Recent Immigrations in Spain and a Brief Approach to Unaccompanied Foreign Minors

Abstract

Throughout its history, Spain has been characterized as a country of emigrants. However, in the last decades Spanish has progressively become (especially since 2000) a receiver of immigrants mainly from the European Union, South America and North Africa. Unfortunately, in recent years, unaccompanied minors are a truly fragile group when it comes to migratory flows. In this paper, after a historical introduction, we will refer, from a general point of view, to the current moment of immigration witnessed in Spain offering not only statistical data regarding this phenomenon but also legislation, and description of the policies carried out by the central and regional governments on issues like immigration, asylum and integration. We will look at unaccompanied foreign minors, above all after the incident of the NGO Ship “Aquarius” in August 2018. We will see how they arrived in our country, how they were treated once they were discovered adrift: the procedures carried out first by the police and later by the institutions or NGO in charge of their legal and social protection systems. Finally, we will discuss how the fundamental right of education in this context can be implemented. We will close with some theoretical conclusions for the future of refugees in Spain and Europe.