Some sort of explanation about my views on Spain/Italy/France vs immigration...
Spain's case is a very strange one, of course. From 2000 to 2007 Spain was the leading immigration country in the world - its unsustainable construction-led boom acted as a powerful magnet, as shown by its dramatic population increase. It had been mired below 40 million and now is almost 47 million. So we have a sizeable immigrant population. Top three incoming countries: Ecuador, Morocco, Romania, plus of course the large number of aging expats from wealthy European Union countries. The bottom fell out of the economy in 2008 and unemployment has skyrocketed, but there have just been a few thousands returning home, and most importantly there have been no major racial rows. The social atmosphere remains peaceful and crime is a relatively minor problem.
Possibly the recent beginning of the phenomenon has helped to avoid some of the causes of unrest elsewhere - particularly, there are no ghastly suburban ghettoes here as in the French 'banlieues'. There are plenty of poor neighborhoods, but they are basically integrated, with poor Spaniards and poor foreigners facing this difficult world shoulder to shoulder with not much reciprocal animosity. There is no significant far-right political party stoking xenophobia. And no politician would dream of using the incendiary language Silvio Berlusconi indulges in in Italy.
There are reasons in Spain's past, ancient and more recent, which partly explain why, besides 200 morons who yell epithets at black soccer players in a few stadiums (a fact much ballyhooed by the British press but which the black athletes I know here completely disregard), tolerance is relatively high.
Spain's colonial past, often described in dire terms by Anglo-Saxon commentators and historians, is no doubt full of violence, injustice, greed, pillaging and religious fanaticism. But it had some redeeming factors. Racial considerations were a very minor component of Iberian colonial philosophies (I include Portugal here: same background); certainly much lesser than religious zeal. On the one part, Iberia is the most ethnically mixed part of western Europe (Iberians, Phoenicians, Celts, Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Arabs, Berbers...), and in 1492 was just coming out of an eight-century occupation by Muslim Arabs. For a long time there were blond Muslims and dark-skinned Christians in Spain, and in the end what counted was if you ate pork and drank wine or not, not your complexion.
In their vast colonies in Asia, Africa and the Americas, Spain and Portugal fostered basically mixed-race populations: a new, partly European, partly local breed developed from Lima to Goa. This never happened in the British Empire, which strenuously kept races apart.
As a consequence, Columbus Day is known as Da de la Raza in Hispanic countries. What race? Any color. The Spanish-speaking race, that's all.
Only the old and deep opposition to Islam in Spain could ignite a modern-day ethnic clash here, considering that there are a couple of million of North Africans living in Spain now. But a generalized rejection of the old-time Catholic fanaticism has been one of the obvious components of the socio-political backlash after the end of Francoism, and that plays a role in reducing that threat. It's not defused because prejudice remains on both sides - even more so amid the few radical Islamists than among the tiny group of Christian fundamentalists. But we're talking small minorities here.
Two final factors:
One: the many Latin American immigrants speak the language from day one; the Romanians easily learn Spanish in six months; the Moroccans and Algerians all speak French, some Spanish, and anyhow have been crossing this country toward northern Europe for years, so they too become sufficiently proficient in a short time. Therefore, Spain has the fastest rate of cultural assimilation anywhere in Europe.
Two: a few million Spaniards were immigrants themselves in other countries just a couple of decades ago. In a generation, this country has gone from exporting millions of poor people to importing millions of poor people. (We might see the pendulum swing once again in the opposite direction in our lifetime, the way Spain's government is attacking the world crisis...) They know what it was like to be away from everything, almost defenseless and desperate. It's this generation of Spaniards which I think is playing a large role in showing that the plight of the foreigner is understood here.
