Friday, September 23, 2005

Spain builds own Berlin Wall to stop immigrants

Spain builds own Berlin Wall to stop immigrants

Spain announces it is to make its frontier fence with Morocco as high as the Berlin Wall after 12 men are badly injured trying to get across existing fences into Melilla. In all 70 tried to break through the three metre-high fences which are topped with row upon row of barbed wire. On 28 August, Joseph Abunaw, a 17-year-old from Cameroon, died in controversial circumstances after another mass wave of illegal immigrants stormed the fences.


Spain heightens fence at African enclave

Spanish authorities are rushing to double the height of a fence surrounding the north African enclave of Melilla after a dozen more immigrants were injured in a battle with police as they tried to find a way on to European soil. The injuries followed the deaths of at least three immigrants over the past three weeks during mass attempts to storm the frontier that have ended in clashes with both Spanish police and their Moroccan counterparts on the other side of Melilla's border. Immigrants are using ladders and what one official called "military tactics" in their increasingly desperate attempts to get through the barrier erected around what is, in effect, a land frontier between the European Union and Africa. The new fence will be much higher than the Berlin Wall.

Almost one in ten in Spain now foreign

Four million foreigners now live in Spain, making up nine percent of the population. Latest figures showed that of 44.3m people living in Spain, more than four million foreigners had registered with the authorities up to the end of July. The Spanish national statistics office said between January and July, the foreign population had risen by ten percent, with 375,000 new people registering. It means that since 1998, the number of foreigners have risen from 1.6 percent of the population, or 0.63m, to nine percent, or 4m, in 2005. The biggest rise came during the first four months of the year, during a government amnesty for foreign workers which brought almost 700,000 applications for legal status, mainly from Africans and Latin Americans.

2 Comments:

At September 23, 2005 5:27 PM, Blogger John Sobieski said...

Another proof that amnesty causes increased illegal immigration. Just kick them out and no appeals.

 
At September 23, 2005 10:21 PM, Blogger Rick Darby said...

Governments never learn anything, do they? I'm sure the amnesty was sold to the Spanish ruling party by a functionary who assured him that once the border-jumpers were rewarded by taking them aboard, that would satisfy everybody and the problem would go away.

El Presidente Bush-Gonzales is aching to follow the same principle in the United States.

 

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