Labor pains: Spain's migrant-worker problem.

It's difficult being a foreigner in Spain these days. The government labels you illegal three months after you arrive. Residency and work permits are nearly impossible to obtain. You can't legally rent an apartment. And that's if, like me, you're an American. If you're an immigrant from a poor country, life can be much grimmer.

Consider Spain's detention center in the Canary Islands, where thousands of African migrants wash up each year in small wooden boats after braving the Atlantic journey from the Western Sahara. Known as "Guantanamo 2," the former airport-cargo terminal where the migrants are processed has been condemned by Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders for its inhumane treatment of detainees. Ill and dehydrated, the migrants are typically caged in overcrowded and unsanitary cells for up to forty days without access to a phone, lawyer, or family members. "It's a prison," a migrant told Human Rights Watch upon his release in 2001. "I didn't see the sun for three weeks."

More than sixteen thousand sub-Saharan migrants have passed through the detainment camp in the last four years. They are from countries like Liberia, Ghana, and Ivory Coast. Some of them are deported. Those who, for various reasons, aren't deported are flown to mainland Spain and given expulsion orders. Predictably, many do not leave, but remain in Spain illegally, without residency papers or work permits, documents they need to legally apply for a job. This has contributed to a growing crisis in Spain: out of the country's 2.5 million immigrants, more than 1 million are here illegally.

In August, Spain's new Socialist Party government announced that immigrants with work contracts would be offered residency papers--making them legal, or "regularized." (Employers are required by law to offer contracts to their workers.) This is a good first step toward addressing the immigration crisis, but more reforms are needed. Only a small number of immigrants hold work contracts, so the proposed reform will not help thousands of foreigners. In the coming months, the new administration will have to find a middle ground between the harsh immigration laws that have been employed thus far, and looser regulations that might attract more immigrants than Spain can handle. Whatever road the government chooses, it will have implications for the rest of Europe: one-quarter of all immigrants to the European Union arrive via Spain.

Spain has traditionally been a country of emigrants, not immigrants. Apart from distinct regional cultures in Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque country, Spain was more or less homogenous until the 1960s, when Muslims started arriving from Africa and the Middle East. The first to come were students from Syria and Egypt, then later Moroccans who settled into their own communities. (Illegal immigration of Moroccans across the Straits of Gibraltar has been a major problem in the last decade.) A larger boom began in the 1990s, when Spain's growing economy attracted immigrants from all over the world. Between 1996 and 2000, the foreign population quadrupled to one million.

Although Moroccans still represent the largest immigrant group--about four hundred thousand live here legally, and at least as many are without residency papers--the number of immigrants from Pakistan, China, and Eastern Europe is rising fast. So is the number from Latin America. Nearly two-fifths of Spain's foreign residents come from the Latin diaspora--mostly from Ecuador and Colombia, but also from Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil. (The number of women and youth in particular has jumped.) Many have taken jobs in the booming service and tourism industries, opening Internet shops, restaurants, and other small businesses. In June, the International Organization for Migration reported that last year Latin Americans living in Spain sent more than $1 billion to their home countries. That's half the money sent home by Latin Americans from across Europe, and more than double the amount per person sent home by Latin Americans living in the United States.

Spain's new racial mix was particularly noticeable last March when train bombings in Madrid killed 191 people, 47 of whom were foreigners from more than a dozen different countries. Some Spaniards have grumbled about the influx of immigrants, but the fact is that Spain--and Europe overall--needs them now more than ever. Spain had a baby boom (about seven hundred thousand births per year) that started in 1976, the year after Franco died, but according to a recent study by the UN, those numbers have dropped to four hundred thousand births per year. Spain's working-age population will start shrinking by 2010, which means that more immigrants will be needed to fill low-paying jobs.

The former president, Jose Maria Aznar, took a hard-line stance on the immigration question, tightening laws and downsizing state immigration offices. The new president, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has promised to extend health care, education, and social services for everyone, whether they're legal or not. Zapatero has also resuscitated the moribund National Employment Institute and employed 250 people to help deal with thousands of backed-up requests for papers. He has, however, refused to offer residency papers to all illegal immigrants who ask for them. There is a fear that if papers were distributed indiscriminately, even more immigrants will flood Spain's shores.

The August proposal, then, appears to be a compromise. It rewards those who work within the system by obtaining work contracts, while refraining from offering residency to all illegal immigrants. The new plan also offers residency papers to those who report on employers who hire workers illegally. This serves two purposes: it ferrets out employers who are breaking the law and, in the process, grants papers to some immigrants without work contracts. It's a clever idea on the surface, but seems unlikely to be very effective. Workers tend to be loyal to the people who gave them their job. More problematic, very few immigrants have work permits, the government-issued documents they need to apply for a job. Without a work permit, an employer cannot offer them a work contract. And without a contract, they cannot receive residency papers. It's a serious Catch-22.

A period of economic prosperity has in some ways allowed Spain to overlook its immigrant crisis. But if more jobs disappear--Spain currently has the second-highest unemployment rate in Western Europe--the Spanish people may turn against those they call los sin papeles (people without papers). At the same time, if hundreds of thousands of immigrants are forced to wait months or years for work or residency papers, Spain could be facing a dangerous showdown--one that pits a growing class of disenfranchised foreigners against what Merrill Lynch reports is the third-fastest growing country of "high-net-worth individuals" in the world.

Spain wasn't in the headlines much before the March 11 attacks and the Socialists' victory three days later. Now, the feeling here is that every decision counts--from the government's reforms on education and domestic-abuse laws to debates about whether Catalan should be considered an official European language. Finding not just immediate remedies but long-term solutions to the immigration crisis must also become a priority; the problem has been lying dormant for too long.

Michael Levitin is a freelance journalist living in Barcelona, Spain.