The Spanish government plans to change immigration law to boost the labor market. A la carte regularization according to the needs in certain professional sectors. Nearly 109,000 jobs are to be filled in Spain and hundreds of thousands of immigrants hope to obtain proper papers.
Faced with a lack of manpower, the Spanish authorities want to reconnect with à la carte immigration. In 2008, the socialist José Luis Zapatero carried out a massive regularization. This time, Pedro Sanchez takes up the idea, but more selectively, reports our correspondent in Madrid, Francois Musseau.
There is a severe shortage of manpower in services, agriculture, construction and hospitality, so he is seriously considering using three mechanisms to fill these gaps. The labor shortage also threatens multi-billion euro projects funded by the European Union to revive the Spanish economy, the hardest hit in the euro zone by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Regularize immigrants
First of all, the government wants to regularize the immigrants who are on the territory and who could occupy these functions. Then, he wants to appeal more to countries of origin, a bit like it is already the case with Morocco, whose nationals work in the strawberry fields in Andalusia. And finally, the third axis would be to allow foreign students with a residence permit to obtain a work permit.
The unions are the first to disagree with this initiative. According to them, with more than 13% unemployment, the priority should go above all through the improvement of wages and working conditions for nationals.
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