daniel He has been in Spain for 17 years since he was 21. But even so, it doesn’t seem like it’s rooted enough to get paperwork. She came from Venezuela in 2005, months after the last mass reorganization of immigrants in our country. They told him not to go; “It could be someone else, go stay,” she recalls.
But there was no other. There were requirements for those who came out of there. “social roots”, the gateway to documents for many irregular migrants in Spain. Entry into a system with lionfish requirements for many, but this can be summed up in two ways: first, to show that you have been residing in Spain for three years; secondly, a one-year full-time contract, something not many Spaniards have.
In practice, this means two things. First, throwing himself into a bad economy and administrative disorder for three years on miserable salaries, marathon workdays (house cleaning, on site or in the field) and without allowing a police officer to identify you and initiate a deportation order from the country. Second, you have to make a contract no matter what. And sometimes it is not possible.
Daniela (fictional name) admits to paying all her Social Security twice for a year to gain social roots. The second was in 2016. She worked to take care of the children of affluent, upper-class families in urbanization, but not wanting to make mistakes. agreement in conditions.
He finally managed to come to an agreement with his family. Even if he only went to work in the afternoons, he would sign a full-time one-year contract… one big but: pay in full Social Security. This is how he acquired social roots the second time around. The first was doing the same thing back in 2010 but working “on its own”. web page programmer. He earned less than 300 euros for a full day on this last job. One-year rooting price.
Between one arrangement and the other, he had a season living in Venezuela that bailed him out of his papers. Because another way to lose them is to spend more than 6 months abroad. Even if you’ve lived here for 17 years. He picked up the papers again after the second try… and lost again because it was missing during the pandemic. 16 quote days to renew documents.
Currently, Daniela has a deportation order to Venezuela, although she has spent almost half of her life in Spain. “They want to send me to a country I hardly know (I came to Spain at 21 and was here 17). My family is no longer here, I have no friends, I have nothing there anymore. They want me to root in this country, I think I have time for this at 17 ” he complains.
While she doesn’t brag about it, Daniela assures that paying Social Security for a year is one of the most common ways immigrants have to go through to get their documents. “We women do housework like what happened to me, but it’s even harder for men because they are at work or orange. When they fall off the pier, the first thing they say is ‘you can’t complain about us because if you go to the police station, they will ask for your documents and send them back to your country’. We think we’re a little bit better in the bad,” he observes.
fear of consequences
Although the name is fictitious so as not to reveal her identity, Daniela says the interview scares her. She feels that she may be closing a door (a door, after all) for those who come. “Yes it is me comrades and I began to condemn them with their names and surnames. employers In the end, nobody wants to do that. Personally, we would have done well, but we would have closed access to those who came after us to get the documents,” he explains.
Also, as he clarified, “many employers also risk it and come to an agreement to do you a favor.” And the “most legit” in the range of possibilities. “There are girls who devote themselves with interest to cheating on men. or marrying people much older than they are. At least I had a signed contract, I showed I was integrated, and I gave my workforce,” he says.
In this immigrant’s opinion, the requirements for access to documents “bullshit“and for many people, through channels established by law, I sew a path that is sometimes insurmountable. “For most of my life, I have worked with or without social security payments to myself. It was either looking for roots or without it. documents, respectively. but you have to live your life. And I didn’t even get a single help from the bus. These are processes that make the job very difficult,” says Daniela.