Islam versus Europe

The Socialist Zapatero has called early elections in Spain, due to be held in November. Most likely this will be the end of him. Good riddance too. According to El Mundo, the opposition Partido Popular are at 45.9% while Zapatero's party is at 32.1%.

On the question of immigration Zapatero has been one of Europe's most reckless leaders.

In 2005 the socialist (PSOE) government under Zapatero, without consulting other EU leaders, provided a three month blanket amnesty to illegal immigrants. This resulted in 578,000 being legalised. However, it also created a ‘pull-factor’ for potential immigrants and, if anything, has acted to encourage further immigration. Certainly, Spain is now perceived as a European ‘gate-way’ for immigrants (possibly a further 1 million illegal immigrants have entered Spain since the amnesty) to the considerable unease of other EU countries.

Under Zapatero, Spain has experienced a huge increase in the number of immigrants in the country and they're certainly not all polite British pensioners who pay their own bills.

Between 1998 and 2007 Spain’s population rose by an astonishing 14%. Furthermore, immigrants, according to the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (INE), now account for 9.9% of the population as of January 2007. More worrying for the Spanish is the sheer speed in which mass immigration has occurred. In 2000 there were 900,000 registered foreigners in Spain, but by 2007 this had risen to 4.4 million – a threefold increase that places Spain second only to the US in the world league for net immigration.

Of course, Spanish government figures on immigration are very conservative, as they are based only upon properly registered foreigners. Accordingly, they do not take into account the potentially huge numbers of unregistered immigrants residing in the country. As a consequence, some commentators suspect the proportion of immigrants in Spain may be closer to 12-15% of the population.

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