El Ejido is at the center of the worst racial violence to afflict Spain in decades. The pressures have been building ever since farm technology and imported cheap labor transformed a stretch of the Costa del Sol into a $2.4 billion-a-year market garden. Three murders over the past month–all blamed on Moroccans–ignited public protests by Spaniards. Last week the situation grew even more tense. Greenhouse operators fired Moroccan workers en masse, 500 antiriot police moved into El Ejido and dozens of workers fled Spain. To end a weeklong strike, Madrid promised reparations for damage to Moroccans’ property. It also said it would legalize the status of 5,000 immigrants and call in the Red Cross to help the homeless.
Since joining the European Union in 1986, Spain’s once tiny immigrant pop-ulation has grown dramatically. Some 200,000 “economic” migrants have entered Spain in the 1990s, a tenfold increase over previous levels, and those are only the legal immigrants. In places like Almeria, the wave of North Africans has unnerved conservative, Roman Catholic Spaniards. “These [Moroccan] people are our religious enemies,” said a policeman in El Ejido last week. “They are all Muslims.” Yet the pressures that led to the tumult in Almeria are not going away. With an aging population and a declining birthrate, Spain will need some 12 million foreign workers to sustain economic growth over the next 50 years, according to the government. But last week the signs of tolerance in El Ejido were decidedly mixed. Mayor Juan Enciso finally agreed to house the immigrants in prefab buildings next to the greenhouses–ensuring that the Moroccans would be kept as far as possible from the town center.
