The most impassable border of the European territory, so it applies to Spain, is the one that you can’t see. An invisible obstacle against which thousands of people who are looking for a new life away from their homes crash every day. “It is the wall of legal engineering”, denounces the study Right to migrate and refuge: the impossible path, led by Cooperativa de Comunicació Quepo6 and made by lawyers from the University of Barcelona (UB) David Moya and Diego Boza.
A work that draws, in Spain, very different borders depending on the origin of the migrant. Regardless of whether the person leaves their home for work, economic issues or fleeing torture and death threats. A test of this different criterion with migration? The study finds that for Latin Americans, for example, everything is much easier to enter and settle in Spain than for Africans, their closest neighbours.
The former affect the number of visas granted (up to 70% of the total), while the latter do not reach 9%, by denying them and costing them much more to access this international protection for humanitarian reasons or risk to their lives in the country of origin. This study draws, without grey, a “hard and inconsistent reality of our migration and asylum model”. This “legal engineering” attempts – says David Moya, one of the authors – against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because it denies thousands of people the right to move freely around the world. They may indeed be able to leave their country, “but then they are denied entry to their chosen destination”, emphasizes this jurist.
But the most serious and worrying thing for these researchers is that so much trouble condemns the “less loved” migrants to stay in their countries, “despite the fact that they suffer persecution and danger”. And many of those who embark on this long journey “get lost in the routes that were supposed to take them to their chosen destinations to find protection or opportunities”.
And another obstacle, now widely used by European countries, is denying the entry of specific migrants, which leaves many stranded. ” It affects people – reveals David Moya – who make pilgrimages to several countries before arriving at their destination and this works against them, since if one of these territories through which they transit temporarily is considered “safe”, when reach their goal, they are told that there is no longer a right to asylum, given that they no longer come from a country (the one of origin) where human rights are violated. All very screwed up.
These barriers raised in a common policy in Europe to those defined in this work as Legal and Safe Routes (VLiS) explain that hundreds of thousands of people are forced to use “irregular and dangerous routes to access protection and escape from real threats of death or torture in their countries”. One conclusion is that “the current method of filtering at the borders is very unequal depending on the origin of the migrant”, reiterates Moya. To qualify this reality as discriminatory “maybe it would be too much, since we have no evidence to show that states make this selection of citizens deliberately”. But it exists all over Europe, no one can deny it.
Returning to the visas, it does not seem logical that 70% of those granted in Spain in 2022 were received by citizens of Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, while those processed for all migrants from Africa represented 8.9%. And the countries that benefit are those that do not require a visa, which makes entry into Spain easier through legal channels. The study proposes to open safe borders, always with control, to the migrants who are now so punished. This would prevent thousands of illegal entries and, even more importantly, so many senseless deaths on these desperate journeys.
Another proof of the ineffectiveness of this border model is reflected in the fact that 90% of migrants who end up working in Spain entered there irregularly. If it had been through a legal and safe route, they would have joined the labor market earlier and would have contributed, also earlier, to adding wealth to our country.
