In Spain, the newcomers
have been good for business

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Immigrants are not welcome anywhere. I know that, firsthand. I have emigrated three times in my life (to the United States, Puerto Rico and Spain) and on every occasion I've heard the same five complaints:

• Foreigners take jobs away from us.
• They work for lower wages, to the detriment of local workers.
• They commit most of the crimes.
• They abuse our social services disproportionately.
• They don't obey the laws or the rules of social coexistence of our community.

That's why I was delighted to hear Esperanza Aguirre, president of the Autonomous Community of Madrid (ACM), say exactly the opposite during a conference at Florida International University in Miami on April 3, at the same time that tens and hundreds of thousands of immigrants -- mostly, but not all Hispanic; both legal and illegal -- demonstrated on the streets of 20 American cities to request job and residence permits.

According to this lawyer and politician, former minister of education and former president of the Senate, the region she governs is the richest in Spain. It has achieved a per-capita income rate 30 percent higher than the median rate for the European Union, basically as a consequence of the unflagging work of the immigrants who have literally invaded the ACM in the past six years and now account for 15 percent of the population.

Thanks to the immigrants -- most of them Ecuadorans, Colombians, Argentines, Dominicans, Romanians and Arabs from North Africa -- the number of people who contribute to the social security system has increased substantially, to the benefit of a population that aged dangerously without contributing enough replacements to the labor force.

That massive presence, far from reducing the real wages of workers or increasing the number of unemployed Spaniards, has caused the opposite effect: more commercial transactions, more created and accumulated capital, more small and mid-size businesses, more job offers. While the unemployment rate in the European Union is close to 10 percent, the rate in Madrid is half that.

The tale brilliantly told by Esperanza Aguirre has been verified a thousand times. The Germans, Scots, Irish, Italians and Poles -- both Christian and Jewish -- made the United States great and powerful. The pockets of prosperity one finds in Honduras, Guayaquil or Panama cannot be explained without acknowledging the vigorous contributions of Turks and Jews. The Japanese constitute the most dynamic ethnic component of the Brazilian and Peruvian economies.

Argentina's golden age was the arrival of millions of Italians, Galicians and central European Jews anxious to rebuild their battered lives. Venezuela was among the countries with the greatest sustained development in the 20th century, when it opened its doors to Portuguese, Spanish and Italian immigration.

There is no harm in a brain or two arms that are eager to work. There is such a thing as ''the immigrant's fire.'' I have proof of that. I've seen it repeatedly. It's that almost neurotic need to create and accumulate wealth rapidly because one feels the time spent in one's country of origin has been wasted.

Of course, the countries that take in immigrants find it more convenient to welcome a neurosurgeon than a humble farm worker, but both newcomers are good business for the nation that shelters them. In his head and dextrous hands, the neurosurgeon brings an education and a practice that are worth millions of dollars, but the tomato picker also makes a net contribution to the place that accepts him. Generally, it's a young man or woman who is willing to do a job that nobody in a developed society wants to do.

The nationalist argument against the Mexicans -- who account for 80 percent of the illegal immigrants -- won't hold water. The idea that they remain emotionally linked to their country of origin and do not integrate into U.S. society is not verifiable in practice. It's quite the opposite: They work hard to integrate. The legal residents become U.S. citizens as soon as they can. Their children are U.S. citizens by birth. Their grandchildren barely speak Spanish (a pity), depriving themselves of the advantages of bilingualism and biculturalism, a duality that usually provides a richer and deeper understanding of reality.

Frankly, to not seek an intelligent and swift solution to make room for the immigrants, more than a punishment to lawbreakers, seems to me to be an absurd punitive measure against the American people themselves.

April 19, 2006

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