Tears and Fraud as the Door to Spain Closes

Estimates are that as many as 200,000 Bolivians have migrated to Spain in the last three years. LAB and Aerosur flights across the Atlantic have become notoriously full going east and notoriously empty returning west. Bolivian travel agencies plaster banners across their front windows, hawking not cheap fares but "guaranteed spaces."

The lines at the passport office here in Cochabamba have been so long for so long that people sleep by the door just for the chance to get a ticket securing a space to come back weeks later.

By the thousands, Bolivian families have scraped together money from every source they could to finance the airfares for children and siblings who practice the "I am here to be a tourist" stories they will tell nervously tell Spanish immigration officials at the airport in Madrid. I know a number of them, including two sisters I have known since they were little girls (here is my Blog post on their experience).

Sunday all that changes. The rush of Bolivians to Madrid and Barcelona has not been to beat the European summer heat. Up till now Bolivians have been able to enter the EU, and Spain in particular, without a visa, a process wildly easier than trying to scale the bureaucratic brick wall that keeps US entry out of reach for almost all Bolivians. On Sunday Spain and the EU close the door with new rules that will require Bolivians to have a visa to enter.

The scramble to beat the deadline has been one of frenzy. Some 900 passengers were booked on LAB's beat-the-deadline flights to Madrid that were cancelled this week. According to Bolivian press reports, not only are the people involved never going to make it to Spain, LAB also doesn't have the money in hand the refund the $871 each (equivalent to more than a year's pay at the minimum wage here) they paid for the tickets. The scenes at Bolivia's airports this week were full of panic, anger, tears, hunger strikes and ultimately the arrest of senior LAB executives.

It is a fact that one of Bolivia's leading and most lucrative exports is now its labor force, with as many as 1 in 5 Bolivians living abroad. The largest enclaves are in places like Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and the outskirts of Washington, DC. Money sent back home from these nannies, construction workers, and others is paying for home construction, school tuition, and even public works projects back home.

Capital, in 2007, can move with the click of a mouse almost anywhere in the word where it can earn its best return – be it for five minutes or a year. Labor faces long, sometimes hopeless lines in front of embassies and passport offices, faces fraud by those eager to exploit, and faces obstacles that remain as hard in many ways as when my grandparents made the long trip to Ellis Island by boat a century ago.

Note: One of the chapters in The Democracy Center's forthcoming book, "Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization" (University of California Press, 2008) is on Bolivian immigration.