Today is 18 December, International Migrants Day. I'll mark transcribing a story that appears in the Amnesty International report “Stop racism, no people”.

It reads: “J. is a Bolivian citizen, has 8 years in Spain and is regularized. On Friday 2 July 2010, at about 6.30 pm, a plainclothes police officer who was conducting an identity check your partner stopped, C. -Bolivia but also regulate- in the subway station Usera (Madrid) and asked for documentation. Approximately 8 that night, J, pregnant 5 months, received a phone call from a police. He said his partner was in the police station and asked Aluche to bring him the passport. He did, but when asked to talk to C. the police officers told him they could not. He waited until 2 in the morning and went home. The next day J. returned to the station and again told him he could not see his partner and return the next day (Saturday) on visiting hours. But when the Sabbath was going to the police, received a phone call from C. “I was crying, I said 'are sending me home'. J. went to the airport of Barajas and there a policeman told him he would be expelled. “I told the police:'I have to say goodbye'. He said, 'You see many American fJlms'.

J. says that although a year has passed since the expulsion of his partner has not been able to forget that day. “The police forget that. But for him and for me it is a trauma that will never forget. Now I am alone with my son. I keep looking for work but with a child is difficult. I can not get sick, For what I do with my child?”

There you have it. Migration Happy.

For more information:

Campaign for the closure of detention centers for foreignthe

Angelika Levi: Absent/Present

Thomas McCarthy: The visitor (Click on the image to see trailer)

Explained in the previous post than looking for an image to portray the real Spain, Spain, which is neither fair nor wants to be, I stumbled upon the entry into Wikipedia  The singer Concha Buika. ¡Horror! It is already happening as we feared: the Spanish and Black Spanish starts calling them Afro-.

It published the Report on Migration 2011 International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the same day released the data means: “The Spanish think that coexist with more immigrants than there are in reality“.

Great news: in Spain are believed to be a 21% immigrant population when in reality the figure is 14%. Where does the misperception? The IOM proposes a cause: there is no common understanding about the meaning of the word “Immigration”. And here, with a candor pasmante, clarifies: the respondents and grouped under the same term for migrant workers, refugees, asylum seekers and even students or tourists.

Let me point other cause: the idea of ​​Spanishness. When we say “be Spanish” imagine a white prototype is necessarily, probably Catholic and Castilian possibly. A Sanchez Gonzalez or any. Blond or blonde as much. An old Christian, was said before.

In this prototype is difficult to include the real Spain where they live and grow several generations of Spanish who are neither blancxs, ni ni católicxs if apellidan Martínez Soria. People have come and done from here or people born here. Not that they are Spanish and they do not really; Nor is that they are “mixture” the “mestizos”, as they are also called, much less to be so terrible that has been called “immigrant second, third or fourth generation”, as if the migration of the parents is inherited by sons and daughters.

The error is in the prototype: the Perez white Catholics are perhaps most, but they are not and never were the only way of being and belonging.

More:

Report on Migration 2011 IOM
PD: Looking for photo to accompany this post I Cross with the definition given in Wikipedia Concha Buika: “Concha Buika(No Palma de Mallorca; 1972)Afro-singer.”

This, clearly, deserve another post…