Refugees Welcome? – Madrid’s Embarrassment
In brief: The “Refugees Welcome” sign represents the apparent power struggle between Madrid’s Mayor Manuela Carmena and Spain’s central government in their different policies concerning asylum seekers, as well as ironically representing Spain’s little effort in welcoming refugees into the country.
On my first day in Madrid, I decided to take a walk to get a better understanding of my new home. I walked down Castellana until I reached the plaza Cibeles. At the plaza, I noticed the enormous “Refugees Welcome” sign. This was September of 2015 and the European Union faced an enormous wave of refugees and migrants fleeing conflicts and economic underdevelopment from Afghanistan to Syria. Like most progressives, I looked at the sign with an immense sense of respect. Welcoming and properly establishing practical methods of including refugees into a society is a duty that all moral states should abide by.
More than two years later, the sign has unfortunately become, for some, a symbol of resistance. Madrid’s government, the Ayuntamiento de Madrid, controlled by Mayor Manuela Carmena, has called for more refugees to be taken in. However, this puts her at odds with Spain’s central government, who prefer a more restrictive approach to an influx of refugees.
For others, including me, the sign has become a symbol of embarrassment. Two weeks before starting my second year, I had gone to Sweden to visit a friend. Sweden, which is a much more homogenous society than Spain, welcomed over 70,000 refugees in 2015, while other European states such as Italy took over 100,000 and Germany more than 750,000. While in Sweden, I did not see “refugees welcome” signs, instead I saw a real life application of this policy. Spain on the other hand took in just over 6,000 refugees, accounting for 1.3% of total EU arrivals in 2016. Does the Madrid town hall really deserve to have a sign saying “Refugees Welcome”, when the government has done so little? The sign is very misleading; refugees are not welcome in Spain. The sign gives the citizens of Madrid and visitors the impression that the refugees are welcome, yet this is statistically not correct. In 2015, Spain maintained an average of rejecting 70% of its asylum applicants, forcing asylum seekers to be shipped back to places as dangerous as Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya.
It was only 80 years ago, that the Spanish Civil War brought chaos to Spanish society. During the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Spanish citizens were refugees as well. In fact, France took in over 500,000 Spanish refugees. The Spanish government should therefore have a much more profound understanding of how desperate the individuals are who are trying to reach Europe. The reluctance of the Spanish government to examine its own history, represents an unfortunate misunderstanding of the current migration situation.
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