The Spanish government plans to offer unemployed immigrants advance payment of their benefits if they return to their countries of origin — and agree to stay there for at least three years.
The Spanish labor ministry said 100,000 immigrants from 19 countries would be eligible to receive the payout but it expects only between 10 percent and 20 percent to agree to the trade-off. The government is expected to approve the plan in September.
Spain’s immigrant population has swelled to roughly 10 percent of the population in the past decade as builders and developers offered seemingly endless work opportunities. But with the international economy flagging and Spain’s construction boom going bust, the immigrants are expected to be among the hardest hit.
Immigrant rights groups have reacted coolly to the scheme.
“We are talking not just about workers but about human beings,” Alvaro Zuleta, president of the Colombian group Aculco, said. “We need to make sure that the immigrant who agrees to return finds the right conditions to restart his life.”
However, he expected some Colombian immigrants, who earn between 750 euros (US$1,200) and 1,500 euros a month, to agree to the deal if the economic crisis worsened.
As many as 165,000 immigrants from outside the EU are unemployed, but not all would be eligible for the deal because their home countries do not have reciprocal agreements with Spain.
Unemployed workers receive about 70 percent of their salary for the first six months without a job, then up to 60 percent for up to two years. Under the proposed deal, workers would receive 40 percent of that money while in Spain and 60 percent on arrival in their home countries. They would then have priority in obtaining working papers if they reapplied to return to Spain after five years.
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
At first, Francis Ari Sture thought a human was trying to shove him down the steep Norwegian mountainside. Then he saw the golden eagle land. “We are staring at each other for, maybe, a whole minute,” Sture said on Monday. “I’m trying to think what’s in its mind.” The bird then attacked Sture five more times on Thursday last week, scratching and clawing the 31-year-old bicycle courier’s face and arms over 10 to 15 minutes as he sprinted down the mountain. The same eagle is believed to be responsible for attacks on three other people across a vast mountainous area of southern Norway
RSS