This kind of exceptional fortune echoes in other migrants' histories. One Gambian university tutor had been placed under intense surveillance by the government, eventually setting off in haste on a step-wise journey that incorporated rural work. Eventually reaching Morocco, he received help from soldiers in Tanger when he was able to offer translation skills. He explained: ‘They needed to communicate with some of the people there, and I could speak for them… so actually my knowledge paid off the villains!’ (interview, Salt, Girona, 23 February 2008). Once in Spain, the reliance on chance continues. A woman from Edo State in Nigeria explained her arrival in Gran Canaria: I came here through Libya. Libya through Algeria. Algeria through Morocco. I came through the ‘patera’ [small boat], in the sea, in 2001. The journey almost took me one year on the road. When I came here I was talking to the police and they interviewed me. They separated everything when we were in Las Palmas; after, they let all of us come, but deported some people. It depends on luck. (Interview, Salt, Girona, 23 February 2008)

In spite of having visible and notorious anti-immigration controls, Spain's economic and social conditions have ‘activated’ its inequality with sending countries, encouraging migrants to take the risk of entering (Sassen 1999, 136–137). They have moved independently through a ‘chain of work’, ‘a job network that enables people to circulate from a more peripheral area to one that is less so’, producing goods and services in a similar pattern to commodity chains; also resembling the ‘hopping’ of capital (Martínez Veiga 1999, 110; Ferguson 2007, 38). The ports and transit towns in West and North Africa offer areas to exchange information, seek work, pool resources and sometimes secure the onward journey to Spain, and then Spain's agricultural and industrial centres continue this pattern within an unfree labour regime.

Alternatively, the pattern begins in Spain. A Nigerian migrant living in Salt, Girona, had obtained a three-month visa in Lagos and flew to Spain with his brother in November 2005. He worked in a telecentre in Salt for five months, which was owned by an associate, then lost his legal status. He had to seek work with an agent and entered into informal agricultural work (interview, Salt, 23 February 2008). Documented workers would earn €6 or €7 per hour, but those without papers would earn €4 after the agent had taken a cut.